Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages
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Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages
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Overview
Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages assesses both the religious and philosophical aspects of travel, as well as the economic and cultural conditions that made the rihla possible. Houari Touati tracks the compilers of the hadith who culled oral traditions linked to the prophet, the linguists and lexicologists who journeyed to the desert to learn Bedouin Arabic, the geographers who mapped the Muslim world, and the students who ventured to study with holy men and scholars. Travel, with its costs, discomforts, and dangers, emerges in this study as both a means of spiritual growth and a metaphor for progress. Touati’s book will interest a broad range of scholars in history, literature, and anthropology.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226808772 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2010 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
ISLAM AND TRAVEL IN THE MIDDLE AGES
By HOUARI TOUATI
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-80877-2
Chapter One
Invitation to the Voyage
Why did Islamic men of letters invent the voyage? And just who were these men of letters? To what use did they put their travels? In order to answer these questions, the great Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher, working in the late nineteenth century, accepted the thesis that it was specialists in Tradition who initiated the rihla-voyage in the early eighth century. He states that the traditionists made use of the voyage as a war machine to combat the opposing party of "reasoners" (the as'hab al-ra'y, or "people of opinion") in the task of collecting, authenticating, and harmonizing the sayings of the Prophet.
That conception of travel, far from dying out, has continued to gather support from many scholars. Some went so far as to state that the origin of the voyage, as a literary practice, is much older than that, and that travel was inextricably intertwined with the history of Islam from the start. The great treasury of modern Orientalism, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, bears the mark of this double misunderstanding. The question is how the traditionists could have possibly created an institution like the rihla-voyage at a time when they themselves did not yet exist as a group.
We have no serious proof that attests to the collective existence of these specialists in Tradition before the late eighth century. As for the "prophetic science" that they promoted, all evidence seems to attest that it attained its maturity only in the first half of the ninth century. If they made use of certain genealogical and doctrinal arrangements to give themselves older origins, and if they took care to give their enterprise an aura of the prestige of the past, that is simply another episode in the "invention of tradition." As shown by one of the oldest sources, the Tabaqat of Ibn Sa'id (d. 230/845), a biographical dictionary that, it is worth recalling, participated in the enterprise of shaping learning through a genealogy of sources, those whom the traditionists took to be their ancestors displayed a pronounced aversion to what became the procedures and the customs of their self-proclaimed heirs. First among these was 'Abd-Allah ibn Mas'ud (d. 32/652), the founding figure of religious intellectuality at Kufa. One person who came to join his study circle and listened to him for an entire year asserts that only once did he hear him say, "The Prophet said ..." At that point, "seized by overwhelming regret," he apologized for his statement, saying that he could not remember whether the Prophet had truly said "something more than that, that approximated that, or that fell short of that." Another disciple reports having seen him, on another occasion, apologize for having said, "I heard the Prophet say ..." When the master realized his mistake it was too late: the damage had been done. "He trembled all over, as did his clothing." He nonetheless took the time to rectify: "I think that he said approximately that, or something close to it." The disciple in question, 'Aqlama ibn Qays (d. 62/681), was a Qur'an scholar and a jurisconsult, and at the death of his master his name was suggested to replace him, which involved being subject to close questioning. The Arabic text uses the term nas'al, a verbal form derived from the root s.'a.l. The use of that verb implies use of the casuistic method of masa'il, the equivalent of the Latin quaestiones, a technique that had taken over entire fields of learning from theology to medicine. It was not really the preferred method of the traditionists, who inclined instead toward procedures that they derived from the verb haddatha (to transmit, relate, inform, narrate) and its nominal form hadith (transmission, tradition, information, oral relation). The term hadith was still used to speak of secular narratives and did not yet have the specialized meaning within their conceptual apparatus that later traditionists gave it.
