Like many scions of scholarly families in Mamluk Damascus, the jurist, physician, and mystic Ibn Ayyūb al-Qādirī (c. 1380–1464 CE) moved to Cairo as a young adult to pursue a career in law. He ultimately failed to establish this career, but Ibn Ayyūb nevertheless impressed the Cairene scholarly elite with his wit, candor, and writings on medicine and natural philosophy. Though he remains relatively unknown to modern historians, at least three notable Mamluk chroniclers––Ibn Taghrī Birdī, al-Biqāʿī, and al-Sakhāwī––wrote obituaries recounting his professional accomplishments and outstanding moral qualities, uniformly praising him as a circumspect and valuable colleague. This paper will bring this important scholarly figure to the further attention of historians of the Mamluk era by analyzing passages of Ibn Ayyūb’s most important surviving treatise on natural philosophy. Entitled “Blocking the Means of Harm Caused by Teaching the Causal Efficacy of Natures,” the treatise remains in only partially-studied Arabic manuscript. It nonetheless indicates the varied subjects that Ibn Ayyūb’s readership believed to be important areas of scholarly inquiry, offering vivid, idiosyncratic explanations for human morphology, psychology, and sexuality. To this end Ibn Ayyūb frames “Blocking the Means” as a didactic as well as homiletic treatise, serving to introduce novice students to the wide-ranging implications of natural causal efficacy––or the doctrine that natures are themselves sufficient causes for their effects, and as such do not require the intervention of God to produce them. Chief among the concepts Ibn Ayyūb invokes to explain this topic as it pertains to human bodies is innate heat, an elemental power that varies in its strength from person to person. Ibn Ayyūb argues that this power is responsible for, inter alia, the mechanics of erection and ejaculation, the high incidence of lesbianism in the scholarly families of Egypt, secondary sex characteristics specific to Arabs more generally, and the capacity for some human beings but not all to be converted to Islam. In light of Ibn Ayyūb’s reputation among his peers as a model scholar and moral exemplar, documenting the strong explanatory power he ascribed to innate heat will illuminate the diverse repertoire of analytic concepts available to the medieval Muslim scholars as they sought to understand bodies in the world around them. Moreover, it will demonstrate the continuing relevance of natural philosophy to the Islamic scholarly elite in the era of the discourse’s alleged decline.

The body, especially female, slave, or queer, was as much the territory of regulation and conflict in premodern Muslim discourses as disputes over property or wealth. This paper invites us to approach the body as a site of impassioned, often political and always complex, legal and moral contestation. Indeed, premodern ethico-legal Muslim discourses pertaining to the body often revolved around ways to differentiate, control, and govern it. This paper employs the body as a site through which to assess historical legal and ethical debates over sexing and governing bodies, especially indeterminate bodies (khunthā mushkil). It scrutinizes debates over how to sex indeterminate bodies that defy the male/female binary. Moreover, it offers examples of jurists granting full agency to the unsexable khunthā to sex oneself based on sexual desires and inclinations. Gender differentiation was a major component of Muslim scholars’ legal system. Since Jurists’ legal determinations resulted in tangible socio-legal and spiritual consequences, they were invested in sexing bodies along gendered lines to the extent possible. For this reason, no single body could remain sexually neutral and ungendered after reaching the age of puberty, which was the age of legal accountability. The jurists’ ultimate goal was to sex and gender every single body, including indeterminate bodies, eventually categorizing them as either male or female. Not only did the answers to legal questions impact the individual directly, but they also affected the spiritual wellbeing of the social body, that is, the community as a whole. Given this framework, what did classical jurists do with indeterminate bodies that defied the male/female binary? Did they force them to fit into their constructed legal system? How did they legally accommodate unsexed or unsexable bodies? This paper explores such questions while examining the process by which Muslim jurists sought to sex and socialize all bodies and the exceptions they made in the most perplexing situations. In it, I contend that Muslim jurists were compelled to think creatively when it came to indeterminate bodies in order to create a medical space to legally and socially accommodate them in their highly gendered legal system. This paper places the body at the heart of our critical analyses and encourages us to consider the historical processes by which Muslim scholars sexed, gendered, socialized, and consequently regulated all bodies while also considering jurists’ reasoning and purpose in doing so.

