the stylite addresses the world

die before you die,
let the vultures of the air
hover over your body,
buried in the dome of the sky,
touching the horizon
and leaning towards the depths.
climb the solitary ruins,
gather the fragments shored,
let the winds wash over you,
and welcome the rain,
no barrier, no facade. the real
sets into your flesh
and tears at your tendons, it all
falls apart and reassembles. listen,
a warrior without weapon rises,
the wilderness flowers in song at
the ascetic’s sky burial, rising again,
the old city fades, a new city begins.

Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part III

This post concludes my series introducing, discussing, and rendering in translation a short Arabic treatise by an eighteenth century Ottoman scholar, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī. In this final section he brings together additional authorities to defend the validity of waking visions of Muḥammad and their fundamental reality (the exact ontological and metaphysical contours of which remain somewhat mysterious however, no doubt deliberately). The authorities upon which he draws will be familiar to anyone with broad familiarity with medieval and early modern Islam, I suspect, with a couple of individuals of a more Ottoman range. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, a late Mamluk era polymath who seems to have written on quite literally everything (including not one but three sex manuals!), is perhaps unsurprisingly a key figure, particularly since he wrote an entire treatise on this controversy. Today we tend to think of figures like al-Suyūṭī primarily as scholarly authorities, speaking from a position secured by their extensive learning and command of the canonical Islamic disciplines; however, as is visible here, al-Suyūṭī was seen as much if not more as a man of personal sanctity, his authority proceeding from his special connections with God and with Muḥammad, including through waking visions. The distinction between the authority of the faqīh, the jurist, and that of the sufi saint was not a sharp dichotomy, or even a dichotomy at all, as the example of al-Suyūṭī in particular illustrates.

It is certainly the case, as al-Kūmuljinawī argued in a previous section, that saintly authority and its validity are assumed here: the witness and experience of the saints form a central pillar of al-Kūmuljinawī’s argument, while vice versa the validity of communication with Muḥammad served as a support to sainthood. At the same time al-Kūmuljinawī draws upon the most broadly ecumenical sources and authorities as well, most obviously ḥadīth, but also other basically canonical texts, such as the famous devotional poem Qaṣīdat al-Burda, the ‘Poem of the Mantle,’ which by the eighteenth century was all but globally ubiquitous among Muslims of many different persuasions and affiliations. All in all, al-Kūmuljinawī situated himself within a much larger universe of texts and ideas and debates, drawing upon a wide range of texts from the late medieval period forward. How he would have accessed these texts is an interesting question, and one I cannot answer here: it is possible that he had something like library access, with a number of possibilities by this period of Ottoman history; he almost certainly would have maintained some kind of personal notebook or curated majmū’a, material copied and collected from libraries, endowed collections, the libraries of friends, books found in the market, and so forth.

Sections of this last portion proved the most challenging to translate, primarily because- if I may be a bit blunt- our author’s Arabic was not always quite up to speed, but I can hardly be one to judge; if I were to try and write a treatise of any sort in Arabic it would probably have similar issues! His relation of the ḥadīth in the first section here is marked by the only significant misspellings and suggestions of lack of full comprehension, though it is not too surprising given that hadith tend to retain quite archaic usages, challenging any readers no matter their linguistic background (and thus giving rise to commentaries to tease out the meanings of often quite opaque texts).

Finally, it is worth noting here how al-Kūmuljinawī sees himself as an author- or not as an author as the case may be. The word he uses for himself is best translated in this instance as ‘compiler,’ literally one who brings things together, and this is an apt description, as his primary mode of work here is locating appropriate sources, finding the relevant material within them, and then judiciously excerpting from those sources to make his arguments. The marginal materials, the minhu notes, can be seen as supplementing his in-text strategy, charting the lines and sources of authority and expanding upon them.

I hope this short series has proven helpful and hopefully interesting, both in terms of the content- about which there is much more that can be said (and interested readers should consult among other things the articles in the recent open-source volume The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam, Volume 3)- and the codicological and related matters.

