Several of the early siyar sha’bīya include a black-Arab hero amid their significant agonists. Often, these black heroes are born to “white” Arab parents. They are thereby inserted into a heroic genealogy, though with a significant social handicap and a miraculous, mysterious ontology. Historically, these “genetic accidents” (per Lyons’ description) have been regarded as recycled avatars of the ‘Antara archetype; a half-black hero was included in later siyar in order to adhere to the parameters of the genre and use the trope of the indomitable black soldier. Our study leaves aside the problems that such a reading raises in naturalizing the displacement of homogenously Arab characters from a central position in these narratives, in addition to perhaps prematurely characterizing the siyar as a fully developed genre. Rather, the focus of this paper is the ontological circumstances of the black heroes in these texts. The paper asserts that narratives of these heroes' conceptions and births perform a significant and complex literary function that scholarship has not yet addressed. Using the case study of ‘Abd al-Wahāb in Sīrat al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma, we explore the historicity of the claim that black children could be born to white parents. In so doing, we incorporate analogous attestations from exegetical literature, medical-scientific works, and adab treatises such as Ibn Ḥāzm’s Tawq al-Ḥamāma and al-Jaḥiẓ’s al-‘Ibr wa-l-‘Itibār, as well as the etiologies of race presented in qiṣaṣ al-‘anbīya’ anthologies. Each theory indicated in this array of texts explaining how a black child may be born to white parents, from atavism to the mixing of the nuṭfa with contaminating fluids, is in some way tested during ‘Abd al-Wahāb’s paternity case as it is appears in the 1909 edition of Sīrat al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma, featuring a provincial qādī, a professional physiognomist, and a fictionalized Imām Ja'far al-Ṣādiq. This portion of the sīra, therefore, offers a wealth of collected popular beliefs and distilled “high cultural” views that, via jurisprudential or religious conduits, percolated throughout society and entered the sīra’s imaginary landscape. Most prominently, much like the philosophical inquiries staged in the aforementioned adab texts, the characters in the sīra use these assorted textual and paratextual gleanings to engage tensions between a scientific, teleological understanding of nature and the supernatural, supersessional power of Divine will. Explicating the enigmatic phenomenon of blackness-from-whiteness in Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma cuts to the very core of this tension, illuminating various strategies for its resolution.

“Indeed, Khūrasān is now crushing my head; however, once I used to be far from its two gates/ If I were to be rescued, I would never come back even if you promised me all the wonders of the world,” sighs Mālik b. al-Rayb in his self-elegy anticipating his own death, in Khūrāsān, far from his home nearby Baṣra. Mālik was a famous Umayyad brigand poet, imprisoned for theft in Mecca. Then, he was either lured by the promise of regular pay or persuaded by the call for jihād and joined the Muslim army marching to Khūrāsān. As the verse above suggests, he later deeply regretted this decision. Mālik’s life story is not unique. Collections such as Abū al-Faraj’s al-Aghānī and Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-Buldān record many verses of poets trapped on the margins of society. This paper analyzes their poetry, focusing on the two kinds of marginal existence epitomized by Mālik’s life – geographical and social. Stationing troops on distant frontiers (tajmīr al-buʿūth) led to such frustration that it has been sometimes considered to be the reason behind Ibn al-Ashʿath’s rebellion that almost toppled the Umayyad caliphate. With the fast pace of the Muslim conquests, the Arabs serving in the armies found themselves suddenly far from their homes and families on the peripheries of the Islamic "oikoumene" and their sentiments gave a rise to an independent literary genre of ḥanīn ilā al-awṭān, the yearning for the homeland. However, one did not have to be removed to the edge of the world to feel estranged in the Umayyad age. Another great tension of the period stemmed from the dichotomy between the muhājirūn and the aʿrāb. The hijra in this time had acquired a military and organizational meaning as the act by which one abandoned his tribe and joined the Muslim army, and thus effectively became a part of the state. Despite a massive migration to the garrison cities, many preferred the traditional Bedouin life, even if on the edge; others, once muhājirūn, decided to return to this Bedouin existence (taʿarrub). The fact that taʿarrub was considered apostasy reveals the matter’s seriousness. This paper will examine the poetry of these two groups, for both shared this yearning for the return to the Bedouin life. While the socially marginal poets pursued this yearning in deeds, deliberately choosing their unstable existence, the geographically marginal poets took refuge in the idealized Bedouin world of their poetry.

