The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters

Arabic Knowledge Construction

Muhsin J. al-Musawi

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780268158019
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia islamica

In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period from the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919 as an "Age of Decay" followed by an "Awakening" ( al-nahdah ). His sweeping synthesis debunks this view by carefully documenting a "republic of letters" in the Islamic Near East and South Asia that was vibrant and dynamic, one varying considerably from the generally accepted image of a centuries-long period of intellectual and literary stagnation.

Al-Musawi argues that the massive cultural production of the period was not a random enterprise: instead, it arose due to an emerging and growing body of readers across Islamic lands who needed compendiums, lexicons, and commentaries to engage with scholars and writers. Scholars, too, developed their own networks to respond to each other and to their readers. Rather than addressing only the elite, this culture industry supported a common readership that enlarged the creative space and audience for prose and poetry in standard and colloquial Arabic. Works by craftsmen, artisans, and women appeared side by side with those by distinguished scholars and poets.

Through careful exploration of these networks, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters makes use of relevant theoretical frameworks to situate this culture in the ongoing discussion of non-Islamic and European efforts. Thorough, theoretically rigorous, and nuanced, al-Musawi's book is an original contribution to a range of fields in Arabic and Islamic cultural history of the twelfth to eighteenth centuries.

chapter one

SEISMIC ISLAMICA

Politics and Scope of a Medieval Republic of Letters

This is a record of travel [ibn Baṭṭūṭah’s] which is rare enough today with our many conveniences.

— Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History, 752

When he [Tīmūr] had filled the bag of his cupidity with precious things and had gradually milked every drop clear or foul … he let his soldiers plunder at will, seize any they wished as prisoners, destroy suddenly and slaughter, burn and drag into bondage without restraint…. Wisdom became fickle, sagacity was stunned and thick clouds of affliction gathered, and I call Allah to witness that those days were a sign among the signs of the last day; and that that hour showed the conditions of the last day.

— Ibn Arabshah, Tamerlane, or Timur the Great Amir, 157

There is perhaps no better instance of the complexity of the politics of medieval and premodern Islamic cultural life, and hence of the formation of an Islamic republic of letters, than the historic meeting between the eminent scholar and historian ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) and the Mongol emperor Tīmūr (Tamerlane; 1336–1405) outside the gates of Damascus in 803/1401.¹ Its significance for this first chapter derives not only from its problematic narrative in relation to other accounts of prominent fourteenth- and fifteenth-century travelers and scholars and their networks, but also from its pertinence to the constitution of the republic of letters during and in the aftermath of invasions and wars. The Arab-Islamic world was about to witness the collapse of another center and the ultimately supreme military domination of the Mongol empire, along with its increasingly consolidated cultural capital of language, rhetoric, and historiography.

The meeting of the two men combined the primary elements in social networking. Conquest and invasion, in the form of military deployment against the Levant, comprised gathering intelligence not only on military matters but also on prominent scholars in Damascus. Such information partly led to Tīmūr’s meetings with ibn Khaldūn and the latter’s ultimate commitment to documenting these meetings as evidence of his social theory, which was based on the principle of group solidarity. The occasion can also be read as the intersectional space for a mixed agenda and a means of testing the ways in which modernist and postcolonial lenses choose to engage with the past. Cutting as it does across conceptualizations of nation and categories of ethnicity and ethos, this meeting confronts readers with an immediate need to recover an Islamic understanding of “Dār al-Islām” (the abode of Islam as an inclusive domain), a concept that may rise above ethnic demarcations but may still succumb to more restrictive dynastic applications, which bring with them significant consequences. This historic meeting is also problematic because it directs attention to the manipulation of religion and its concomitant cultural capital in a conquest that has an ethnic core, a core that Tīmūr makes clear in his discussion of historiography and pre-Islamic or Mesopotamian lineage, addressed below. Philological and political explorations, however, cannot be understood apart from economic needs and grand confrontations with other rising powers across the Mediterranean. By wrecking the Levant and planning to conquer the western Arab flank, Tīmūr was facing a possible confrontation with his ancestors’ allies, the Franks. In ibn Khaldūn’s short autobiographical sketch of that meeting, we are led into Tīmūr’s exceptional mind and will to imperial power. Tīmūr was only one emperor among many competing powers and dynasties that also witnessed, cherished, or undermined cultural growth across a long period rich in knowledge production. The meeting subsumes not only the politics of power but also the geography of the Islamic world, its east and west, and the implications of knowledge construction beyond the context of dynastic rule on the large scale.

