Budapest, 7 February 2019: Presentation of the Marie Curie Fellowship Project

Center for Religious Studies, CEU – 15:30

Pious Reading as Spiritual Practice:
A Biography of the Prophet Muḥammad from Twelfth-Century Iberia


al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Kitāb al-shifāʾ. University of Michigan Library, Isl. MS 209, p. 640, detail. MS arab. h = 21 cm, dated 1269/1852

Individual or communal reading of revelation and other sacred literature is a spiritual practice across faith traditions in literate societies. The Kitāb al-shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf huqūq al-Muṣṭafā (“The book of healing concerning the recognition of the true facts about the Chosen One”) has been a bestseller of devotional literature with Muslim audiences for centuries, all over the world.  Its author ʿIyād b. Mūsā (1083–1149) was an important Maliki jurist who spent most of his professional life as a judge (qāḍī)  in Ceuta.  A loyal partisan of the Almoravid dynasty (1040–1147), Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ died in exile in Marrakesh, and became one of the saints of the city.  Drawing on the evidence of manuscripts and printed versions, this lecture will use the Shifāʾ to explore different modes of pious reading in Muslim societies since the twelfth century.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 706611.

Madrid, 22-23 February 2018: Workshop on Prophets and Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Updated, 18 February 2018

Prophets in Medieval Iberia

One goal of my Marie Curie research project is to situate the Kitāb al-shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf huqūq al-Muṣṭafā (“The book of healing concerning the recognition of the true facts about the chosen one”), a work about the prophet Muḥammad (d. 632) compiled by the Maliki jurist Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (1083-1149), within the context of medieval Iberian literature.  Taking as starting point the observation that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all three faith traditions have literature about prophets, I am co-organizing an international workshop with Benito Rial Costas, a specialist of the book in early modern Spain who teaches at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.  The workshop Of Prophets and Saints: Literary Traditions and “convivencia” in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia will take place in Madrid on February 22 and 23, 2018.  In the next weeks detailed information about the workshop’s program will be posted on its website.  Below follow some thoughts on the workshop’s rationale.  


Plate with Jonah and the whale
Tin-glazed earthenware, d = 41 cm, Talavera de la Reina, Toledo, c.1600, HSA LE2407
Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

The international workshop will explore religious literature that originated under the particular conditions of “convivencia” in the societies of medieval and early modern Iberia.  It has twenty participants, eighteen invited colleagues and the two organizers, and will be open to the public.  It most general aim is to promote exchange and discussion between academics from Spain with scholars from other parts of Europe and North America.  The participants will employ comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to open new perspectives on how the coexistence of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities on the Iberian Peninsula is reflected in their respective literary traditions.  The primary focus will be on works concerning prophets and saints.  Both are figures of spiritual authority, since each of the three religions acknowledges prophecy (Heb. nəb̲ūʾa, Lat. prophetia, Ar. nubuwwa) and holiness (cf. Heb. ẓaddik, Lat. sanctus, Ar. walī).  The workshop’s starting point is the hypothesis that literature about prophets and saints also reflected changing modes of religious coexistence, because in premodern societies every contact between religions was haunted by the fear that one’s own religion might have followed a false prophet.  The long experience of religious coexistence on the Iberian Peninsula—beginning with the Islamic invasion of the Visigothic kingdom (418–c.721 CE) in 711 and changing after the rise of the Almoravid dynasty (1040–1147), the Christian edict of conversion in 1391 and the anti-Jewish riots of 1392—also challenges contemporary notions of the roles of both Judaism and Islam in European societies.  Since the Holocaust, there has been a growing recognition of two millennia of Judeo-Christian civilization in Europe and North America.  Islam, however, is still seen as “other” and defined as being outside, if not incompatible with, western civilization (Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, New York City 2004).

The Historiographical Debate on “convivencia”

In research on medieval and early modern Iberia, the term “convivencia” serves as a shorthand for the fact that in the societies of medieval and early modern Iberia, at least until the fall of the Nasrid emirate of Granada (1230–1492), ruling elites of Muslims or Christians lived cheek to jowl with substantial minority communities of Christians, Muslims, or Jews.  Relations between these three communities were complicated, and included many forms of violence.  Boundaries between religious communities were nonetheless regularly crossed since the three communities were connected in myriad ways in the realms of politics and economics (e.g., Robert Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, Cambridge 1984; Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, 2d rev. ed., Leiden 2005).  Moreover, the relative demographic strength of minority communities vis-à-vis their respective ruling elites was unavoidably accompanied by at least some degree of personal acquaintance with neighbors who belonged to other faith communities (David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 2d printing with corrections, Princeton 1996, pp. 21-30).

