Before Sufism

Early Islamic renunciant piety

Christopher Melchert

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110617719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología islámica

Christopher Melchert proposes to historicize Islamic renunciant piety ( zuhd ). As the conquest period wound down in the early eighth century c.e., renunciants set out to maintain the contempt of worldly comfort and loyalty to a greater cause that had characterized the community of Muslims in the seventh century. Instead of reckless endangerment on the battlefield, they cultivated intense fear of the Last Judgement to come. They spent nights weeping, reciting the Qur'an, and performing supererogatory ritual prayers. They stressed other-worldliness to the extent of minimizing good works in this world.

Then the decline of tribute from the conquered peoples and conversion to Islam made it increasingly unfeasible for most Muslims to keep up any such régime. Professional differentiation also provoked increasing criticism of austerity. Finally, in the later ninth century, a form of Sufism emerged that would accommodate those willing and able to spend most of their time on religious devotions, those willing and able to spend their time on other religious pursuits such as law and hadith, and those unwilling or unable to do either.

Chapter 1: Basic problems

The topic

The topic of this book is early Islamic renunciant piety, which seems to have predominated before the rise of classical Sufism in the later ninth century. To state my history with utmost brevity, I might say that the renunciant piety of the eighth century was about preserving the ethos of the conquest period after the conquests were over. It became increasingly unfeasible as the military was professionalized and more and more people converted to Islam. It was one thing to call for Muslims to spend most of their nights in prayer and qur’anic recitation when the Muslims were a thin stratum at the top of society, supported by tribute from the conquered peoples. It was quite another thing to call for that when Muslims had become the majority and most of them necessarily had to work for a living. Active distrust of the life of austerity began to be respectable from about the last third of the eighth century, even as enthusiasts embraced new, more extreme forms. Following some active persecution of Sufis, a new synthetic piety crystallized around al-Junayd (d. 298/911?) in Baghdad. This was classical Sufism, still calling for austerities but not for everyone; subordinating the old fear of God to cultivating mystical communion with the Divine.

In the following chapters, I shall try to present representative examples of renunciant devotions, accounts of how they were supported materially and their stance vis à vis rulers, finally the rise of opposition to world-denying renunciation and the Sufi answer to that opposition. One of my theses is that it is possible to write about Islamic piety historically: to identify stages and to suggest why it moved in some directions rather than others. Scholars must reject the view, however comfortable to believers, that Sufism is a superhistorical essence manifest in the Prophet’s lifetime, manifest throughout the conquest period, manifest immediately after the conquest period.

The sources

The chief problem of writing early Islamic history is that so few of our sources are contemporary. That is, to know what happened in the seventh and eighth centuries we mainly have to rely on chroniclers and others of the ninth and tenth centuries. The risk is that chroniclers of the ninth and tenth centuries were projecting backward the ideas of their own time. Sometimes, the anachronisms are obvious, as when the Companions of the Prophet are supposed to have reverently listened to, memorized, and passed on warnings from the Prophet about errant theological views that they would never themselves hear expressed, nor any but the longest-lived of the generation after them; for example, ‘Every nation has Magians (majūs). The Magians of this community are those who say there is no predestination (qadar). Whoever of them dies, do not witness his funeral. Whoever of them falls ill, do not visit him. They are the party of the Antichrist.’5 Sometimes, it is contradictions among different versions of how something happened or what exactly was said that alert us to how little we can be sure of.

Lack of contemporary or even near-contemporary accounts from within the Islamic tradition is worsened by lack of contemporary accounts from outside it. Seventh-century Muslims did not have the sorts of institutions that generate and preserve quantities of documentation, but their neighbours were in only somewhat better condition. Seventh-century Byzantine history is also difficult to make out on account of imperial weakness. The Sasanian empire completely disappeared, and Persian letters did not revive until the later ninth century. We therefore have no Persian chronicles of the seventh and eighth centuries, either.

The authenticity of hadith remains an area of major disagreement in the academy. Briefly stated, my own position is that there are so many anachronisms and contradictions among them that attributions to the Prophet and his Companions in the seventh century are fairly certain to have originated in back projection of current ideas.6 In descriptions of the ninth century, when most of the earliest extant literature was written, there are many fewer anachronisms but enough contradictions to require that scholars remain on their guard. Still, it seems probable that across the eighth and ninth centuries, back projection of current ideas was accomplished within a narrowing scope, ever more by the adjustment of the existing record and ever less by the outright invention of new sayings.

The Muṣannafs of ʿAbd al-Razzāq and Ibn Abī Shaybah, our best sources for eighth-century debates about the law, are replete with successive topic headings ‘Those who said such-and-such about this problem’ and ‘Those who said the opposite’; for example, ‘those who discouraged talking while circumambulating the Kaʿbah’, then ‘those who permitted talking while circumambulating the Kaʿbah’.7 They often quote Companions on both sides of an issue, a clear sign of back projection, representing later ideas of what these eminent authorities must have said rather than accurate recollections of what they said. And then, especially in collections of the ninth century, we get contradictory accounts of what the Prophet said—again, clearly, the product of back projection, not continuous, accurate transmission.

In the field of qur’anic commentary, lack of knowledge about the early seventh century shows up in multiple successive glosses. For example, Q. 5:51 says, ‘Do not take the Jews and Christians as allies’, concerning which al-Māwardī successively quotes reports that it was occasioned by the conversion of two from Judaism, ʿUbādah ibn al-Ṣāmit and ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ubayy, who feared to abandon their old alliances; by Abū Lubābah ibn ʿAbd al-Mundhir, who had been given to decide what to do with the Banī Qurayẓah, a Jewish clan the Muslims had just subdued (he would order the men slaughtered, the women and children enslaved); or concerning two of the Muslims of Yathrib who were wavering just before the battle of Uḥud.8 It would be reckless to attribute any of these to continuous, accurate transmission. The upshot is that I trust eighth- and ninth-century quotations of the Prophet and his Companions to illustrate the views of eighth-and ninth-century Muslims but not to tell us what was said and thought in the seventh century.