The firmly established one al-Jalāl al-Suyūṭī says in Tanwīr al-ḥalak fī ruʾyat al-Nabī wa-al-malak: ‘Vision of his noble essence in body and spirit is not impossible, because he—God bless him and give him peace—and all of the prophets—God’s blessing and His peace be upon our Prophet and upon them all—are alive, their noble spirits returning to them after they die, and they are given leave to go forth from their tombs and leave to act in the upper and lower realms.’ And he mentions the ḥadīth of Ibn ’Abbās: ‘We traveled between Mecca and Medina with the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, and we passed by a valley. [Muḥammad] said, “What valley is this?” They replied, “Wādī al-Azraq.” He said, “It is as if I am gazing at [the prophet] Yūnus, wearing [a jubba of] wool, passing by this valley upon a red she-camel, saying the talbīya.’ Then he said, “It is as if I am gazing at my brother Mūsā, placing his fingers in his ears, supplicating God, saying the talbīya, passing by this valley.” Then [al-Suyūṭī] said, ‘It is not improbable that they make the ḥajj, pray, and draw close [to God] as they are able. And if they are in the other world they are [also] in this one which is the abode of action until its term is concluded, and it is succeeded by the other world, which is the abode of reward, in which action ceases.’ He then quotes Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ [author of the famous devotional work al-Shifā’], God be merciful to him: ‘“Now, if the prophets, upon whom be blessing and peace, separate from their tombs and make the ḥajj in accordance with what he related, then how improbable is our Prophet’s, upon him be peace and blessing, separation from his noble tomb?”’

However many senseless prattlers have denied such, someone who argues thus, saying that the rudiments of intellect understand its rottenness, as his coming out of the tomb and going about in the markets meeting people and people meeting him necessitates that his tomb be empty of his holy body, nothing of it remaining therein, such that people are visiting the tomb along and bestowing peace upon mere absence. But al-Ghazālī indicates the rebuttal of such an idea in that the one who sees [Muḥammad] in a dream vision sees his reality (ḥaqīqa), then sees him thus in waking life, but the attribution of some necessity [entailing the previous argument] to that [state] is the essence of ignorance and obduracy. The proof of that is that the waking vision of him, God bless him and give him peace, does not require his going out from his tomb is because from among the miracles of the saints is that God, exalted is He, rends for them the veils, such that nothing of reason, sharī’a, or custom gainsays that the saint, whether he be in the furthest east or west, be granted by God the grace of having no obstructing veil between himself and between the noble essence of [Muḥammad], it still in its place in the noble grave, nor is there any need that He make these veils like the glass which assimilates itself to what is behind it. And then it is possible that the saint’s gaze falls upon him, upon him be peace—and we know that he, God bless him and give him peace, is alive in his grave, praying, and if one is blessed with the befalling of his sight upon him then there is no reason to preclude that it be in relation to his doings and speech and asking about things (and none of this goes against sharī’a or reason), and that he would answer him is also correct. So it is [discussed] in my commentary on al-Qārī and [in] ibn Ḥajar on Shamā’il al-Tirmidhī.

Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part II

This post continues my three-part exploration of a short Ottoman manuscript text, Risāla fī ithbāt ruʾyat al-nabī yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, by the otherwise obscure scholar Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī; if you have not already read Part I much of the following will not make sense, so start there then proceed to the following.

In Part I we were introduced to the manuscript as a codicological unit, and reviewed some of the paratextual aspects that appear in this handful of folios. In the remaining pages the same elements continue, plus some additional ones, which we’ll examine before plunging into the main topic of this post, the theological content and the way in which al-Kūmuljinawī drew upon existing authorities, how he might have gone about locating sources, and what we can gather about ‘canonical’ theological authorities in the eighteenth century Ottoman world. Let’s have a look at the second page in the treatise and note the paratextual elements visible there:

First, it’s important to pay attention to things that might otherwise fade into the background: for instance, this manuscript features a frame around the main text, a common feature but not a universal one, bespeaking the refined nature of the manuscript and its intended purpose as a presentation text. More mundanely, the frame neatly demarcates the main text from its marginal apparatus: in the case of this manuscript, primarily comments that are the functional equivalent of footnotes in modern book practice. In the example above, three annotations are visible, all examples of the minhu, ‘from him,’ type of note, placed there by the author of the text (at least in this case- in other cases the provenance of such notes can vary). The notes are linked to particular points in the main text via rubricated letters, very much akin to the footnote, although spatially they are placed more or less proximate to the linked section of main text, and hence in a variety of arrangements- an affordance of handwritten texts that is considerably more of a challenge for typography (though not insurmountable; not a few early Ottoman printed works featured sloping commentary text, though not at varying angles as here).