Whenever Iberian societies are considered together with other Mediterranean societies in Asia Minor, the Levant, and North Africa, the Iberian experiences with “convivencia” appear as ordinary.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims were living next to or with each other under varying degrees of asymmetric violence since the emergence of Islam in the seventh century (Gil Anidjar, “Medieval Spain and the Integration of Memory,” in Islam and Public Controversy, ed. Nilüfer Göle, Farnham, Surrey 2013, pp. 217–226, esp. 218).  It is only from the vantage point of northwest Europe that the coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval and early modern Iberia continues to be perceived as exceptional, since from France to the British Isles Christians were far less likely to live with or next to Jewish or Muslim neighbors.  Small Jewish communities were few and far between, and most Christians only encountered fictional Muslims in Church teachings and vernacular literature (for the best recent survey of the images of Islam in medieval European Christendom, see John Tolan, Saracens, New York City 2002).

It is therefore salient, though not surprising, that at the beginning of the twenty-first century the meaning of “convivencia” in medieval and early modern Iberia has remained fiercely contested (Manuela Marín, “Historical Images of al-Andalus and Andalusians,” in Myths, Historical Archetypes, and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature, eds. Anglika Neuwirth et al., Beirut 1999, pp. 409–421; Kenneth Baxter Wolf, “Convivencia in Medieval Spain,” Religion Compass 3/1, 2009, pp. 72–85).  The term most likely first entered Iberian studies in 1918, when Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968), a pioneer of comparative philology and literary history, used the phrase “la convivencia del hispano y el sajón que se reparten, con América, uno de los hemisferios del planeta” (pp. 13–14) in an article about “La lengua española,” written for the first issue of Hispania, the new journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.  But it was his use of “convivencia” in Los orígenes del español (Madrid 1926) that introduced the term into the twentieth-century continuation of the much older debate about the emergence of the modern Spanish language in a multilingual and religiously diverse medieval Iberia and its import for a Roman-Catholic Spanish identity at the core of twentieth-century Spanish nationalism (e.g., Arndt Brendecke, Imperium und Empirie, Cologne 2009; Patricia Hertel, Der erinnerte Halbmond, Berlin 2012).

In contrast, the debates on “convivencia” in Jewish and Middle Eastern studies are deeply informed by historical experiences of persecution and loss, in particular after 1492.  In Jewish studies, the term “convivencia” is linked to debates about the limits of acculturation despite the celebration of a thriving Sephardic culture, in particular between the eighth and the twelfth century (e.g., Yitzhak Fritz Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. from the Hebrew by Louis Schoffman, 2 vols., Philadelphia 1961–1966; Seth Kimmel, Parables of Coercion, Chicago 2015).  In Middle Eastern studies, “convivencia” under the rule of the Umayyad dynasty of Cordoba (756–1031) is cherished as one of the highpoints of medieval Islamic civilization (e.g., María Rosa Menocal, Ornament of the World, Boston 2002; cf. Bruno Soravia, “Al-Andalus au miroir du multiculturalisme,” in Al-Andalus/España, ed. Manuela Marín, Madrid 2009, pp. 351–365).

Material Evidence of Acculturation

That “convivencia” was accompanied by varying degrees and forms of acculturation is well attested in the arts and literature of medieval and early modern Iberia.  Art historians discuss the traditional distinctions between “mozárabe” and “mudéjar” when probing how Christians or Muslims, as well as Jews, under Muslim or Christian rule responded to the cultural norms of their respective ruling elites (cf. exhibition catalogs such as Convivencia, Jewish Museum in New York City, 1992; Caliphs and Kings, Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC 2004).  With regard to the uses of language and literacy, extant Romance documents written in the Hebrew or the Arabic script (i.e., Aljamiado) have prompted reflections about diglossia and bilingualism (e.g., Federico Corriente, Diccionario de arabismos, Madrid 1999; David Wacks, Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature, Bloomington, Ind. 2015; Olivier Brisville-Fertin, “¿Aljamía o aljamiado?,” Atalaya, no. 16, 2016, available at:  http://atalaya.revues.org/1791).  Stanzaic poetry (e.g., Otto Zwartjes, Love Songs from al-Andalus, Leiden 1997) and frametale narrative (e.g., Karla Nielsen, “Sewing on the Frame,” PhD diss., University of California Berkeley 2010) demonstrate the diffusion of literary genres across the boundaries of religious communities.

