Abstract
Y?suf al-Nabh?n? (d. 1932) was a traditionalist cleric, Ottoman judge and leading opponent of Islamic modernists like Rash?d Ri??. Against their rational and modern vision of religion, al-Nabh?n? championed the institutions of Sufism, sainthood and baraka. Amongst his writings was the J?mi? karam?t al-awliy?’, a massive collection of biographies of Muslim saints and the miracles they performed from the beginning of Islam to al-Nabh?n?’s own time. The course of miracles in Islamic history, however, has not been consistent. From limited reports in the early Islamic period to a colorful and sometimes outrageous flowering in the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods, stories of miracles differ in type and tone from age to age. Al-Nabh?n? had to negotiate this diachronic legacy and bring it up to his own day. This paper examines how al-Nabh?n? described and interpreted miracles and the powers that worked them amongst his own teachers and contemporaries. It analyses how he explained a present in which miracles were fewer and more mundane than in the past while upholding what he held to be the unchanging truth of sainthood and its wonders.
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