Nearly all of the minhu comments in this section, save a single (incorrect as it turns out!) translation of an obscure Arabic word into Ottoman Turkish, are in the same hand as the main text, which we’ve every reason to believe is the hand of the author (or, if not in his actual hand, the hand of a scribe to whom he dictated). For more on these notes and their relationship to authorship, manuscript transmission, and so forth, see A Tunç Şen’s ‘Authoring and Publishing in the Age of Manuscripts: the Columbia University Copy of an Ottoman Compendium of Sciences with Marginal Glossing.’

The other paratextual element to notice in this section of the text is the use of red overlining at various points: there is no single modern equivalent for this overlining, as at points it functions like italicizing or bolding, drawing attention to a particular point in the text; at other points it functions somewhat akin to quotation marks, or, at least, the first set of quotation marks. In the example above, the final line is largely overlined, marking out a particular ḥadīth visually from the rest of the text (in Persian texts from this period, switching from nasta’liq to naskh for ḥadīth and Qur’ān did similar visual denotation work). Taken together, all of these paratextual elements- dots, rubricated words and letters, and overlining- aid the reader in navigating and interpreting the text, knowing immediately where cited texts begin, or where important arguments or transitions are located. In my translation below I’ve largely ‘translated’ these elements into modern punctuation; on reflection I think it would be interesting to try and replicate them exactly, and will try to do in the final installment of this series.

I have aimed for a relatively literal translation, while trying to draw out some of the nuance in the usage of technical vocabulary, the most challenging aspect of this text to render in English. I initially tried a two-column display here, but found that it caused a serious error when displayed on the front page of the website, unfortunately, so I have had to drop the marginal notes down to the end of the translated section.

Know that it has been established by definite texts from among the sound and sunna-conforming aḥādith that our lord and master Muḥammad, God bless him and give him peace, is alive in his grave in body and soul, and that he has freedom of action and can go where he wills in the quarters of the earth and in the imaginal realm (al-malakūt). Verily, he—God bless him and give him peace—is [still] in his noble form in which he was before his death, nothing has been changed. And if he, God bless him and give him peace, is hidden from the sight of the likes of us, it is due to the relational distance between us and between his noble person, due to the turbidity of our lower selves due to the passions of the self and their immersion in the attachments to these trifling vain wordly babbles, just as the noble angels are hidden from us even as they are in our very midst.

Now, if God desires to honor anyone with this bodily miracle, He raises the veil and he is able to see him in his true form (this does not entail that the one who so sees him is in the ranks of the Companions in a sharī’a-accordant sense). The generative cause for the obtainment of this vision is his following the sunna in his deeds and words. The more that he strengthens his following [of the sunna] the more resilient will be his personal connection [with Muḥammad], and love [for him] will increase. This is the fundamental root of all union and separation—there are those people who are scarcely ever in a state of separation and those people who are scarcely ever in a state of union [marginal note a.].

It has been established by multiple avenues of transmission that many among the noble saints, God sanctify their inner secrets and pour out blessing upon our hearts from the orients of their lights, see him, upon him be peace and blessing, in waking life, and spiritually benefit from him—that is something that is known to the one who comes to the path of the saintly or who associates with them, such that it becomes akin to necessary knowledge.

Al-Ajhūrī (d. 1655) [marginal note b.] said, ‘The shaykh of our shaykhs, Aḥmad ibn Ḥajar al-Haythamī said that Ibn Abī Jamra [marginal note c.] said that al-Yāfi’ī and al-Bārazī and others from among the community of the saintly pious have said that they have seen the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, in waking life. And Abū Jamra mentioned that they experienced that in accordance with the transmitted saying, “The one who has seen me in a dream-vision, he will see me in waking life.” Truly, they have seen him in dreams and they have seen him afterwards in waking life, and have asked about various things and he has reported to them concerning those things, and it has turned out as he has related to them.’