The medieval Muslim travelers Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217) and Ibn Battuta (d. 1377) describe the veneration of Qur’an codices associated with the third Caliph ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan (r. 644-656). At the Great Mosque in Damascus, Muslims rubbed and kissed one of these Qur’ans as a means of obtaining baraka (divine blessing). In Mecca, a Qur’an associated with this caliph was used as part of a ritual to bring rain during drought. Remarkably, neither writer comments on these books and their use as intercessors to God as violations of Islamic law. Scholars have, in the last few decades, examined a number of aspects of lived religion in the medieval Middle East. Activities such as veneration of saints and grave visitation have been analyzed, successfully complicating the scholarly dichotomy of Islamic orthopraxy and “popular” religious practices. Like their medieval predecessors, modern scholars have been largely silent concerning veneration of Qur’an codices. By tracing the changes in the literary accounts of the assassination of ‘Uthman, by Ibn Sa’d (d. 845), al-Baladhuri (d. 892), and al-Tabari (d. 923), I demonstrate that medieval scholars intentionally escalated the drama and trauma surrounding the Qur’ān present at the murder. This was done, I argue, in order to rehabilitate ‘Uthman’s problematic caliphate and ensure his place among the other three Righteously-Guided caliphs, collectively known as the Rashidun. These powerful narratives, however, had unintended consequences among the Muslim masses. It was these accounts, I suggest, that encouraged every-day Muslims to elevate Qur’ans associated with ‘Uthman to the level of hyper-sacred. This paper attempts to identify and examine the religious and political processes that resulted in the extreme veneration of ‘Uthmanic Qur’ans. I argue that sanctification of these books was a long process inextricably linked to the contentious history of the third caliphate, the rise of the book in the ninth century, and the attempts by ninth-century Abbasids and religious scholars to unify the Muslim community. Brannon Wheeler notes, “Sacred things are conventions agreed upon by, and pertaining to, society.” By the twelfth century, when the prestige of both ‘Uthman and the written Qur’an were crystallized, the unintended consequence of these processes was the extreme sanctification of particular codices. This paper documents the process and consequence of agreeing on the level of sanctity of ‘Uthmanic Qur’ans.

What is poetry’s relationship to the Qur’an? Like many other litterateurs in Islam’s Middle Period, the well-known Indian poet Amir Khusraw (d. 1325) wrestled with this question. In the autobiographical preface to his divan Ghurrat al-Kamal (written in 1293/4), the poet acknowledges the Qur’an’s criticism of poets, but claims that this censure applies only to slanderous verse makers, not to the accomplished authors. In fact, citing verses that contain a great deal of alliteration and rhyme, Khusraw asserts that the Qur’an itself contains poetry. Khusraw likewise declares that poetry equates and even surpasses ‘ilm as a vehicle for conveying religious truths, for it can be more easily understood, remembered, and repeated than prose. He even goes so far as to compare his own works of poetry to the Qur’an, observing that he, too, has been given a “book.” Later in the same preface, however, Khusraw expresses remorse for having composed poetry, calling the fruits of his labors a mere “handful of wind” that cannot wash away his sins. And in a much later preface, written in 1316/7, he castigates himself for having devoted his life to the worthless art of poetry rather than to religious sciences. Though it is possible to regard Khusraw’s effusions of regret as the traditional repentance of Islamicate autobiographies, both his fierce defense of poetry and his denunciation of it indicate an uneasiness that likely derived from poetry’s not-quite-legitimate status in the Qur’an, and thus in many Islamic societies. Drawing from the autobiographical prefaces to Khusraw’s five books of poetry, my paper explores how the Qur’an’s statements about poetry – both explicit and implicit -- resonate in Khusraw’s works. In particular, it shows how these statements produced an ambivalent attitude that, in turn, compels the reader to confront both sides of the question.

A fair number of leading scholars have identified positive law (furū‘) as the core of Islamic jurisprudence, at least among Sunni schools, and the debate continues unabated over how rightly to conceive of the historical reception and development of this body of knowledge. One influential image, advanced notably by Norman Calder, sees the law as a long-term accumulation and back-projection of material, though this view has recently come under attack. Another image regards jurisprudence as an elite private pursuit, a hidebound tradition mired in conformism (taqlīd) and concerned more with school preservation than addressing real-world contingencies. This latter image is given even for Hanafism, geographically the most widespread and, if all legal writing is considered, the most prolific legal school. Behnam Sadeghi has recently argued that Hanafis over centuries reconfigured the school’s analytical framework to meet the objections of opponents, with the purpose of doggedly safeguarding, above all else, the primitive legal positions of the school founders. While well researched and heavy in data, Sadeghi’s claims rest on a preliminary historical question that remains largely unaddressed by scholars. This question, which forms the central line of inquiry for this paper, is the function of legal precedent in the formation of law. In conversation with Sadeghi and others, I ask the following: How did Hanafis construct both a theory and substance of legal precedent, and how may theirs have differed from the precedent of other schools? Put another way, how did Hanafis receive and rank the legal opinions of prior authorities, and what status did this body of authority hold vis-à-vis other sources of positive law? My chief source material are selections from Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) Aṣl, only recently brought out in a complete edition. I seek not only to trace how his influential rulings became embedded in the deliberations of successive future jurists, whose writings in time encompassed a trove of legal opinion; I also seek to understand what ideas about the functions of law, explicit or not, animated this practice among Hanafis. I argue that, far from lifeless ritual, the cultivation of legal precedent provided an intentional check against scriptural literalism and a productive way of debating and addressing emergent legal issues. This contention in turn ties in with what other scholarship has suggested about the classical jurist’s role in the broader legal apparatus of the state.