The Fear of False Prophets

Religious coexistence, however, presented serious theological and spiritual challenges, as in medieval and early modern societies there was no religious tolerance in the modern sense of the term.  The legal concept of a secular society in which the full privileges of citizenship are independent of private religious belief did first become law in the French Civil Code of 1804.  In medieval and early modern Iberia, Jews, Christians, and Muslims considered themselves followers of a true prophet who had revealed God’s will, which, in turn, was demonstrated in the well-being of God’s chosen community on earth.  Since in all three religious communities prophets were recognized as instruments of divine revelation, there was considerable anxiety about proving the truth of one’s own prophet when exposing the falsehood of rival prophets.  Apologetic and polemic works from medieval and early modern Iberia vividly illustrate how the experience of oppression on earth added spiritual insult to physical injury, as it raised the specter that a community’s defeat had been preordained because they were following a false, and not a true prophet (e.g., Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Un oriente español, Madrid 2010; Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew, Philadelphia 2012; Ryan Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative, Philadelphia 2013).  To minorities at the receiving end, hagiographic literature about the lives of prophets and saints was therefore of great practical value, since it provided guidance and consolation whenever a religious community was ruled by those whom they regarded as followers of a false prophet.  By the middle of the thirteenth century, the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre controlled most of the Iberian Pensinsula, while the Nasrid emirate in Granada only held the coastal lands along the southern Mediterranean.  Among Iberian Muslims, the demand for works about the life of the prophet Muḥammad (d. 632) went hand in hand with an exploration of literature about jihad (Ar. jihād lit. “struggle, striving”), and there was intense scholarly debate how hadith ascribed to the prophet Muḥammad (Ar. ḥadīth lit. “narrative, talk”) foretold the fate of their community (Maribel Fierro, “Doctrinas y movimientos de tipo mesiánico en al-Andalus,” in Milenarismos y milenaristas en la Europa medieval, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte, Logroño 1999, pp. 159–175, here p. 160; cf. Javier Albarrán, Veneración y polémica, Madrid 2015).  Conversely, the rich Sephardic literature about the Messiah provided its Jewish readers with much sought affirmation of a positive Jewish identity (Benjamin Gampel, “A Letter to a Wayward Teacher,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale, New York City 2002, pp. 388–447, here p. 421; cf. Howard Kreisel, Prophecy, Dordrecht 2001).

Comparison and Specificity

It is against this background that the workshop will use literature about prophets and saints from Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities to explore “convivencia” in medieval and early modern Iberia.  Its methodological approach is the assumption that context-specific investigations will build strong foundations for a fresh interdisciplinary discussion, since concrete literary examples necessitate terminological precision.  This specificity will, in turn, serve as safeguard against the hermeneutic pitfall of projecting any particular meaning of “convivencia” unto the interpretation of these sources about important figures of religious authority, since the “problem is not so much the designations themselves, but rather the generalizations that have arisen in their usage.” (María Judith Feliciano and Leyla Rouhi, “Interrogating Iberian Frontiers,” Medieval Encounters 12, 2006, p. 323).

 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 706611.

Taking Measure of a Forest with too Many Trees

Sampling problems often tell researchers about the topic they are studying.

Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin, Edging Women Out, 1989

All categories of evidence available to scholars are heavily dependent on patterns of recording and publication.

Christopher Howgego, Ancient History from Coins, 1995

For the next twenty-three months I will use this blog to report regularly on MASHQI (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/206308_en.html), the research project of my Marie Curie Fellowship at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid.  At the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo (ILC) of the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS) I will be working on the transmission and reception of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf huqūq al-Muṣṭafā (“The book of healing concerning the recognition of the true facts about the chosen one”) by ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā Abū’l-Faḍl al-Yaḥṣubī al-Sabtī (1083-1149), a highly regarded authority of Maliki Islam, also known as Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ.  At the CSIC, the project is sponsored by Professor Maribel Fierro, and its origins are our shared interest in the Kitāb al-shifāʾ’s continuing popularity with Muslim readers in the early twenty-first century.