To the credit of the Mongol conqueror, the thirty-five meeting sessions, spread over forty-eight days, confirm his pursuit of disputation, a trait that was matched only by his voracious desire for conquest and the destruction of every other urban center that competed with his cherished Samarqand. The imperial pursuit was as ruthless and destructive of human and cultural property as any postcapitalist invasion. In preparation for storming Damascus, and also shortly thereafter, the emperor made use of the sessions with the historian and thinker ibn Khaldūn to gather information about lands, resources, theological and philosophical controversies, craftsmen, scholars, and other notables of the Arab-Islamic world and Muslim Spain. The meetings of the two men were held both at Tīmūr’s instigation and ibn Khaldūn’s own choice, the result of discreet suggestions from Damascene notables in order to avert the calamity of the city’s capture.² Ibn Khaldūn, an accomplished intellectual, historian, and scholar, the chief Maliki judge in Mamluk Egypt, a native of Tunisia and noted administrator in Granada and Morocco, and an expert in social and economic politics, brought with him a vast knowledge of Andalusia (Muslim Spain), the entire western flank of the Arab-Islamic world (al-Maghrib), Africa, and certainly Egypt, the kind of knowledge that an ambitious conqueror like Tīmūr needed in order to ensure expansion and rule that would sustain a Tīmūrid empire (1370–1506).³ The whole Islamic world was about to fall into the Mongol emperor’s hands, with the help of this noted scholar, who found in Tīmūr the proof of his theory of the paradigmatic rise and fall of empires and the function of group solidarity in substantiating, inciting, and consolidating the drive for conquest.⁴ Over these fortyeight days, Tīmūr acquired from ibn Khaldūn an extensive knowledge about the region, including its geography, demography, natural and human resources, and present and future prospects.

The last part of ibn Khaldūn’s multivolume history includes his autobiography, although without the account of the historic meeting and of the last eleven years of his life, which are found in other autobiographical pieces.⁵ Scholars have tended to focus on his introductory volume, or Prolegomena (al-Muqaddimah), where he pursues a highly sophisticated theoretical discussion of history, state, society, and the formation of culture.⁶

The father of sociology and history as a science was no minor figure, and it is to ibn Khaldūn’s credit that he had and still has a substantial impact on historical theorists, sociologists, linguists, literary scholars, and Islamic jurists. His acquiescence to Tīmūr’s desire for expansion may present him as complicit in a devastating expansion; yet ibn Khaldūn shows no qualms with respect to the politics of the meeting. On the contrary, his smooth narrative presents the occasion as an act of recognition and reciprocal arrangement, a gift exchange that Tīmūr and his entourage fully appreciated. The historian is also not bothered by the ethnicity of the conquest; throughout North Africa and until very recently, Islam and Arabism overlap, and no such contradiction or separation is implied, unlike the case in the Arab east. Ibn Khaldūn’s counter-endeavor, aimed at contacting Moroccan rulers and acquainting them with the situation, might be a saving grace or a genuine warning, which does not contradict his appreciation of the conqueror.⁷ Ibn Khaldūn’s social theory could have turned him away from nationalist imperatives, despite the impending calamity that was about to change the political map drastically and relegate Damascus, Cairo, and the rest of the Arab world to a secondary, peripheral status. Medieval scholars’ positions with respect to these grave issues seem to be quite problematic and are more complicated than those of contemporary Arab modernists, with their sweeping rejection of the recent past and of its intimidating cultural capital.⁸

