Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East

Jonathan P. Berkey

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780295800981
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Islamic popular preachers and storytellers had enormous influence in defining common religious knowledge and faith in the medieval Near East. Jonathan Berkey's book illuminates the popular culture of religious storytelling. It draws on chronicles, biographical dictionaries, sermons, and tales — but especially on a number of medieval treatises critical of popular preachers, and also a vigorous defense of them which emerged in fourteenth-century Egyptian Sufi circles. Popular preachers drew inspiration and legitimacy from the rise of Sufi mysticism, with its emphasis on internal spiritual activity and direct enlightenment, enabling them to challenge or reinforce social and political hierarchies as they entertained the masses with tales of moral edification. As these charismatic figures developed a popular following, they often aroused the wrath of scholars and elites, who resented innovative interpretations of Islam that undermined orthodox religious authority and blurred social and gender barriers. Critics of popular preachers and storytellers worried that they would corrupt their audiences' understanding of Islam. Their defenders argued that preachers and storytellers could contribute to the consensus of the Islamic community as to what constituted acceptable religious knowledge. In the end, religious knowledge, and the definition of Islam as it was commonly understood, remained porous and flexible throughout the Middle Period, thanks in part to the activities of popular preachers and storytellers.

1 / Origins and Early Controversy

As with many other Islamic institutions, the origins of the qāṣṣ and the wā‘iẓ are obscure.¹ Later Muslim writers who discussed them related a number of differing accounts. Among the more common was one that identified Tamīm al-Dārī, a Christian convert to Islam, as the first person appointed to act as a qāṣṣ. According to one account, Tamīm twice asked the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb for permission to act as qāṣṣ and twice was refused. On his third application the caliph granted his reluctant permission.² Tamīm, however, is himself an enigmatic figure, and the reports of his activities are encrusted with legend.³ Other sources point to the caliphate of ʿAlī, and the fitna, the period of social and political upheaval following the murder of the caliph ʿUthmān, as the time at which the storytellers first appeared; some lay the blame specifically at the feet of the Khārijī rebels, the militants who precipitated the first schism in Islam by breaking with ʿAlī over his willingness to accept arbitration of his dispute with those demanding vengeance for ʿUthmān’s murder.⁴ The most recent study has concluded that these early reports yield little reliable information regarding the origins of organized storytelling but that the practice was certainly linked in a general way to the need to preach to and to teach the rapidly growing number of converts in the first decades of the Islamic state.⁵ Muḥammad himself, of course, had instructed and exhorted his community, so it is hardly surprising that later Muslims followed his example.

In the first Islamic century the quṣṣāṣ operated at the center of the process by which the nascent religion defined itself, as the lines of political and legal institutions and authority only gradually came into focus. At the beginning they functioned as part of the network of individuals among whom Islamic law slowly took shape, answering questions concerning ritual and right behavior posed to them by members of their audiences.⁶ The Umayyad caliphs quite naturally sought to control their activities. The office of the qāṣṣ, like that of the official Friday preacher, acquired a political dimension, and under the caliph Muʿāwiya became an official institution of the state, what Gordon Newby has called “the first salaried positions in Islam.”⁷ Stories related on the authority of Mālik b. Anas and others to the effect that ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, generally regarded by the Sunni tradition as the most pious and reputable of the Umayyad caliphs, appointed storytellers and apportioned them monthly salaries suggest an attempt to give institutional form to the exhortatory impulse.⁸ This did not, however, prevent unofficial and popular preachers from carrying on the task of spreading tales of the prophets and exhorting Muslims to what they considered correct behavior, completely independent of state control. In this growing tension lay the roots of later efforts to control popular preachers and storytellers and also of one of the most important textual weapons employed by the critics, a hadith in which the Prophet is reputed to have said that “only three kinds of people narrate stories: one who can appoint [amīr], one who is appointed for that purpose [maʾmūr], or a hypocrite [murāʾī].”⁹