The one who denies that, if he is from among those who cast calumny upon the miracles (karāmāt) of the saints—then we have nothing to say to such a one. Otherwise, this [vision] is from among [their miracles], when in the rending of [the] customary [nature of things] there is unveiled to them things in the world above and below.

Al-Fāsī (d. 1698) says in Maṭāli’ al-massarāt [his commentary (sharḥ) on] Dalā’il al-khayrāt: ‘Shaykh Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Suhaylī [also vocalized as al-Sahlī], God be pleased with him, has said: “In order to affix love of the Prophet in the soul, do not let his noble form be hidden from the eye of insight for a moment—it is the true vision because the vision of sight is due to his conveyance of the true essence of the one who sees to the eye [or essence] of insight, so that in the presence of insight there occurs comprehension regarding the true reality of what is conveyed to [sensory] sight from among the visible things. There is no doubt that ṣalāt upon the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, if one’s innate disposition (mashrab) is purified, will shed forth its lights and the lower self (nafs) will become a mirror for [Muḥammad’s] form, God bless him and give him peace, and will not be hidden from it. This is true knowledge in which there is no doubt.

new echota

the land lies blank but for the reconstructed
structures and the young trees lately planted, a few
faint lines of roads shallowly traced. I listen for
the principal people, my eyes closed, but all I hear
are the voices of my children, running over the sod.
why did this happen, they ask me after the park film
is over. I struggle to explain. I do not even myself know
the full why of these things. one day I will correct
the tense of their question, but not today.

when they built the great scar of a road
that runs along the Tennessee, they leveled
a great ancient mound, gashed open its sides and ground down
on its lowest levels, tore out the bones of the ancestors
and wheelbarrowed them to the bank,
dumped them in the river.

tonight I read of the armored bulldozers
working over the dwellings of the dead
in Jabaliya, Shajaiye, no respite even in the grave.
always the present tense. history does not repeat,
it is a long and bloody line, without stopping.

taphonomy

let them dig up my bones laid in a red clay hole,
long centuries later when the world will have made
many more turnings, settled into some other transitory state.
let them take care, take heed of the trees
I instructed my children to plant, and the trees sprung from them,
their loam lying deep over the ground
that gathered me. still let them find me,
let them wonder what was and what may be
through the prism of old bones and scattered words,
they will slowly work their trowels down past the trace of ash
laid over my grave, time’s burnt horizons.
let them sift the soil above me, gather the carbonized seeds
that we scattered and sowed in the sheltering earth. let them
listen to the isotopes plied from my teeth, and trace out the map
in my enamel. watersheds and mountainsides, oxbows and
blue holes, slow turning rivers and hurrying streams
newly born. chart my migrations, decipher the places in my bones.
tell them that I meditated long on my own taphonomy.
and have them then place my bones back
to rest in their slumber, to wait to rise,
keeping the land company until that great and holy day.

Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part I

I’d like to try out something a bit different in this space (and no, I have not forgotten about the Ahl al-Kahf- I still have material related to their place in the history of Islamic devotion on tap to translate and share!): a folio by folio examination of a single manuscript text, incorporating a visual examination of the manuscript pages themselves, a translation of the text (and its paratextual apparatus), and an analysis of the text, situating it in its historical context and discussing the ways in which the particular form of the manuscript shaped the semantic content. There are whole historical worlds contained within what can at first glance seem a simple array of page and ink; there is more that can be descried beyond what I will outline here, in fact. But I hope that my stab at an annotated digital edition of sorts here will provide an idea of how one might go about exploring a manuscript text like this, and the possible panoramas the now tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of digitized Islamicate manuscripts can open up with a little attention and contextualization.

The text that I’ve chosen for this treatment, Risāla fī ithbāt ruʾyat al-nabī yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, is one that I came across, as so often happens, serendipitously while browsing for some other topic (though to be honest I cannot tell you what my original search query was!); the title looked interesting, as did the catalog description, so I gave it a look, realized it was the perfect length for this project and concerned a topic of no small interest to me, and so I downloaded the digitized manuscript and transcribed it. The primary goal of this treatise is a defense of the belief that Muḥammad would appear to the pious during waking life- that is, not in the course of a dream-vision while asleep (something which was, and is, widely accepted across Islam). But at a deeper level its author sought to defend one of the primary sources of saintly authority, communication in waking life with the Prophet, against detractors who sought to denigrate such routes of transmission and authority in favor of more strictly textual and ‘rational’ means.

