This panel brings together a diverse range of scholarly papers--historians and scholars of religion--to showcase how innovative digital tools, understudied manuscript sources, and interdisciplinary methods are changing the field of hadith studies to deliver luminous insights into the social and political worlds of the medieval Middle East, from the early Islamic period to the Mamluk and early Ottoman eras. Scholars of political history, economic history, urban history, religious studies, and ethics will find much of interest in this panel, which moves beyond the narrower forms of analysis that have too long discouraged disciplinary outsiders from finding rewards in the academic study of hadith.
Our first panelist takes a big-data approach to analyzing chains of transmission (isnads) and uncovers, how and when the centers of hadith transmission rose and fell, and how those contours correlate with the political and economic history of the early Middle East. Our panel next explores representations of jihad in early hadith literature, and shows how a close examination of these accounts might press our field to question the dominant historical narratives about the early Islamic conquests. Moving forward in time, our panel turns to the proverbial Spice Trade of the 13th-16th centuries, and explores the elective affinity between the pursuit of profit and prophetic traditions across the Mediterrenean and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, as this paper argues, the spice trade and the tradition of hadith transformed one another, as merchants, scholars, and merchant-scholars alike turned to prophetic traditions to mediate the novel dilemmas sparked by ever-widening flows of people, capital, and ideas. Our panel concludes by examining understudied manuscripts sources--reading licenses (ijazas) in particular--to illuminate how Mamluk-era networks of hadith study fared under the Ottoman conquest. This final contribution marks an important corrective to the current understanding that the study of hadith declined with the fall of the Mamluks, and traces a novel genealogy of Sunnism in the Ottoman Empire.
Far from an obscurantists' fascination, these four panelists show just how much hadith literature has yet to teach the broader field of Middle East Studies about trade, empire, war, and the formation of social networks in the Islamic world. The panel will close with a roundtable-style conversation with the audience on new approaches and new directions in hadith studies, and how to make the rewards of studying hadith useful to broader and interdisciplinary audiences of the medieval Middle East.
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Mairaj Syed
Co-Authors: Danny Halawi, Nazmus Saquib
This paper attempts to quantify and locate in space and time hadith transmission in early Islamic history. By applying computational and statistical methods of analysis on the data found in the Gawami al-Kalim hadith software, the paper gives a probabilistic account of how the volume of the transmission of hadith was distributed in different cities over the period of the first 375 years of Islam. The paper describes the nature of the source data, the assumptions made in developing the probabilistic account, the tools used in the analysis, and the results achieved. Based on these results, the paper argues that in different time periods, Madina, Kufa, Basra, and Baghdad rose and fell as the centers of hadith transmission.
Lastly, the paper correlates the rise and fall of these cities with changes in their political, cultural, and economic importance. The results show that for any given time span, there exist three different tiers of cities, each of which account for different proportions of hadith transmission. Moreover, the results indicate that hadith transmission in the most voluminous tier of cities is characterized by the activity of a plurality of different teachers, whereas the volume of teachers in the lower two tiers are characterized largely by the activity of a single teacher.
In addition to making the substantive claims about hadith transmission in early Islam, the paper introduces “distant reading” methods of analysis to the field of hadith studies, a field has been dominated by close reading of individual or small groups of hadith texts.
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Joel Blecher
“The honest and trustworthy merchant will be among the martyrs on the Day of Resurrection.” So goes a variant of a well-known hadith, just one among many on the importance of business ethics that were widely circulating in the era of the spice trade. But how did the norms enjoined by such hadith and hadith commentaries operate, if at all, in the lively and long-distance commercial culture of the spice-trade in the 13th-16th centuries? Considering that some outstanding hadith scholars of this era amassed vast fortunes as prosperous merchants, did these worlds of profit and prophecy intersect in meaningful ways? And to what extent did the ever-widening flows of capital, goods, people, and disease across seas and oceans transform the way Muslim scholars understood such hadith on commercial matters and their call for what we might term a “moral economy”?
This paper—a preview of a larger book project—will take up these questions by discussing a figure who best illustrates this convergence of trade and tradition: Ibn ?ajar al-?Asqal?n? (d. 1449), a learned hadith master and a textile and pepper merchant who was active among mercantile and hadith networks that linked the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. That Ibn ?ajar turned to the hadith to take up perennial problems related to managing the risks of long-distance commerce as well as the fortunes and debts that arose from its excesses may come as little surprise. And yet, as I argue, these problems took on a fresh urgency in this era, and the strategies and modes of ingenuity, translation, and discovery that he employed to address such problems reflect his embeddedness in an expanding and morally challenging world of global trade.