Later criticism of the storytellers and popular preachers should not obscure the important role they played in the articulation and diffusion of Islam in the first Islamic centuries. A city such as Baṣra, for example, provided an open forum for their activities, and their audiences included both scholars (fuqahāʾ) and literati such as al-Jāḥiẓ.¹⁰ In such venues storytellers and popular preachers became the principal channel of instruction for the common people, for those not engaged in a rigorous course of study of the religious sciences under the supervision of one or more scholars. Hence, those reports that indicate that it was the quṣṣāṣ who first began preaching “sermon-like accounts of an edifying nature” about the Prophet.¹¹ By the sixth/twelfth century, the Ḥanbalī jurist and theologian Ibn al-Jawzī, whose famous treatise on the storytellers, Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ waʾl-mudhakkirīn (The Book of Storytellers and Those Who Remind [People of God’s Blessings]), sought to rein in their excesses and set proper bounds for the material that they related, acknowledged their important role in the transmission of religious knowledge to the common people (al-ʿawāmm). Drawing on the ethical injunction related in the Qurʾān in sūra 3, verse 104, and elsewhere, he remarked that God had sent prophets “to draw people to the good and warn them against evil” and, after them, the ulama who are distinguished by their learning (ʿilm). “Moreover,” he said, “the storytellers and the preachers were also given a place in this order [amr] so as to exhort [khiṭāb] the common people. As a result, the common people benefit from them in a way that they do not from a great scholar.”¹² At another point he was more precise: “The preacher brings to God a great number of people, while a jurist [faqīh] or a traditionist [muḥaddith] or a Qurʾān reader [qāriʾ] cannot bring [to God] a hundredth of that number, because [the preacher’s] exhortations are addressed to both the common people and the elite [liʾl-ʿāmm waʾl-khāṣṣ], but especially the common people, who only rarely meet a jurist, so they discuss things with [the preacher]. The preacher is like the trainer of animals, who educates them, reforms them and refines them.”¹³

Ibn al-Jawzī’s simile was surely not intended to flatter the audience of common people who listened to the sermons and tales of the quṣṣāṣ. Nonetheless, it is clear from the polemics over preachers and storytellers that these “shepherds” often acquired a devoted following among their “flocks.” According to a story told by Ibn al-Jawzī, the mother of Abū Ḥanīfa, jurist and eponym of the Ḥanafi school of law, refused to accept her son’s ruling on a matter until his opinion had been confirmed by a storyteller in whom she placed great trust.¹⁴ Ibn al-Jawzī related another tale concerning ʿĀmir al-Shaʿbī (d. c. 104/722–23), an Iraqi scholar who once entered a mosque in the Syrian city of Palmyra and there encountered “an elderly man with a long beard, around whom the people in the mosque had gathered taking down into writing what he said.” When the old man repeated a hadith according to which “God has created two trumpets each having two blasts: the blast of death and the blast of resurrection,” the visiting scholar could not help but correct him. “O Shaykh!” he said, “fear God and do not relate traditions which contain falsehood. God has created only one trumpet having two blasts: the blast of death and the blast of resurrection.” The old man did not take kindly to al-Shaʿbī’s intervention and struck him with his shoe. More important, his audience followed his example, and, according to al-Shaʿbī, “they did not stop until I had sworn to them that God had created thirty trumpets each having but a single blast.”¹⁵

The devotion and loyalty of the common people to their preachers and storytellers is a theme that is repeated in discussions about them by Muslim scholars. It pervades, for instance, the treatise of the ninth/fifteenth-century polymath Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī condemning the excesses of the storytellers, Taḥdhīr al-khawāṣṣ min akādhīb al-quṣṣāṣ (A Warning to the Elites Concerning the Lies of the Storytellers).¹⁶ In explaining the occasion for writing his treatise, al-Suyūṭī relates that he was asked about a storyteller who repeated hadiths that were not genuine. The hadith in question concerned sūra 21, verse 107, of the Qurʾān: “We have sent you [Muḥammad] as a mercy to the world.” Muḥammad, according to the story, asked the archangel Gabriel whether any of that mercy had devolved upon him. “Yes,” Gabriel responded, “before He created me, God created thousands of angels named Gabriel. He asked each of them, ‘Who am I?’ but they did not know what to reply, and so they wasted away. But when He created me and asked me, ‘Who am I?’ your Light, O Muḥammad, said to me: ‘Say, You are God, other than whom there is no god.’” Al-Suyūṭī was of the opinion that this hadith was spurious and made his judgment known to the qāṣṣ, issuing a fatwā (personal legal ruling) to the effect that he must correct the traditions he recited under the supervision of reputable scholars. The storyteller reacted with rage, insisting that he desired the approbation of the people (al-nās), rather than that of the scholars (al-mashāyikh), and spurred on his listeners—al-Suyūṭī described them as the “rabble” (al-ghawghāʾ)—until they threatened to stone al-Suyūṭī.¹⁷