Several things stand out about the manuscript itself: it is a presentation copy, despite being a short risāla it is alone between the covers, never having been, as was the fate of many such treatises, disaggregated and rebound into a larger majmū’a. However, as we will see, it circulated outside of its original destination, the Sublime Porte’s library, passing through at least two other owners in the course of the nineteenth century, before being purchased by Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951) and eventually deposited in the National Library of Israel, where it is now held under the shelfmark Ms. Yah. Ar. 765 (for an excellent exploration of Yahuda and of the process of manuscript collection in the 20th century, see Garrett Davidson, ‘On the History of the Princeton University Library Collection of Islamic Manuscripts‘). We are fortunate in this case to be able to trace the maker and the owners quite accurately, though much more opaque is the actual process whereby this manuscript made its way, ultimately, to our screens. But I’m getting ahead of myself- let’s briefly consider the nature of this risāla‘s content, its author, and then turn to the folios themselves. For this first installment we’ll look at the title page and the opening of the text, with additional pages appearing in the weeks to come.

The short and often polemical risāla- ‘epistle,’ ‘treatise,’ or ‘pamphlet’- was a staple of early modern Ottoman life; the role of these short texts has been extensively explored by Nir Shafir, who has an entire book coming out summer of next year on the topic: The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire. These sorts of little treatises are wonderful windows into the social, cultural, and religious currents of the Ottoman world, as they were written quite explicitly in response to ‘live’ debates and questions, and circulated far and wide, helped by their brevity and condensed arguments and citations. They were written by a wide range of individuals: in the case of this treatise, the author, one Sayyid Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī, i.e. Gümülcinevī, (d. 1788), was a member of the Ottoman ‘ulāmā’, Turkish-speaking but like many of his peers choosing, in this case at least, to write in Arabic (he also wrote at least one treatise mostly in an albeit very Arabicizing register of Ottoman Turkish, Risaletü’t-ta‘rîf fî tercemeti’l-Mevlidi’ş-şerîf). Beyond the fact that he was evidently from Gümülcine- modern Komotini in Greece- that he had trained in and was presumably employed as part of the Ottoman ‘ilmiyye system of learning and instruction, and died in Constantinople (he is evidently buried in the cemetery of Emîr Buhârî Tekkesi), there is little information available on his life. Notably, our manuscript has on the final, otherwise blank page, a note in Arabic reading: ‘Kūmuljina is a town (qaṣaba) in the district of Edirne,’ suggesting it was not exactly a household place-name. In addition to this treatise and his work on the Mevlid, he wrote some fairly popular treatises on Maturidi theology, suggesting overall the profile of a scholarly broadly in favor of theological investigation, popular devotional activity, and, as we will see in the treatise in question, the authority and charisma of the Friends of God. In short, he was a man of his age, with his finger to the pulse of many of the major controversies of the time. 

Let us turn to the title page of the work, which follows a well-crafted if plain cover with closing flap and a few blank pages:

We can immediately identify three features, common to perhaps the majority of Islamicate manuscripts, especially from this period (as in anything, conventions changed over time, and had regional variation). First, the title block itself, Risāla fī ruʾyat al-nabī ṣalā Allāh ta’alā ‘alīhi wa salam yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, neatly identifying the work, though not including the author’s name (probably because this was his own copy). Of rather more interest to us however are the three impressions of seals and the two ownership statements in the margins. Two of the three seals indicate prior possession by Ottoman sultans- Sultan Mustafa III (r. 1757 to 1774) at the top, and his successor Abdul Hamid I (r. 1774 to 1789). The third, smaller seal, dated 1805, is that of a later owner, Qārṣīzāda Muḥammad Jamālī (d. 1845).

