Month: December 2023

Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part II

On By JonathanIn Arabic, History, Islam, OttomanLeave a comment

This post continues my three-part exploration of a short Ottoman manuscript text, Risāla fī ithbāt ruʾyat al-nabī yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, by the otherwise obscure scholar Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī; if you have not already read Part I much of the following will not make sense, so start there then proceed to the following.

In Part I we were introduced to the manuscript as a codicological unit, and reviewed some of the paratextual aspects that appear in this handful of folios. In the remaining pages the same elements continue, plus some additional ones, which we’ll examine before plunging into the main topic of this post, the theological content and the way in which al-Kūmuljinawī drew upon existing authorities, how he might have gone about locating sources, and what we can gather about ‘canonical’ theological authorities in the eighteenth century Ottoman world. Let’s have a look at the second page in the treatise and note the paratextual elements visible there:

National_Library_of_Israel_Jerusalem_Israel_Ms._Yah._Ar._765.pdf_page_9

First, it’s important to pay attention to things that might otherwise fade into the background: for instance, this manuscript features a frame around the main text, a common feature but not a universal one, bespeaking the refined nature of the manuscript and its intended purpose as a presentation text. More mundanely, the frame neatly demarcates the main text from its marginal apparatus: in the case of this manuscript, primarily comments that are the functional equivalent of footnotes in modern book practice. In the example above, three annotations are visible, all examples of the minhu, ‘from him,’ type of note, placed there by the author of the text (at least in this case- in other cases the provenance of such notes can vary). The notes are linked to particular points in the main text via rubricated letters, very much akin to the footnote, although spatially they are placed more or less proximate to the linked section of main text, and hence in a variety of arrangements- an affordance of handwritten texts that is considerably more of a challenge for typography (though not insurmountable; not a few early Ottoman printed works featured sloping commentary text, though not at varying angles as here).

Nearly all of the minhu comments in this section, save a single (incorrect as it turns out!) translation of an obscure Arabic word into Ottoman Turkish, are in the same hand as the main text, which we’ve every reason to believe is the hand of the author (or, if not in his actual hand, the hand of a scribe to whom he dictated). For more on these notes and their relationship to authorship, manuscript transmission, and so forth, see A Tunç Şen’s ‘Authoring and Publishing in the Age of Manuscripts: the Columbia University Copy of an Ottoman Compendium of Sciences with Marginal Glossing.’

The other paratextual element to notice in this section of the text is the use of red overlining at various points: there is no single modern equivalent for this overlining, as at points it functions like italicizing or bolding, drawing attention to a particular point in the text; at other points it functions somewhat akin to quotation marks, or, at least, the first set of quotation marks. In the example above, the final line is largely overlined, marking out a particular ḥadīth visually from the rest of the text (in Persian texts from this period, switching from nasta’liq to naskh for ḥadīth and Qur’ān did similar visual denotation work). Taken together, all of these paratextual elements- dots, rubricated words and letters, and overlining- aid the reader in navigating and interpreting the text, knowing immediately where cited texts begin, or where important arguments or transitions are located. In my translation below I’ve largely ‘translated’ these elements into modern punctuation; on reflection I think it would be interesting to try and replicate them exactly, and will try to do in the final installment of this series.

I have aimed for a relatively literal translation, while trying to draw out some of the nuance in the usage of technical vocabulary, the most challenging aspect of this text to render in English. I initially tried a two-column display here, but found that it caused a serious error when displayed on the front page of the website, unfortunately, so I have had to drop the marginal notes down to the end of the translated section.

Know that it has been established by definite texts from among the sound and sunna-conforming aḥādith that our lord and master Muḥammad, God bless him and give him peace, is alive in his grave in body and soul, and that he has freedom of action and can go where he wills in the quarters of the earth and in the imaginal realm (al-malakūt). Verily, he—God bless him and give him peace—is [still] in his noble form in which he was before his death, nothing has been changed. And if he, God bless him and give him peace, is hidden from the sight of the likes of us, it is due to the relational distance between us and between his noble person, due to the turbidity of our lower selves due to the passions of the self and their immersion in the attachments to these trifling vain wordly babbles, just as the noble angels are hidden from us even as they are in our very midst.

