Beyond the written word: unity and diversity across transmission and transformation of medieval textual traditions in the Arabian Peninsula
Panel 154, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 17 at 3:00 pm
Panel Description
The concept of text can cover a range of evidence. Scholars of the early Middle Ages are familiar with the notion of text as an inscribed document, whether that inscription occurs upon stone, metal, vellum or textiles. Thus, one might speak of archaeological remains, land use patterns, traditional stories, remnant practices and revenant beliefs as constituting texts in their own right which interact and generate textual traditions. The medievalist faces particular constraints in recognizing when a new textual tradition is born. Questions such as when and how a tradition starts, intersect with problems of authorship, transcription, translation, redaction and transmission to inform a complex discourse.
The goal of the panel is to suggest the centrality of the broader Arabian Peninsula for Islamic textual traditions, where texts are fundamental in the recognition of religious identities and of specific groups. The first example that comes to mind is the Qur'an, an inexhaustible source of intellectual and spiritual reflection in Islamic history which we are accustomed to understanding as the "Islamic Text" par excellence. The discovery of the Sana'a Qur'an palimpsest has offered new hypotheses concerning the transmission of the Qur'anic text during the first centuries of Islam. Thus the Qur'an started to be seen more as a communicative tradition rather than a literary fait accompli, with the lower text used for school exercise, written, corrected, and recited within the channel of transmission proper to teaching circles of the 7th century CE. Other notable examples are found in the multifaceted fields of ceremonials in Sufi texts, as well as Ibadi hagiographic and theological literature and Isma'ili codes of conduct for the missionaries (adab al-du'at) in the Arabian Peninsula. These examples show also how oral and written traditions in the Arabian Peninsula are the instrument through which a religious community tries to make sense of the local political, economic and social change through the lenses of its cosmological view.
The scholars of the Arabian Peninsula developed textual traditions exposed to constant interplay and whose traces are particularly rich and still unexplored. By investigating the textual traditions in their origins and characterizations as well as in the processes of textual transmission and transformation, the panel will lead to the illustration of how the traditions moved forward, extended to broader use, both inside and outside the region.
For the inhabitants of Zabid, the poem Tufi tufi lubanah, a popular composition sung and danced by the children and transmitted orally over generations in the families of Tihama (Zabid?), is anonymous. While this is a comic piece of poetry, expressing an urgent desire for the beloved at a second level of meaning, in the style of humayni poetry—a learned genre, which has been practiced at least since the 18th century by famous poets and which left records, they say it is a Sufi poem. Sufism developed in the Sunni regions of Yemen and our poem provides evidence of relations with another Sufi region of the country, Hadhramawt. Manuscript m / h 57 of the Al-Hadrami Private Library in Zabid (Yemen), contains a mystic sharh of the same poem, which offers a third level of meaning, known to scholars and literate people. Copied in 1975, on a private manuscript, it testifies of a written transmission and gives an attribution to the poem, as well as its sharh. According to the ms., the commentator would have died in 1889-90. The author of the poem remains to be identified and could be from Taez or its region. The talk will explore the question of the birth of a tradition, which is attested in this case both in its written and oral path. Furthermore, a soundtrack of the song will be available for the public who wishes to hear it.
The paradigm of “Late Antiquity” has by now become widely used in Islamic studies, from Qur’anic studies (Angelika Neuwirth and her “school” for example) to religious Islamic studies properly (Aziz al-Azmeh for example). My interest, though, is to single out those elements and characteristics which are peculiar only of Islam. For I completely agree with the necessity to put Islam and its historical, religious, philosophical birth and development in the broad framework of the “Late Antiquity” (in short terms the period of deep transformations involving Europe, the Mediterranean world and the so-called Near East, from 4th - 5th to 7th - 8th centuries), but the issue at stake is to emphasize which themes made of Islam a “new” religion in respects to Judaism and Christianity. This is the present paper’s focus, dealing with: 1) a critical survey of the literature concerning Late Antiquity; 2) the relation between the empires (Roman, Byzantine and Sasanid) of Late Antiquity and the triumph of monotheism; 3) the concepts of hanifiyya and Israiliyyat; 4) the Qur’an as a discriminating event.
The present paper will focus on the analysis of the different layers and dimensions of the so called Isma'ili "codes of conduct" for the Yemeni da'wa ("mission"). A remarkable example of "code" is al-Risala al-mujaza of the da'i Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Nisaburi (d. after 386/996). Here a series of advices for the missionaries of the community are provided, expressing the endeavor of formulating abstract principles on government interfaced with the deployment of anecdotes and dicta from the Isma'ili tradition. Furthermore the "codes" exemplify the confluence of various strands of statecraft, setting out the philosophy of the mission (da'wa) and its organisational structure. In other words, the "codes", viewed together and over a connected chronological timeframe, are more than a literary genre.
The "codes" testimony the Tayyibi Isma'ili attitude on preserving books by copying the texts. They are important to limit access to true knowledge only to those who had reached the appropriate stage in their learning process. This is why, traces of the tradition cannot be found in single books, but disseminated through anthologies and summae, in order to ensure that only the religiously educated elite had access to the Tayyibi "codes of conduct".
My paper will focus on defining the features of the Isma'ili Tayyibi "codes", which make them a textual tradition, with a specific focus on the demands for specific formulas, on the channels of transmission of the "codes" within the community, and on their reception before and after the relocation of the Tayyibi community to Gujarat, India in 1539.
Ibadism first developed in Basra in the second century A.H. among groups of Arabian origin, especially from Oman. The earliest Ibadi texts were produced there; some have been lost, while others have been found in private Ibadi libraries in North Africa. It seems that the Ibadi community in North Africa wrote to the sect’s leaders in Basra for guidance, and that these early texts came into existence for that reason. Most of these texts remained unknown in Oman for centuries. The Ibadi textual tradition in the Arabian peninsula developed somewhat later and separately, after persecution in the late Umayyad period led to the dissolution of the Basran leadership and the migration of many Ibadis to Oman, and some to Yemen.
The earliest Ibadi texts in the Arabian peninsula are letters or short treatises known as siyar (singular sira) that deal with a broad number of issues, from law and theology to rules for the Imamate. In the 3rd/9th century Ibadis produced the earliest Ibadi collections (jawami‘) of legal opinions. Abu Sa‘id al-Kudami (3rd/9th to 4th/10th century) produced the first monograph on a single topic, in which he tried to heal wounds in the Ibadi community of Oman that had been precipitated by disagreements over the deposal of an aged Imam in 272/886. Ibn Baraka (second half of the 4th/10th century) may have been the first to compose comprehensive works of Ibadi theology and law. His works were incorporated into a series of encyclopedias composed in the 5th/11th and 6th/12th centuries that consolidated Ibadi doctrine in Oman. It was only in the late 19th century that Nur al-Din al-Salimi led Ibadi theological literature in Oman toward convergence with that of North Africa, in the process creating a major change in the official Omani-Ibadi doctrine on the creation or eternity of the Qur’an.
This paper will trace the development of Ibadi theological literature and the process of consolidation of an Ibadi theological tradition in the Arabian peninsula, especially with regard to three issues: association and dissociation (walaya and bara’a), free-will versus predestination, and the creation or eternity of the Qur’an.
