Abstract
Scholarship on the relationship between Sufis and Muslim jurists has traditionally focused on the disagreement between members of the two groups, and the disparity in their methods of knowledge acquisition. Where studies of the symbiotic textual relationship between Sufis and legalists in the pre-modern period do exist, they have argued that Sufi frameworks and concepts have historically been subordinated to their legal counterparts.
This paper proposes a revision of this paradigm through a close textual study of a fourteenth-century fatwa of Ibn ‘Abbad of Ronda (710-81/1310-79), a scholar of Sufism and Islamic jurisprudence and the chief preacher (imam khatib) of the Qarawiyyin congregational mosque in Fes. In addressing a question about the proper celebration of the Prophetic birthday (mawlid al-nabi), Ibn ‘Abbad’s fatwa cites a treatise by Tlemcen Sufi scholar Ibn Marzuq on the preeminence of the Night of Prophetic Birth (laylat al-mawld al-nabawi) over the Night of Power (laylat al-qadr). The fatwa was subsequently included in the twelve-volume fatwa collection of Maliki jurist Ahmad b. Yahya al-Wansharisi (834/1431 – 914/1508), the Mi‘yar al-mu‘rib, which by the 16th century would become a key part of the curriculum in Maghrebi institutions of Islamic learning.
I argue that Ibn ‘Abb?d’s fatwa is an example of what I call a “Sufi-legal discourse”: an integration of Sufi concepts into the legal arguments, in which the two intellectual approaches complement each other. Ibn ‘Abb?d’s fatwa, and Ibn Marz?q’s work which it is based on, indicate a substantial conceptual symbiosis between Sufi and legal discourse that directly challenges prevailing notions of an antagonistic Sufi-juridical relationship.
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