Such storytellers, according to al-Suyūṭī, defended themselves by accusing their scholarly critics of envy, a telling mark of the depth of the storytellers’ popularity.¹⁸ If the biographical literature is frequently reticent on the subject of preachers and storytellers, those whom the biographers did notice often stood out for the number of listeners drawn to their preaching. The historian al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, who surely knew a good sermon when he heard one (his name means “the Baghdadi preacher”), described Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Shīrāzī al-Wāʿiẓ (d. 439/1047–48) as one who “spoke to the people [of Baghdad] in the language of exhortation” and remarked that uncounted numbers attended his sessions.¹⁹ Later in the fifth/eleventh century Abūʿl-Ḥusayn Ardashīr al-ʿAbbādī al-Wāʿiẓ, passing through the Iraqi city after performing the pilgrimage, began to preach in the great Niẓāmiyya madrasa. His audiences, which included the famous scholar Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, increased in size until, Ibn al-Jawzī reckoned, their number reached thirty thousand.²⁰ Shihāb al-Dīn al-Sanbāṭī, who preached in the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, did not perhaps attract crowds of comparable size, but his audiences were enthusiastic nonetheless. When he descended from his chair after his sermon, the people would jostle and fight with one another to draw close and touch him; if one of them was unable to touch the man himself, he would toss his girdle (shadda) so that it brushed against the preacher’s robe and then draw the cloth over his face.²¹

Such individuals were clearly exceptional by any standards, but their success and popularity were replicated in varying degrees all the way down the scale of religious accomplishment and fame. The biographer of the famous Egyptian Sufi and preacher Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh (d. 709/1309) remarked that “he was among those who talked [about religious subjects] to the people” and that individuals of all types, both “legal scholars” (mutafaqqiha) and the “common people” (al-ʿāmma), flocked to hear him speak.²² Biographical notices of less famous preachers tend to be extremely terse, even in generally expansive collections such as al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ (The Gleaming Light of the People of the Ninth Century) of the ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian al-Sakhāwī, but it is not uncommon to encounter individuals who “sat with the people” and “preached to them” or “read to them.” These transmitters of religious lore and exhortation often attracted the biographers’ attention through the “confidence” (iʿtiqād) that their listeners and followers had in them. Ibrāhīm b. Miʿḍād al-Jaʿbarī (d. 687/1288), for instance, whose preaching was by all accounts eloquent, sat with the common people, and they had “confidence” in him. (Ibn Miʿḍād’s popularity no doubt rested in part on what seems to have been a delightful sense of humor. When he was near death, he was carried out to the location of his tomb, in the Ḥusayniyya district outside Cairo, and said in a playful rhyme, “O little tomb, a little pair of buttocks has come to you.”)²³ So did the preacher Ibn Bint Maylaq (d. 797/1395), a member of the Shādhilī order of Sufis, whose listeners also revered him—at least until he was appointed Mālikī qadi in Cairo, in which post he was found to have embezzled a fair sum of money.²⁴ Abū ʿAlī Ḥasan al-Khabbāz (d. 791/1389), another Shādhilī Sufi who, as his name suggests, began life as a baker, took up residence in a small mosque (zāwiya) outside of Cairo where he preached to the common people, on whose hearts his exhortations “left a mark” (li-waʿẓihi taʾthīr fiʾl-qulūb).²⁵

Despite, or perhaps because of, their popularity with the common people, preachers and storytellers became the object of the wrath of more reputable scholars, as al-Shaʿbī’s and al-Suyūṭī’s experiences suggest. In fact, criticism of the storytellers forms a distinct focus of early and medieval Islamic polemical discourse.²⁶ In later chapters of this book I will discuss the issues raised by this polemic, as well as efforts to defend the preachers and storytellers, in greater detail. For the moment I wish simply to identify the general contours of the debate.

Criticism of preachers and storytellers was vigorous and sustained. One of their most persistent critics was the Ḥanbalī jurist and theologian Ibn al-Jawzī. Ibn al-Jawzī’s attack on the lies preached by storytellers to their credulou...