This means that the sage in question was not teaching the hadith in the sense that the traditionists understood the term. Otherwise it would be difficult to understand why his disciple Ibrahim al-Nakha'i (d. 96/714) should have asked him, one day, whether he knew the "hadith that had come to him from the Prophet." The master is reported to have answered, "Yes, but I prefer to say: 'X said, Y said, and Z said'; I find that easier (than to say 'The Prophet said')." Nor can we say that Nakha'i was a specialist in Tradition in the strict sense, or that his own students were. When, at his death, his disciples asked two of their company to carry on the master's teachings, it was not in order to teach them the traditions. One of them states: "When Ibrahim died, we thought only A'mash (d. 148/765) capable of succeeding him. We went to see him and we interrogated him on 'the licit and the illicit' [an expression meaning 'law'], but he knew little about it. Then we interrogated him on the fara'id [the part of jurisprudence that treats successions and teaches what is due to each heir], and we saw that he possessed them. Next we went to see Hammad (d. 120/730) and we interrogated him on the fara'id, about which he knew little, and on 'the licit and the illicit,' of which he had full command. We therefore studied the fara'id from A'mash and law from Hammad."
One eyewitness reports that he entered the Great Mosque of Kufa in the company of the judge of that city and saw Hammad "surrounded by his companions," all seated in a circle animated by "their boisterousness and their loud voices." The scene, which displeased the magistrate, is a good indication that the two men were not watching a session of the transmission of traditions but a disputation circle, and that such circles did not much like those who made a profession of collecting traditions. A'mash is reported to have said that if he had had dogs, he would not have hesitated to set them on as'hab al-hadith, or tradition seekers. A generation earlier, another great jurist in Medina, no less a personage than the grandson of the first caliph of Islam, demonstrated his hostility toward the enthusiasm for collecting hadith. He reportedly attempted to turn one of his disciples away from the practice by telling him that when the second caliph of Islam saw that traditions attributed to the Prophet were proliferating in Medina, he gave orders to destroy by fire all the "supports" on which they had been written down. This means that to speak of a "world of traditionists" that existed "throughout the eighth century" seems more than a bit anachronistic.
On the other hand, the disaffection that the doctors of the late seventh and early eighth centuries showed regarding prophetic traditions was not accompanied by an absolute refusal to use them. In order to elaborate their doctrines, the jurists of the age felt it necessary to base them on Tradition. Thus, it is not impossible that one of their number, a doctor from Basra installed in Syria named Abu Qilaba (d. 105?/723?), made the trip to Medina, where he reportedly waited for several days until a specialist in traditions returned to that city in order to collect a hadith that he had heard of directly from him. The source tells us that the Iraqi jurisconsult made the trip in the hope of obtaining just "one hadith." This fits with other evidence that the same doctor from Basra displayed circumspection about improper transmission of this type of material. One of his disciples tells us that when his master had transmitted more than three traditions at one time, he thought he had said too much.
When the great Medina jurist Zuhri (d. 124/741) first arrived in Damascus in 701, he encountered the same determination to respect Tradition. In the Umayyad capital, one of the first study circles that he frequented was that of an eminent doctor who had connections at court. He learned there that the caliph was eager to know what laws had been passed in the time of 'Umar I (r. 634–44), one of the "Rightly Guided" caliphs, regarding the status of a slave concubine who had borne her master's child. Zuhri won his sovereign's favor by providing the information requested, but he lost that of his master, who was hostile to the reigning dynasty.
Although we are now at the threshold of the second century of the existence of Islam, the voyage was only beginning to develop around the first study circles constituted in the larger urban centers of the Hejaz (Mecca, Medina), Iraq (Basra, Kufa), and Syria (Damascus). Still, there were a few men of letters who were already genuine "tourists." This was true of 'Ikrima (d. 105/723). He was an indefatigable traveler whose peregrinations took him to the Hejaz, Iraq, Persia, and Yemen, and even as far as Khurasan and Transoxiana. The judge of Kufa at the time said of him, admiringly, that he had never known anyone who had visited a greater number of "horizons" in his quest for knowledge. Ayyub al-Sikhtiyani (d. 131/748), a doctor in Basra, reports how he met him: "I wanted to go see 'Ikrima, wherever he might be—he traveled much—when one day, when I was in the marketplace of Basra, I saw a man on a donkey (and heard) people crying, 'It's 'Ikrima! It's 'Ikrima!' A crowd of people then surrounded him. I came closer in order to ask him the questions lodged in my heart, but I could not do so. They had flown from my mind. So I placed myself next to his donkey, and as people questioned him, I memorized his responses to them."