In closing, I will situate Ibn ?ajar’s case in the context of other merchant-scholars from Málaga to Malacca. In this larger context we can observe the way that the spice trade generated revenues that supported the patronage of hadith scholarship as well as the ports and pathways through which the transmission of hadith and its commentaries flowed. But at a deeper level—and self-referentially—these hadith scholars teach us about the trading of norms about trade itself, and an opportunity to reflect on the way such norms were challenged, transformed, and upheld in historical practice.
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Dr. Helen Pfeifer
Over the course of the sixteenth century, Ottoman Islam underwent a significant transformation. Whereas in previous centuries many inhabitants of Anatolia and the Balkans had taken a liberal view of Islamic belief and practice, sampling freely from elements perceived today as Shiite or even Christian, as the empire matured, various actors began to place a greater emphasis on what they took to be proper Sunni Islamic belief and practice.
Scholars have often viewed this shift as the result of a top-down process by which the Ottoman state began taking a greater interest in managing the religious lives of its subjects. This paper seeks to complement this focus on the state by considering the role of a different set of historical actors, namely the Arab scholars who joined the Ottoman Empire after the conquest of the Mamluks in 1516-7. It argues that in the sixteenth century, under the influence of their Arab colleagues, Ottoman learned men intensified their engagement with the sunna. It was this shift as much as any other that contributed to Ottoman ‘Sunnitization’.
Although too little is still known about Ottoman interest in hadith, existing research suggests that certain aspects of prophetic tradition generated less excitement in fifteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia than they did in Mamluk Syria and Egypt. This seems to have changed in the sixteenth century. This paper examines the growing Ottoman interest in hadith transmission, a key scholarly and devotional practice by which prophetic accounts were passed from one generation to the next. The paper focuses on two mid-century ij?zas in which Arab scholars granted their Ottoman colleagues permission to transmit certain hadiths. These licenses and the larger culture of which they were a part, the paper suggests, resulted in a new ‘hadith consciousness’ among the Ottoman imperial elite.
In addressing these issues, the paper underlines the importance of studying the so-called ‘post-classical’ engagement with hadith; indebted as this engagement was to earlier developments, it was no less dynamic.
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Dr. Syeda Beena Butool
What does the matn of Early Hadiths tell us about the Spoils of Conquest?
A textbook understanding of jihad neatly divides the theory of jihad into jus ad bellum (justifications to go to war) and jus in bello (justified conduct during warfare). However, when one returns to the earliest compiled chapters on jihad in hadith collections such as the Musannaf of 'Abd al Razzaq al San'ani (d.827), the corpus does not reveal such a neat picture. The 'Kitab al-Jihad' (a chapter in the fifth volume of Musannaf ‘Abd al Razzaq) provides different hadiths with varying isnads, and not all of them go back to the Prophet Muhammad. Although there is some internal consistency to the different sections of the chapter, there appears to be no overarching structure to the understanding of conquest and war. One can also sense that war was not perceived as one large scale, all-out venture. In fact, glossing through the matn of these hadiths, conquests are often presented as a cluster of smaller battles. This paper focuses on sections inside the chapter related to the rules regarding the spoils of war obtained during such battles. Most hadiths focus on maintaining a discipline regarding the spoils of war. Apparently, the code of conduct regarding the spoils of war evolves over time; some injunctions following a Prophetic precedent, but most follow a standard logic: i.e. the maintenance of a central depository for the spoils of war. Presumably, this was an important concern for the commanders and caliphs of the 7th-8th century. Moreover, it appears that attacks were waged through smaller battalions, but in a cumulative fashion. Can it be that the conquests in the first stage of the history of the Islamic empire were small scale, local, and limited in scope? I argue that the matn of the hadiths present in the Kitab al-Jihad can help us reconstruct the manner in which Muslims perceived war and empire in the first and second century of Islam. Additionally, I aim to investigate some of the hadith transmitters mentioned in the isnads to locate their time-period and location. Alongside the matn, the proximity of the transmitters to centers of power (such as Kufa or Baghdad) can also offer hints about the utility offered by hadiths compiled in the chapter on Jihad, especially as their timing coincided ongoing campaigns on the borders of the Abbasid empire.