Seals were a common feature in early modern Islamic manuscripts, and had a range of functions, not just indication of ownership or placement in a waqf (endowed foundation). Many, such as Sultan Mustafa III’s above, contained pious phrases, and might well have had a talismanic or prophylactic function (which other, ‘devotional’ seals lacking any ownership information certainly did). Ottoman sultanic seals are particularly striking visually and symbolically, dominated as they are by the intricate calligraphic personal emblem of the sultan, the tuǧra. For more on the question of seals in manuscripts, see Boris Liebrenz, ‘What’s in a Seal? Identification and Interpretation of ʿAbd al-Bāqī Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 971/1564) Seal and Its Function.’

gihli digalenvhida

in the distant end
of the smoothsided passageway of dreams
I see ascending the rough stone above
the marked clay floor, turning upward,
the great dog chasing the stars, heavy snout
of charcoal, dark condensed and deep, pointing
beyond himself to the dome of the underground sky awash
in rivercane burning stars. returning and returning,
still I cannot hear, his baying frozen in the limestone.
what does he have up
that world tree growing from the broken
earth up to the mountain above, drinking
of the endless river pouring from the deeps?
I float and turn in the soft mud womb
enclosed in the hard jagged body of the land,
I have passed into it and it into me. I
listen for the baying of the ancient dark dog
chasing the sea of stars century after century on end.
the waters rise to meeting, flow in, and out of dream,
awaiting an awakening, emergence into the light of day,
remembering what waits in the dark.

The Seven Sleepers In Islamicate Textuality: Complex Crossings

During an Islamicate manuscripts reading group I am coordinating this semester, I was looking around in my archive of digitized manuscripts for some nice examples of marginal texts and came across the manuscript from which the above image comes, a majmū’a (a collective volume of many discrete texts between two covers) of various sorts of material, produced somewhere in the Turkish-speaking part of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century or so. As we read through some of the marginal comments surrounding this particular main text (a compilation of awrād, devotional litanies for use throughout the day), we came to the one in the top right corner of this page. Written in Ottoman Turkish, the note claims to relay information from the tafsīr of al-Nīsābūrī concerning the effaciousness of writing out the names of the Aṣhāb al-kahf, generally known as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in Christian tradition, which will ward off all manner of evil and bring much good. Briefly for those not familiar with the story, the ‘Companions of the Cave’/’Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’ were seven (though the number varies in pre-Islamic traditions, variance which is referenced- and not resolved- in the Qur’an) young men who fled from Roman persecution into a cave and were granted divine sleep for three hundred and nine years, awoke to find a totally transformed world in which Christianity was now dominant, disclosed themselves to the wondering population, then died. While the exact origin of the story and devotion to the Sleepers is now obscure, their hagiography circulated in numerous languages, from Sogdian to Old Irish, ending up in the Qur’an as a sizeable portion of Surat al-Kahf (‘the Cave’), alongside other material (including renderings of the names of the Sleepers, which are not given in the Qur’an).

In the marginal notation above only six of the human Sleepers’ names are given out of the usual Islamic seven (a number not however fixed by the Qur’an), plus that of their dog, Qiṭmīr, himself a de facto saint in Islamic tradition (his name has sometimes been treated as prophylactic aid on its own in fact). The notation is brief, but it got me thinking about the textual traces of the Seven Sleepers in the Islamicate world, which I’d like to explore a bit here. The use of names of the Seven Sleepers/Aṣhāb al-kahf provide a good view into the ways in which elements of ‘manuscript culture,’ of the textual materia of the book, crossed over into other media and spheres of life, parallel to the boundary-crossing nature of devotion to and the semantic traces of the Seven Sleepers themselves. As I discuss in a parallel but more philosophical and speculative essay on my Substack, there is a lot that we can continue to glean from this strange story and its incredible historical afterlives.

