This paper argues that when the Ibadiyya began to emerge as a distinct Islamic sectarian group in the early 8th century CE, some of the processes by which they defined themselves over and against other sectarian groups mirrored similar processes by which Eastern Christians had been imagining group identity in terms of lineage to sacred persons, especially martyrs and ascetics. Coalescing from the "quietist" Kharijites of Basra, and against the more activist Azariqa and Najdat, the emergent Ibadiyya appropriated a body of literature devoted to the acts of the early Basran and Kufan shurat ("exchangers," literally those who "exchanged" this world for the next, or martyrs) - a literature that depicted Kharijite heroes engaging in the same kinds of asceticism, miracle working and martyrdom often found in Syriac narratives of Christian saints. Concurrent with the re-working of this material in an Ibadi idiom, nascent Ibadis simultaneously linked themselves through "imagined" lineages to the heroic figures that their literature described. This paper will focus on the story of Abu Bilal Mirdas b. Udayya, the doyen of the early quietist Kharijites, as he appears in Ibadi sources, highlighting narrative convergences with accounts of the Eastern Christian saints. Abu Bilal remains a particularly compelling example as his story is widely preserved in Ibadi as well as non-Ibadi sources, and he was claimed as a founder or hero by other Kharijite groups (and even by some Shi'a). Abu Bilal's story in Ibadi literature thus illustrates the particular ways that Ibadis used such narratives. The paper will also briefly examine claims of lineal derivation from Abu Bilal and other Ibadi shurat, such as Tawwaf, Qurayb al-Azdi and Zuhhaf al-Ta`i, that are preserved in later Ibadi texts. By examining the Ibadi martyrdom narratives such as Abu Bilal's, and the "sacred pedigrees" attached to them, the paper will comment on the construction of sect identity in late antique/early Islamic contexts.

The connection between hagiographical and biographical texts and projects of communal self-fashioning is by now well known and well attested. When, for example, we read the accounts of Ahmad b. Hanbal's life authored by the scholar's son 'Abd Allah and cousin Hanbal b. Ishaq b. Hanbal, or the narratives of Ahmad's deeds and character that appear in later tabaqat texts, it seems clear that these texts were constructed in part for the purpose of defining the effective boundaries, both social and intellectual, that came to enclose the Hanbali madhhab in the years and decades after Ibn Hanbal's death in 241/855. Similarly, in the Christian bishop Thomas of Marga's history of the monastery at Beth 'Abhe near Mosul and certain superstar ascetics from neighboring parts of Mesopotamia, the protagonists of the texts are recollected, evoked and deployed by the author in service of a memory project whose aim is to draw into a single, integrated narrative of descent and inheritance not only the monks of Beth 'Abhe, but ascetic personalities with no formal affiliation with the monastery going back to the fourth century CE as part of an ongoing project whose object was to emplot current theological and Christological positionings within a larger, primordialist narrative of Christian and monastic origins. What is fascinating, however, is the shared strategies and resources with which members of the very early Hanbali community undertook their commemoration of their communal founder, and those with which Thomas narrated his own community's foundational heroes. While one might attribute this to "borrowings" or "cultural influences," I will argue that this phenomenon might much more productively be understood as the result of a seldom noted but crucially important cultural koine shared among Abbasid Christians and Muslims, and will advance a preliminary explanation for the origin of this multi-communal idiom for commemoration and veneration.

Once it had been established, the dogma that Muhammad was the final prophet led many Sunni Muslim scholars to argue against the possibility of comparable representatives of the divine after his passing. However, especially during the formative period of Islam when theological dogmas such as this one were still being debated and formulated, one witnesses world-views among Muslim thinkers which contrast strongly with such perceptions. In this paper, I will focus on the perspective of Muslim mystics on prophethood (nubuwwa) and sainthood (wal?ya), themes which were a strong focus of interest in the oldest surviving mystical texts, those which date from the 3rd/9th century. As one might expect, the unique break in prophethood from the death of Muhammad to the reappearance of Jesus, dictated by the eventual interpretation of "kh?tam al-nabiyan" (Qur'an 33/40) as "the last of the prophets", created a major challenge for all mystics. The mystically compatible emphasis in the Qur'an on the perpetual and all-inclusive nature of prophethood became modified by the eventual interpretation of this single verse and the corroborating hadith which were compiled by the mid 3rd/9th century. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that this should have become the topic of most interest among early Sufis. One discovers in the first systematic theory of sainthood, the Sarat al-awliy S of ak-m al-Tirmidhf (d. between 295-300/905-910) and the treatise al-Kashf wael-baytn of AbK Saf d al-Kharr?z (d. ca. 286/899), that Sufis had already developed the notion that saints (awliyhe) were representatives of the divine during the unique break in prophethood, and that their status in relation to the prophets (anbiyel) had already become hotly-contested. Both authors argue that the status of the saint is virtually as high as that of the prophet. While Kharrtz was writing in response to the view among Sufis that sainthood was in fact superior to prophethood, Tirmidh reserves his polemical comments for skeptical non-mystics (e.g. exoteric scholars, -ulamic al-.ghir; pietists, lubb,d, qurr?). I will consider their arguments in the light of the dogma that Muhammad was the final prophet, which had been established by their time. And, drawing on recent academic debates about the precise dating of the establishment of this dogma, I will extrapolate from these texts the factors which seem to have prompted their authors to take their distinctive stances in support of the virtually-prophetic status of saints.

In this paper I examine the nexus between various modes of piety and the subsequent authority it conferred in historical literature from early Islamic Persia. This paper incorporates both historiographical research and social history. I posit that the authors of Persian local histories employed various modalities of piety and literary devices in portraying the virtues of their cities; this in turn bound the city to key moments and characters in Islamic and cosmic history. By embedding the city deep into the fabric of Islamic history and its continued development, the authors of these city histories fostered a sense of local Persian Islamic identity along the twin bases of piety and authority. The pietistic virtues that bind Persian cities to critical moments in Islamic history and therefore to prophetic and religious authority incorporate both modes of piety that are tied to Islamic institutions or organizations as well as extra-institutional elements of piety. The former include awqaf, localized hadith collections and local hadith transmitters, as well as ulama and pious exemplars, both deceased and living; the latter are constituted by dreams and visions of Muhammad, Khidr, and other prophets, and ziyarat sites such as graves and tombs of pre-Islamic prophets, religious notables, and holy men, such as ascetics and saints. Critical to this construction of piety and authority in early Islamic Persia is that these pre-Mongol local histories evidence styles and techniques generally not used elsewhere. I offer some paradigmatic examples of texts from Syria, Arabia, Iraq, and Andalusia to provide a contrast. I apply a functionally skeptical methodology in my approach to hadith study and the local city histories and borrow from literary theories to address the schema and rhetorical devices they contain. My sources are pre-Mongol Persian local histories composed in Arabic, Persian or both, which include: T?rrkh-i Bayhaq, T r kh-i Bukhara, Tar kh-i Qum, TQrmkh al-Mawhil, Tarikh Irbil, Fada'il al-Sham, Fada'il al-Madina, and Dhikr Fath al-Andalus. The historiographical element of this paper examines the rhetorical and literary devices characteristic of local Persian histories that underscore piety as the dominant quality of the city and its denizens. I consider the implications of these modalities of piety on the social histories of cities and their relations to structures of authority. I suggest some hypotheses - such as tensions between forces for and against decentralization of religious and political authority - that may have contributed to the development of these Persian characteristics.