This historic meeting cuts across many divides. In ibn Khaldūn we have both the humanist and also an effective participant in Islamic “scholastic” knowledge in its most excessive exegetical domain; the shrewd negotiator trying to save people from impending destruction; and the theorist who is carried away by a theory that demands cogent proof of the group solidarity dynamic needed to generate conquest and control empires. In that meeting, the Islamic world is encapsulated in a nutshell. The struggle for power takes Islam as an ideological pretext for the establishment of a rule based on tribal, ethnic, and other broadly defined confederations. On the positive side, ibn Khaldūn can serve as the iconic and also charismatic embodiment of the Maghrib, not only because he “clung stubbornly to his special Maghrib, or Moorish, garb,” but also because his identitarian politics connects us symbolically with the Maghribi community of scholars, Sufis, and entrepreneurs who happened to form a substantial portion of the Cairene and urban elite between the tenth and eighteenth centuries.⁹ It is not surprising, therefore, that Maghribi culture and ibn Khaldūn’s writings in particular received great attention in the eighteenth century.¹⁰ In other words, in him as a scholar and signifier we also have the Muslim west both in conversation and at war with the Muslim east. This state of affairs does not preclude ups and downs in the lives and careers of individuals and communities. Scholars, artists, artisans, poets, and scientists are caught in the middle, as accomplices, captives, and, on some rare occasions, independent minds and talents.

Indeed, Tīmūr’s unflinching purpose of establishing Samarqand as a unique metropolis, one that could outshine the former ʿAbbasid Baghdad, generated an insatiable desire for culture that took the form of enforced migrations of artisans, scholars, and scientists to Samarqand. From the twelfth and even into the nineteenth century, choices were never easy. The Arab center could not hold for long, despite the invigorating presence of Cairo amid other centers subject to rise and fall, such as Granada, Fez, Damascus, Herāt, Tabrīz, Balkh, Bukhārā, Hamadhān, Ṭūs, Samarqand, Iṣfahān, Khwārizm, Khurāsān, Marv, and others. As if mapping out a geographical scope for Islamic knowledge, the discerning master of eloquence Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (known as the “wonder of the age”; d. 398/1008) takes these and other cities as the sites for his short, eloquent, and witty narratives of ruse, the Maqāmāt (Assemblies), which present their locales as culturally active and thriving cities under the control of shaky and unstable regimes.¹¹

KNOWLEDGE UNDER DURESS

Postclassical Islamic cultural life since the mid-tenth century has resisted attempts at categorization on the bases of ethos, ethnos, and logos. Instead it demands a reading (or indeed a rereading) of the period that takes the free, enforced, or deliberate conversations among artisans, poets, and scholars across Islamic lands as an ongoing struggle, a contestation among priorities that cannot be grasped outside the context of power relations. Culture, although upheld and kept alive in poetry, art, and social relations, cannot be argued independently of the ever-shifting grounds that at times compromise the sober-mindedness and agility of scholars. As an example, certain scholars are fully prepared, for instance, to criticize ibn ʿArabshāh’s (d. 1450) biography of Tīmūr, ʿAjāʾib al-maqdūr fī nawāʾib Tīmūr (The Wonders of Destiny Concerning the Calamities Wrought by Tamerlane), for its “Persianate” style and lack of sympathy for his subject,¹² without giving due consideration to the personal intervention in a narrative of an author who was taken captive in Damascus by Tīmūr at the age of twelve.¹³ Unlike compromised historians who write for power motives, but also like many who unflinchingly subscribe to one theological stand, ibn ʿArabshāh is obviously bent on setting the record straight against somebody who destroyed his birthplace, Damascus, and who claimed the intention to interrogate and dismantle the Arab official discourse of power since the Umayyads (r. 661–750).¹⁴ This subjectivity notwithstanding, he offers firsthand accounts of Samarqand as a thriving place for scholars and also highlights the positive aspects of Tīmūr, which were used by the Renaissance poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) in his play of two parts, Tamburlaine the Great. Indeed, ibn ʿArabshāh’s description of Tīmūr’s physical features, his proclivity for disputation, and his interest in learning are juxtaposed with descriptions of his cruelty and destructiveness. Albeit with styles that succumb to the contentious qualities of the languages that ibn ʿArabshāh mastered, his hybrid grammaticality and diction represent but one aspect of the period under consideration here, namely, the struggles between Arabic as the language of religion, rhetoric, and poetry, on the one hand, and, on the other, the growing prevalence of Persian and Turkish as the languages of the new Islamic political order in its enormous shift eastward. His account lays bare the problematic in cultural formations, between conquest and the commensurate constitution of cultural centers and coteries. The Islamic world was turned into a large theatre of disputation, embodied in multiplying commentaries and other forms of writing. There is a noticeable shift in the transmission of knowledge eastward, as Hamid Dabashi argues, but the same transmission places ibn Baṭṭūṭah and ibn ʿArabshāh, for example, in conversation with a broad Islamic order that was always either in conflict or else rapprochement with the west.¹⁵ The west itself was already there in the east, not only through an unabating influx of Greek logic, via translations, into Islamic speculative reasoning, but also through contacts in Andalusia and Sicily and during the Crusades. The east/west paradigm could not hold for long, and a struggle for power beyond borders took place, as Tīmūr’s conquests demonstrate. Transmuted into an epicenter of learning and elegance, Samarqand could not outlast its Tīmūrid-enforced cultural feeding: lettered cities also require their own self-generated dynamics.

