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From Cairo to Mecca and Back Again: What a Thirteenth-Century Sufi Scholar Collected along the Way
Abstract
Travel, and the constellation of effects associated with it, has been one of the most persistent features of Islamic history. Yet, while the subject of travel and its effects in the medieval Islamic world has been treated before, as Shawkat Toorawa has recently noted it have neither been well theorized nor effectively modeled in relation to its actual extent and significance. Taking note of this observation, this paper examines the relationship between travel and networks of religious exchange in the thirteenth century. Utilizing the case of the well-traveled Sufi scholar Ibn al-Qastallani (d. 1287) as a means of posing questions about the ways in which travel intersected with the development of transregional networks in the central and western Islamic lands, it asks what might have been entailed by the high degree of personal mobility enjoyed by figures such as Qastallani in relation to the development and spread of Sufism and its institutions at the beginning of the Later Middle Period? Hailing from a Sufi family from Andalusia, Qastallani was a born in Cairo and made his career in the bustling religious milieu of the Haramayn. Eventually exiled from the Hejaz on account of bitter disputes obtaining between him and another émigré Sufi, he traveled widely though Iraq and Syria, eventually returning to Cairo where he took on the directorship of the prestigious Dar al-Hadith al-Kamiliyya. In analyzing the networks of religious exchange fostered by Qastallani’s travels, two textual artifacts in particular are brought to the fore in this paper. The first is Qastallani’s account of his Sufi initiations, the Irtifa‘ al-rutba bi-libas wa-l-suhba, a Sufi equivalent of the mashyakha, or curriculum vitae, so often produced by medieval hadith transmitters. The second is a number of lengthy certificates of audition found in five manuscript copies dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of an influential Sufi manual composed by one of Qastallani’s teachers, the ‘Awarif al-ma‘arif of ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi (d. 1234), certificates which reveal that Qastallani transmitted the text to a long line of North African, Egyptian, and Syrian students at the famous Sa‘id al-Su‘ada’ Khanaqah in Cairo. A thorough evaluation of these materials paints a telling picture of how processes of reception, dissemination, and religious exchange were made possible through mechanisms of travel and, in turn, how such processes were related to the development and spread of Sufism and its institutions during a key historical period.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
Arabian Peninsula
Egypt
Fertile Crescent
Syria
Sub Area
None