The principal sources of this study: three genres

Our principal sources for the early history of piety are collections of short texts belonging to three traditions: adab (polite letters), Sufism, and hadith. The adab tradition aimed at forming character (corresponding to ancient paideía), with self-restraint an important constituent of the ideal. It was deliberately comprehensive, so that the gentleman knew something of everything. Naturally, that included something of religion. The section on sermons and renunciation (al-ma-wāʿiẓ wa-al-zuhd) makes up about 1 percent of al-ʿIqd al-farīd, for example, a monumental adab collection by the Andalusian Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (d. Cordova, 328/940). The adab tradition of renunciant literature is distinguished from the Sufi and hadith traditions by its attraction to elegant locutions (hence Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih’s pairing), more subtly to humour and miracles. From the ninth century C.E., the zuhd sections of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868−9), al-Bayān wa-al-tabyīn, and Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889?), ʿUyūn al-akhbār, are examples of this tradition, along with the many works of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 281/894), which apparently have the most overlap with the hadith tradition.9 For example, Ibn Qutaybah (whose section on renunciation and sermons makes up around 7 percent of ʿUyūn al-akhbār) reports that it is written in the Torah, by the inspiration of God,

O Mūsá ibn ʿImrān, master of Mount Lebanon (ṣāḥib jabal lubnān), you are my servant and I am your God the Judge (al-dayyān). Do not contemn the poor man (faqīr) or envy the rich man for something little (yasīr); at my recollection be fearful (khāshiʿan); at the recitation of my inspiration be obedient (ṭāʾiʿan); give me to hear the sweetness of the Torah with a voice that is sad (ḥazīn).10

Injunctions to renounce worldly goods, fear God, be obedient, and chant with a sad voice are commonplaces of renunciant literature, but they do not usually come with rhetorical flourishes like the rhyming prose in this work of adab.

The Sufi literary tradition probably begins with two collections of sayings and stories from the mid-tenth century, those of Ibn al-Aʿrābī (d. 340/952?) and Jaʿfar al-Khuldī (d. 348/959), mostly lost except in quotation. Both were members of al-Junayd’s circle in Baghdad at the beginning of the century. It is characterized first by a tendency to present renunciation as a precursor to Sufism (anticipating the standard view among historians today), also to project a mystical outlook onto early figures. The shorter Sufi biographical dictionary of al-Sulamī (d. Nishapur, 412/1021), for example, divides up its subjects among five generations of about twenty each. Only a minority of those in the first generation were ever called ‘Sufis’ in their lifetimes, and some of the earlier ones are often cited in renunciant literature.11 The principal disadvantage of the Sufi collections is just that their main interest is in the Sufis, not their precursors, so they present less information about eighth-century piety.

I recall no attempt to explain why Sufi authors of the 11th century and later preserved so much of the pre-Sufi, renunciant tradition despite its disagreeing with theirs. In part, presumably, the austerities and attitudes of eighth-century renunciants served to illustrate and inspire those of novices in their day. In part, presumably, it also served to justify odd behaviour of their own. For example, I have pointed to a short section that the early Sufi writer Khargūshī (d. 407/1016?) devotes to preparations for spending all night in worship.12 First is a story of the Companion ʿImrān ibn al-Ḥuṣayn, after whose death it transpired that he had been in the habit of dressing in wool and praying all night, then changing it for cotton at daybreak. Next is a story of ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s having a hairshirt and iron collar in a basket, which he would pull out and wear for the second half of the night, weeping and crying out in a special chamber till daybreak, then putting them away to go out. Finally, we hear of an anonymous Khurasani who would put on his best clothes at nightfall. His wife observed that other people would put on their best clothes in the morning, before they went to their places of trade (aswāq). He answered, ‘I am going to my place of trade’ and proceeded to his place of worship (miḥrāb). There are many stories in other sources establishing that secret worship, uncomfortable clothing, and nighttime devotions were common features of eighth-century devotional life, although the assignment of these particular devotions to a Companion and a caliph may be doubted.13 Khargūshī’s contemporary likewise performs devotions at night, not surprising in a Sufi. (The Sufis were known, after all, for little food, little sleep, and little speech.) But he dresses well for his devotions, in exact opposition to the earlier figures in this section. (Also, what he does in his fine clothes is presumably to praise God, not to abuse himself.) The stories of the two early figures justify social nonconformity in the recent one, however different many details.

If the first disadvantage of the Sufi collections is simply that they provide much more information about the Sufi period than what went on before, the second disadvantage is that they tend to look on the renunciants of the past as they look on practitioners of renunciation in their own day; that is, as persons doing something valuable as a first stage on the Sufi path. They may report behaviour different from that of the Sufis they most admire, as in the example from Khargūshī, but they will also be tempted to give the renunciants mystical objects. Sometimes, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Conventions
• Chapter 1: Basic problems
• Chapter 2: Physical austerities
• Chapter 3: Moral austerity
• Chapter 4: Supererogatory forms of required worship
• Chapter 5: New devotional forms
• Chapter 6: The Muslim holy man
• Chapter 7: Renunciants and politics
• Chapter 8: The economics of renunciation
• Chapter 9: Opposition to renunciation
• Chapter 10: The transition to Sufism
• Works cited
• Index