In Islamic contexts, devotion to the Seven Sleepers was expressed in multiple ways, but two stand out: one, the ‘finding’ and veneration of caves associated with them, to the point that caves reputed to have held the Sleepers in their several centuries of sacred slumber proliferated across the Islamicate world, from Turkestan to the Maghrib (with a similar proliferation present in Christian lands). But even more widespread were the names of the Sleepers: as with several other sites of Islamic devotion, in the general absence of pictorial icons, names and verbal descriptions served as de facto ‘icons’ reproducing the presence and the sacred power of holy figures. In the early modern Ottoman context, beyond Muhammad and his house, verbal ‘icons’ of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, of the Ahl al-Badr (fighters and martyrs in the Battle of Badr), and the Aṣhāb al-kahf were frequently reproduced within manuscripts and across other media, in some cases also embedded in other texts. There are no doubt many reasons for this focusing on names; in the case of the Companions/Sleepers, it is partially an inheritance of the late antique heritage, as visible in lines from the sixth century Syriac poet St. Jacob of Serug (translated here by Sebastian Brock):

There were there two wise men, sons of the leading men,
and they reckoned that the Lord would resurrect them,
so they made tablets of lead and placed them beside them,
on them they wrote down the names of the children of light…

Already there is a sense of their names having an important function, if not quite the prophylactic one they would gain in early modern Islam. By whatever routes however, those names- which as we will discuss below, were inherently distinctive just in their spelling- would be the locus of devotion and power for Islamic audiences, and traces of that devotion and power are readily visible in the manuscript tradition.

In the example below, a short poem (for those who do not read Arabic, it is the section marked with what look like red commas) off gives their names in succession and then details the particular potencies of each name when written down, either for a certain thing or upon certain media. The names of the Sleepers are written in red (fifth through seventh lines), the virtues of each then adumbrated in a series from ‘the first’ to ‘the seventh,’ the numbering also rubricated:

Early modern Islamic audiences took such messages to heart: the names of the Companions do indeed appear in many, many contexts outside of manuscripts. Here are two of them: first, a prophylactic seal made in the eighteenth century Ottoman world (Met. 1983.135.11), the text consisting primarily of the Sleepers’ names intertwined; the stamp produced by this seal could have been applied to manuscripts, or perhaps for the production of stand-alone amulets, upon documents, and so forth (perhaps even on walls, one wonders). As with many such calligraphic amuletic devices, human legibility is not primary in terms of the effectiveness of the writing; and in this case, even a cursory look at the writing suggests whose names are given here:

At the other end of portability (well, almost- obviously it was disassembled and moved at some point!) is this fireplace of Iznik tile (V&A 703-1891), built in 1731 for the home of someone quite well off indeed; the names of the Sleepers run across the very middle of the installation, the only instance of text in the entirety of the piece:

burned horizons

i.

a white shroud hangs before the mountain, the sun
is wan and thin, ebbing through the particles of ash in air.
burning, burning, the rancid and unbid fruit of harnessed fire.
far off dying trees groan, dry bones splintering.

ii.

they backfilled the vulture-signed enclosure, the raw
phallic stones pushing against earth and sky
and the spatters of blood and beer on the thirsty earth.
rough worked back into the dark with ragged stone.
finality, and they walked away, into days to come.
a conclusion, and a beginning. the barley was nodding
along the spare limestone hills. göbekli tepe slept cthonic.

iii.

and then, grain, and cattle, and
earthen banks and ditched courses cutting the land.
they raised wooden beams to the sky, and wove beams
within beams and so dwelt above the earth, suspended,
houses circling a vast inner space. across the widening water,
in cursus limning holy spaces, others raised
timber to mark the ways, precincts of some rare power.
and then—when their time was come, when the cycles
of the stars and the cattle’s births and the grain’s rising
were meet and right and the signs were set,
solemnly they set their worked woods alight.
burnt house horizons along the southern
steppes, great flames licking at the skies,
smoke as of incense rising, a kenning of the limits
against which they had pushed, a need to start anew.
the isles’ timbered precincts, too, they burned clean to ground,
only ash and charcoal remaining. as a burnt sacrifice, maybe,
a searching memory of the garden lost, of ways
not taken. what is most immediate and close, cannot
in this world last forever. we must let go in offering.
hall and enclosure, consigned to the fire, works as of ash.

iv.

what did those neolithic delvers and woodturners know,
that we do not? what biting ghosts and bitter demons
did they stay with their fiery forced obsolescence?
what acts of propitiation and doxology did they summon,
in the setting alight of shape and form, a stop, and a release.
I wonder as I watch the smoke hang motionless on
lookout mountain, drifted down from our new burnt horizons,
on a world fast burning, without ritual or guide. perhaps it is
time then to backfill our own sharp clawed monuments,
and to let the old timbered frames give way to new,
to see what will grow in the unhallowed ruins.