While invasions and conquests led to the growth of some city-states and the destruction of others, there is nevertheless a resilient human will that escapes the rigid constraints of ascending political powers and disturbs their seemingly homogeneous façade. Ibn ʿArabshāh’s life-itinerary is merely one among many similar examples that demonstrate the other dynamic in the “republic of letters,” namely, its networking, which confronts us with an interactive Islamic web, a cluster of Islamica, a pattern of vast possibilities that traverse geographies in pursuit of a book, a scholar, a poet, a manuscript, or a noted majlis (assembly). Born to a Turkish father and an Arab mother in Damascus, ibn ʿArabshāh was captured in 1401 and carried away to Samarqand by Tīmūr’s invading army, where he acquainted himself with Persian, Turkish, and Mongolian languages in the process of later becoming private secretary for the Turkish Sultan, Muhammad II, son of Bāyazīd. He returned to Damascus in 824/1421 and finally settled in Cairo. There he suffered imprisonment once again under Sultan al-Ẓāhir Juqmaq, bequeathing to us before his death in 1450 a large number of prominent disciples, numerous books, and a high level of scholarship. The life of ibn ʿArabshāh can thus be cited as an index of Tīmūrid times and their cultural achievements, all at the expense of human life and urban growth. Such were, in fact, the vagaries and outcomes of those troubled times.

TRANSMITTERS OF KNOWLEDGE

If ibn ʿArabshāh’s enforced migration at the age of twelve during the Tīmūrid heyday of Samarqand led him paradoxically to greater knowledge and achievement, there were others who were simply driven by wanderlust. Although free from the dangers of political captivity, this urge was no less binding on others, such as the Moroccan ibn Baṭṭūṭah (d. 1377), whose journeys took him in the opposite direction from that of the Mongol army. Traveling deep into central Asia and ending up in China, he also acted as a judge in Delhi and the Maldives. There and in other places of residence, he became acquainted with notables, converted people to Islam, married, and came across old friends and relatives. In him, the abode of Islam was deterritorialized, and issues of dogmatic stratification and regimentation lost ground. Turned into a lyrical subject like any distinguished poet, this traveler sang the riḥlah theme as an ultimate human odyssey shorn of limits. In an amazing travelogue (1325–1354) that eludes questions of identity and language, ibn Baṭṭūṭah, as the unique Islamic subject, takes us to Islamic lands as confederational sites of possibilities where rigid scholasticism is put aside and other ways of communication, understanding, and also difference are found.¹⁶ In more than one sense, his travels provide an index of social networking patterns, through his contacts, his self-presentation as a jurist, his sociability, partial affiliations with coteries and brotherhoods, attendance at ceremonies and Friday congressional prayers, subscription to officialdom, and many other activities.

The adventures of the human agent in this struggle for knowledge open up wide cracks in the shell of consensus that had defined and marked a portion of scholastic thought among jurists and theologians. In this type of thought, there was a sustained emphasis on religious paraphernalia as a...