Mak'hul (d. 112/730), whom the Syrian school of law considers its founding master, was also one of the great travelers of the time. Leaving Egypt, he passed through the entire Middle East from Syria to Iraq, including the Hejaz. When he got to Iraq, he spent several months at the court of the grand judge of that city, observing his decisions. At Medina he joined the circle of a master who had earned from his contemporaries the title of "jurisconsult of the jurisconsults." There he met other men of letters, in particular, from Iraq. He is the first man of letters whose travel narrative, albeit in fragments, appears in ninth-century sources:
Fragment 1: I was in Egypt the slave of a woman of the tribe of Hudayl, and that woman gave me my freedom. But I did not leave Egypt before having gathered all the knowledge that could be found there. Then I went to the Hejaz, and from there to Iraq, with the same purpose and with the same success. Next I traveled toward Syria and thoroughly examined that land.... I have never left a land without thinking that there was a knowledge hidden within it that I had not heard.... I traveled throughout the earth in search of knowledge. ... Then I met [the judge] Sha'bi; he was without peer. Fragment 2: I frequented [the judge] Shurayh [d. 78/697] with assiduity for several months without interrogating him; I was satisfied with hearing him pass judgment.
That was the start, after which the men of letters of Islam made incessant journeys within the empire. For a long time the Middle Ages resonated to the sound of their mounts' hooves.
The 'ilm, an Onomastic Emblem
Mak'hul said of the Kufa judge whom he had frequented that he had never known any man more knowledgeable than he "in matters of past Sunna." It would seem normal for a great judge to be an authority on what should, in practical terms, furnish the traditional rules of law. It seems in fact inconceivable that the application of the law not demand a reactivation of the Sunna, the usus of the "community of Muslims" as that community had been organized by Muhammad and his immediate successors. One might then conclude that the professionals of law and of religion, like this magistrate, would have sought to glean from it their doctrinal elaborations. The development of a social life that was becoming more and more complexly tangled as the empire grew, now stretching from Asia to Europe and to Africa, demanded the regulation of relations between individuals and groups within the framework of consistent legal norms and more or less unified rituals. The judges were officials named by the sovereigns. Without going so far as to take it for granted that, from that time on, they followed a line determined by the state, it is likely that their political masters' preoccupations helped to shape the development of jurisprudence in the direction of the Sunna. The considerable role that jurists allied to the Umayyad dynasty played in that alliance between law and Tradition is a familiar tale. They made that contribution thanks to their authority as judges, their competence as jurisconsults, and their talents as professors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ISLAM AND TRAVEL IN THE MIDDLE AGES by HOUARI TOUATI Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface to the English-Language Edition (2010)Acknowledgments (2000)
Introduction
Chapter 1: Invitation to the Voyage
The ‘ilm, an Onomastic Emblem
A Catastrophic Theory of Knowledge
The Genealogical Structure of Knowledge
Chapter 2: The School of the Desert
Linguists and Bedouins
The Stay in the Desert
A Geography of Pure Language
A Theory of the Stay in the Desert
Chapter 3: The Price of Travel
Financing a Voyage
Paying a Personal Price
Terminus
Chapter 4: Autopsy of a Gaze
The Eye of the Popeyed Man
A Geographer in His Study
The Experience of the Voyage
A Clinical Look at Muslim Verismo
Muqaddasi, Strabo, and Greek Science
Chapter 5: Attaining God
The Theory of the Errant Life
Topographical Writing
Sufism as a Crossing of the Desert
The Voyage to Syria
Entering into the Desert
Society and Its Obverse
Chapter 6: Going to the Borderlands
The Ulemas and Jihad
An Ideology of Combat
Jihad and Hagiography
Chapter 7: Writing the Voyage
Narrating an Absence
The Extraordinary in the Voyage
The Travel Letter
An Art of Travel
A Return to the Travel Narrative
Conclusion: The Journey to the End of the Same
Chronological List of Principal Travel Accounts
Glossary
Bibliography
Index