In the early half of the sixteenth century, the deviant Moroccan Sufi saint known as Abū Rawāyn (d. 1556) was traveling from Meknes to visit the Sufi saint Mulay Ibrāhīm al-Afḥām (fl. 1460-1534) near Jabal Zarhūn. On the way, he passed by the tomb of Sīdī Āmsnāwa (d. 1534-43). Despite the crowd of people gathered around the tomb, he disrobed and relieved himself. The people exclaimed at this gross impropriety and questioned him: “How can you uncover yourself in front of us?!” Abū Rawāyn responded: “What people? There is no one here but Sīdī ‘Uthmān Āmsnāwa,” indicating the shrine beside him. This anecdote, one of many bizarre acts attributed to Abū Rawāyn who was affiliated with a community of divinely mad (majdhūb) saints in northern Morocco at the time, troubled one of his main hagiographers, Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī (d. 1698). After telling this story, al-Mahdī al-Fāsī worried over Abū Rawāyn’s actions, devoting several pages attempting to rationalize the saint’s deviance: Did revealing himself and urinating in public signify that Abū Rawāyn was a holy fool (bahlūl) who had lost control of his rational faculties (sāqiṭ al-taklīf)? Were his actions the sign of his enrapturement in a great spiritual state (ḥāl)? Or, did the people and those who narrated the tale misinterpret his actions, confusing the metaphorical meaning of “cover” with a literal rendering? In this presentation, I examine the relationship of embodying abasement to debating divine madness (jadhb) in early modern Moroccan Sufi hagiographies. I focus in particular on attempts by hagiographers to delineate the boundaries of a community of majdhūb saints that populated northern Morocco between the mid-fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Who counted as a “majdhūb” was the subject of continual debates, as hagiographers wrestled with the slippage and overlapping categories of master [possessor] of spiritual states (ṣāḥib al-ḥāl), one who practices self-blaming (malāmatī), holy fool (bahlūl), and madman (majnūn). The categorization of majdhūb hinged on a Sufi’s embodied performance of abasement, which was often expressed through gender and sexual deviance. Yet, as I argue, the question of embodying abasement was also embedded in discourses of power. As Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī’s aggrieved response demonstrates, being majdhūb often conflicted with broader concerns related to the hagiographer’s understanding of Sufism, political and social context, and commitment to elevating particular Sufi hierarchies, lineages, and paradigmatic saints.

How does the text of the Qur’an draw on vocabulary and imagery of sense perception? How does the sensory landscape of the Qur’an relate what is felt to what is known? How do human senses relate to one another, and how do they relate to the Qur’an’s overall depiction of feelings, and feelings in relation to knowledge? In much recent interdisciplinary literature on the role of the senses in human life, there are claims of a motif of a supremacy of the eye and the visual in modern cultures. This does not mean that, however, if we look to premodern texts such as that of the Qur’an, that we see a reversal of the relationship between the visual and the sonic, the seen and the heard. We might be inclined to think of the Qur’an as a primarily oral and aural text, one that is heard before it is seen, which might seem to suggest a simple reversal of a modern paradigm of the dominance of the eye of over the ear. If modernity is characterized by hyper-visuality, the Qur’an as a pre-modern text could be assumed to exhibit the reverse, and its orality could be assumed to be evidence in support of this. A close look at the text of the Qur’an, however, reveals a more complicated picture. Rather than a simple dominance of the sonic over the visual, a reading of the roles of the senses of seeing and hearing in the text of the Qur’an reveals that they are in fact closely intertwined, working in tandem with one another. Together, they form a combined field of sensory experience that contributes to the formation of knowledge and comprehension on the part of those humans who receive messages from God, and who perceive the world around them. This presentation draws on the assumptions of the interdisciplinary area of Sensory Studies as well as theories of affect and emotion. Specifically, it assumes that ideas of sensation and its meanings are impacted by broader historical and cultural contexts. Building on this assumption, the research here draws on modern literary approaches to the Qur’an (Izutsu, Madigan, Sells), as well as recent work on the Qur’an and sensation and emotion (Bauer, Kueny, Lange) in order to explicate the broader fields of meaning around seeing and hearing.

According to Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) in his Kitāb al-Sirr al-Maktūm (Book of the Hidden Secret), there are twelve prerequisites for practicing astral magic. Most of these conditions center on the comportment of the practitioner: one must be somber and serious, restrained, secretive, industrious, resolute, and confident. Once these requirements are met, the aspirant is then advised to purify their body by balancing the humors, reducing food intake, avoiding worldly distractions, cleansing the heart of impure thoughts, and strengthening the mind. The aim is that one may, through particular embodied practices, sever their attachment to the corporeal world and orient themselves towards the spiritual realm, for the magic that Rāzī details is accomplished through connection with celestial spirits (al-rūḥanniyāt). In eighteenth- century Cairo, a scholar named Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Kahsnāwī al-Sudānī (d. 1142/1741-2) wrote a commentary on and epitome of Rāzī’s Sirr al-Maktūm, called al-Durr al- Manẓūm. In his reworking of Rāzī’s text, Kashnāwī also lists twelve conditions that must be met in order to engage in magical pursuits. While some of Kashnāwī’s instructions match those found in the Sirr al-Maktūm, he diverges from Rāzī’s text in several significant ways. Most notably, Kashnāwī introduces the frameworks of authorization (ijāza) and piety (taqwā) to this discussion of the prerequisites of magical practice. In this paper, I present material from these two related grimoires to demonstrate the ways in which Rāzī and Kashnāwī center embodied practice in their theories of and instructions for magic. In bringing together and building upon recent scholarship on these two texts (the Sirr al-Maktūm and the Durr al-Manẓūm), my analysis highlights Kashnāwī’s original contributions and forefronts the active role of commentator. Kashnāwī’s revisions and additions are evidence both of the enduring relevance of Rāzī’s work centuries after it was written, and also of transformations in theories of magic that occurred in the early modern period.