In Middle Eastern and Islamic studies there is a marked preference for works for which at most a few copies have been preserved.  The situation reflects in part the pragmatism of a field with fewer scholars than fields such as history or English studies.  We do know that there are still too many texts in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, as well as in the languages of Muslim communities in Africa, Central Asia, China, and the Pacific Rim, which have not yet received any scholarly attention at all.  While the discovery of new texts and unknown authors will make an obvious contribution to the human knowledge base, the focus on the not yet discovered is not without drawbacks.  Familiar works and authors are deeply integrated into our research infrastructure, because they constitute the foundations of our knowledge of the history of Muslim societies.  Consequently, the assumptions upon which this received disciplinary consensus rests is rarely questioned.  On the one hand, it is difficult to be critical of that which is familiar.  There is simply not enough distance to see the rough edges and contradictions that are so obvious from afar.  On the other hand, time and funding are always limited.  In order to complete research projects on a tight schedule, it is important to be careful about the battles we pick.  Not every fight is worth having – whatever the whisperings of our heroic id.

Against this backdrop, my project tries to accomplish two goals.  The first is to use the Kitāb al-shifāʾ as a test case for the practical challenges of how to study a work with an extraordinarily rich transmission history.  Luckily, these practical challenges are not unique to the Kitāb al-shifāʾ, and I can draw on research in quantitative codicology, enumerative bibliography, and the digital humanities in order to design my own approach.  The second goal is to explore the reception of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ outside the Islamic West and the strongholds of Maliki Islam.  My working assumption is that the diachronic study of a work’s reception provides insights into changing interpretations of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ which, in turn, serve as indispensable safeguards against any facile explanation for the enduring popularity of a twelfth-century work of hadith scholarship in the early twenty-first century.  In this context I will also explore questions about the Kitāb al-shifāʾ’s literary genre.  How does the Kitāb al-shifāʾ fit into the system of learned Islamic literature in the early twelfth century?  I am furthermore keen to consider the Kitāb al-shifāʾ within the larger context of comparative hagiography, as literature about the lives of exceptionally holy men and women can be found in most religious traditions.

The Marie Curie Fellowship will allow me to conduct this research at one of the most important centers for the study of Islam in Iberia and Africa.  Having arrived at the CCHS on 31 January 2017, for the last month I was very much preoccupied with getting settled in a new environment.  At the end of March, the project has to pass its first milestone: the cataloguing template of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ‘s online database.  One of the methodological challenges of any quantitative, cliometric approach is how to account for the truism that each corpus is also the outcome of chance and serendipity, although their importance varies from case to case.  At the same time, the complimentary risk of missing the forest for the trees is equally grave.  Nonetheless, the definition of the fields of the cataloguing template must happen at the beginning of the project, as the online database will unite the circa two-hundred references to manuscript copies and printed versions of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ, which Maribel Fierro and I have collected independently for years.  The template’s fields will determine how the database can be sorted, and thus their definitions will predetermine how this corpus can be examined and analyzed.

To illustrate these abstract considerations with a concrete example, in October 2015 Madrasa Editorial published in Granada the first Spanish translation of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ, which had been prepared by the prolific translator Abdelghani Melara Navío.  Since I am focused on the Kitāb al-shifāʾ’s reception before 1900, the logical conclusion would be to exclude all printed versions, in whatever language, from the corpus published after 1900.  Unfortunately, at this point it is difficult to assess the downside of excluding the continuing publication of new versions of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ in Arabic, as well as in new English and French translations since 1900.  How important are these contemporary versions for a deeper understanding of the roles of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ in the spiritual and intellectual lives of earlier generations of Muslim readers?

The record of the first Spanish translation in the online catalogue of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) indicates that the library owns not just one, but two copies:

The visual teaser that accompanied Abdelghani Melara Navío’s announcement of his new translation, posted on 30 October 2015 on the blog Islam Hoy, stresses that Spanish reading Muslims have now access to the Kitāb al-shifāʾ in their own language:

One of three images that accompanies the listing of the Spanish translation on AMAZON’s Spanish website shows the book against the backdrop of the Alhambra, one of the important lieux de memoires of Islam on the Iberian Peninsula which is connected with the biography of Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ:

One of the images in the banner of the translation’s publisher Madrasa Editorial, which is located in Granada, indicates which exalted company Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ and his Kitāb al-shifāʾ are keeping:

NB – I would like to thank Javier Albarrán Iruela for bringing the Spanish translation to my attention.

 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 706611.