A Day in the Life of an Early Modern North African Scholar-Farmer

17th century Tunisian tile with floral motifs (V&A 1718-1892)

[‘Alī bin Yaḥyā al-Salaksaynī al-Jādīrī, d. 1564] would spend his daytime fasting, teaching ‘ilm all day long, not stopping from his teaching except during the times of the ritual prayers and the call to prayer, and if he wanted to deliver the call to prayer a reciter who was with him reading out texts with him in his cell would accompany him on the way, coming and going, reading out loud, and he would give the call to prayer, and so maintain the duties of his position as imām. He was, God be pleased with him, extremely avid about teaching ‘ilm, and was an imām in the Ajādīr Masjid wherein he taught ‘ilm until late morning, then he depart and go down to his plot of land by Wādī al-Ṣafṣīf, which he cultivated by hoe. His students would go out with him, he teaching coming and going along the way. When he reached his plot of land he would get down off his mount, unload manure, remove the packsaddle from his mount, and tether her in place by his own hand, no one else being able to tether her but he. He would take up his hoe and set to cultivating his plot of land, the reciter still reading out loud, and [‘Alī bin Yaḥyā] giving exegesis until he was done with his work. Then he would remount his beast of burden, the reciter on his right or left—this was his custom!

When he was young and in the maktab [somewhat equivalent to an elementary school] he struggled with memorization, until one day a man came passing by and took from him his tablet and wrote upon it more than what the teacher had written out to be copied, which did not make the teacher happy, but he was unable to speak to the man about why he had written those things. A few days that man came to Sīdī ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā and commanded him to come out to him, which he did, and the two of them to the wādī named Būyaḍān. The man said to Sīdī ‘Alī, ‘Ride on my back!’ Then he forded him over the wādī and prayed for him- and from then on he was able to memorize [what was written on] his tablet.

Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Maryam, al-Bustān fī dhikr al-awliyā’ wa-al-ulamā’ bi-Tilimsān

*

When we read biographical accounts such as this, we can read them a bit against the grain in that we are as much interested in what would have been ordinary and uninteresting things to the original author(s) and readers as we are those matters that stood out at the time. In the first of these two vignettes, it is ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā’s sheer dedication to teaching that is of course exceptional: the man is kind of a machine! We can understand from this description that such dedication was unusual, which is not surprising (one also wonders if all teachers’ students would have been dedicated enough to follow behind their instructors’ donkeys out to the fields). For us in the present, who are far removed from early modern North Africa, one of the more interesting details is that ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā supplemented his income from teaching and work as an imām with small-scale farming, either on land he owned (which would be my guess) or which he held on lease. Either way, his farming- which based on the description here would no doubt have been a sort of market gardening, as we would say now- was something he himself did, every day at the same time, with his own hands, including dumping manure for compost.

Such bivocationalism comes as little surprise: indeed, probably the vast majority of pre-modern Islamic scholars (as well as scholars and associated identities in other traditions) had usually not one but multiple ‘side hustles,’ their incomes being derived from many sources patched together, often shifting over time. Farming or, better, market gardening was perhaps not the most frequent such supplementary (or in some cases, primary) source of their income, but it was not rare either, or at least that is my impression from years of reading biographical accounts of saints and scholars across the Islamicate. Because virtually all cities, with a couple of exceptions, in the premodern Islamicate world interfaced very directly with semi-rural or fully rural hinterlands, it was rarely very onerous for a scholar to make the walk from his madrasa or sufi zawiya to his field, and for rural sufis orchards and fields might be immediately adjacent to one’s home. There are a number of interesting take-aways from this situation, but one I want to suggest here and which I should at some point develop in a more formal manner is that the widespread existence of scholar-gardeners helps to explain the popularity and intended audiences of the Islamicate agronomy handbook tradition. To be sure, many of the users of manuals of filāḥa were no doubt estate owners who rarely or never got their own hands dirty; but I suspect not a few were like ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā, highly literate individuals who took up the hoe along with the pen.