Now, if God desires to honor anyone with this bodily miracle, He raises the veil and he is able to see him in his true form (this does not entail that the one who so sees him is in the ranks of the Companions in a sharī’a-accordant sense). The generative cause for the obtainment of this vision is his following the sunna in his deeds and words. The more that he strengthens his following [of the sunna] the more resilient will be his personal connection [with Muḥammad], and love [for him] will increase. This is the fundamental root of all union and separation—there are those people who are scarcely ever in a state of separation and those people who are scarcely ever in a state of union [marginal note a.].

It has been established by multiple avenues of transmission that many among the noble saints, God sanctify their inner secrets and pour out blessing upon our hearts from the orients of their lights, see him, upon him be peace and blessing, in waking life, and spiritually benefit from him—that is something that is known to the one who comes to the path of the saintly or who associates with them, such that it becomes akin to necessary knowledge.

Al-Ajhūrī (d. 1655) [marginal note b.] said, ‘The shaykh of our shaykhs, Aḥmad ibn Ḥajar al-Haythamī said that Ibn Abī Jamra [marginal note c.] said that al-Yāfi’ī and al-Bārazī and others from among the community of the saintly pious have said that they have seen the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, in waking life. And Abū Jamra mentioned that they experienced that in accordance with the transmitted saying, “The one who has seen me in a dream-vision, he will see me in waking life.” Truly, they have seen him in dreams and they have seen him afterwards in waking life, and have asked about various things and he has reported to them concerning those things, and it has turned out as he has related to them.’

The one who denies that, if he is from among those who cast calumny upon the miracles (karāmāt) of the saints—then we have nothing to say to such a one. Otherwise, this [vision] is from among [their miracles], when in the rending of [the] customary [nature of things] there is unveiled to them things in the world above and below.

Al-Fāsī (d. 1698) says in Maṭāli’ al-massarāt [his commentary (sharḥ) on] Dalā’il al-khayrāt: ‘Shaykh Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Suhaylī [also vocalized as al-Sahlī], God be pleased with him, has said: “In order to affix love of the Prophet in the soul, do not let his noble form be hidden from the eye of insight for a moment—it is the true vision because the vision of sight is due to his conveyance of the true essence of the one who sees to the eye [or essence] of insight, so that in the presence of insight there occurs comprehension regarding the true reality of what is conveyed to [sensory] sight from among the visible things. There is no doubt that ṣalāt upon the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, if one’s innate disposition (mashrab) is purified, will shed forth its lights and the lower self (nafs) will become a mirror for [Muḥammad’s] form, God bless him and give him peace, and will not be hidden from it. This is true knowledge in which there is no doubt. Continue reading “Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part II” →

new echota

On By JonathanIn Current Events, History, PoetryLeave a comment

the land lies blank but for the reconstructed
structures and the young trees lately planted, a few
faint lines of roads shallowly traced. I listen for
the principal people, my eyes closed, but all I hear
are the voices of my children, running over the sod.
why did this happen, they ask me after the park film
is over. I struggle to explain. I do not even myself know
the full why of these things. one day I will correct
the tense of their question, but not today.

when they built the great scar of a road
that runs along the Tennessee, they leveled
a great ancient mound, gashed open its sides and ground down
on its lowest levels, tore out the bones of the ancestors
and wheelbarrowed them to the bank,
dumped them in the river.

tonight I read of the armored bulldozers
working over the dwellings of the dead
in Jabaliya, Shajaiye, no respite even in the grave.
always the present tense. history does not repeat,
it is a long and bloody line, without stopping.

taphonomy

On By JonathanIn PoetryLeave a comment

let them dig up my bones laid in a red clay hole,
long centuries later when the world will have made
many more turnings, settled into some other transitory state.
let them take care, take heed of the trees
I instructed my children to plant, and the trees sprung from them,
their loam lying deep over the ground
that gathered me. still let them find me,
let them wonder what was and what may be
through the prism of old bones and scattered words,
they will slowly work their trowels down past the trace of ash
laid over my grave, time’s burnt horizons.
let them sift the soil above me, gather the carbonized seeds
that we scattered and sowed in the sheltering earth. let them
listen to the isotopes plied from my teeth, and trace out the map
in my enamel. watersheds and mountainsides, oxbows and
blue holes, slow turning rivers and hurrying streams
newly born. chart my migrations, decipher the places in my bones.
tell them that I meditated long on my own taphonomy.
and have them then place my bones back
to rest in their slumber, to wait to rise,
keeping the land company until that great and holy day.

Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part I

On By JonathanIn Arabic, History, Islam, Ottoman1 Comment

I’d like to try out something a bit different in this space (and no, I have not forgotten about the Ahl al-Kahf- I still have material related to their place in the history of Islamic devotion on tap to translate and share!): a folio by folio examination of a single manuscript text, incorporating a visual examination of the manuscript pages themselves, a translation of the text (and its paratextual apparatus), and an analysis of the text, situating it in its historical context and discussing the ways in which the particular form of the manuscript shaped the semantic content. There are whole historical worlds contained within what can at first glance seem a simple array of page and ink; there is more that can be descried beyond what I will outline here, in fact. But I hope that my stab at an annotated digital edition of sorts here will provide an idea of how one might go about exploring a manuscript text like this, and the possible panoramas the now tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of digitized Islamicate manuscripts can open up with a little attention and contextualization.

The text that I’ve chosen for this treatment, Risāla fī ithbāt ruʾyat al-nabī yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, is one that I came across, as so often happens, serendipitously while browsing for some other topic (though to be honest I cannot tell you what my original search query was!); the title looked interesting, as did the catalog description, so I gave it a look, realized it was the perfect length for this project and concerned a topic of no small interest to me, and so I downloaded the digitized manuscript and transcribed it. The primary goal of this treatise is a defense of the belief that Muḥammad would appear to the pious during waking life- that is, not in the course of a dream-vision while asleep (something which was, and is, widely accepted across Islam). But at a deeper level its author sought to defend one of the primary sources of saintly authority, communication in waking life with the Prophet, against detractors who sought to denigrate such routes of transmission and authority in favor of more strictly textual and ‘rational’ means.

Several things stand out about the manuscript itself: it is a presentation copy, despite being a short risāla it is alone between the covers, never having been, as was the fate of many such treatises, disaggregated and rebound into a larger majmū’a. However, as we will see, it circulated outside of its original destination, the Sublime Porte’s library, passing through at least two other owners in the course of the nineteenth century, before being purchased by Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951) and eventually deposited in the National Library of Israel, where it is now held under the shelfmark Ms. Yah. Ar. 765 (for an excellent exploration of Yahuda and of the process of manuscript collection in the 20th century, see Garrett Davidson, ‘On the History of the Princeton University Library Collection of Islamic Manuscripts‘). We are fortunate in this case to be able to trace the maker and the owners quite accurately, though much more opaque is the actual process whereby this manuscript made its way, ultimately, to our screens. But I’m getting ahead of myself- let’s briefly consider the nature of this risāla‘s content, its author, and then turn to the folios themselves. For this first installment we’ll look at the title page and the opening of the text, with additional pages appearing in the weeks to come.

The short and often polemical risāla- ‘epistle,’ ‘treatise,’ or ‘pamphlet’- was a staple of early modern Ottoman life; the role of these short texts has been extensively explored by Nir Shafir, who has an entire book coming out summer of next year on the topic: The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire. These sorts of little treatises are wonderful windows into the social, cultural, and religious currents of the Ottoman world, as they were written quite explicitly in response to ‘live’ debates and questions, and circulated far and wide, helped by their brevity and condensed arguments and citations. They were written by a wide range of individuals: in the case of this treatise, the author, one Sayyid Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī, i.e. Gümülcinevī, (d. 1788), was a member of the Ottoman ‘ulāmā’, Turkish-speaking but like many of his peers choosing, in this case at least, to write in Arabic (he also wrote at least one treatise mostly in an albeit very Arabicizing register of Ottoman Turkish, Risaletü’t-ta‘rîf fî tercemeti’l-Mevlidi’ş-şerîf). Beyond the fact that he was evidently from Gümülcine- modern Komotini in Greece- that he had trained in and was presumably employed as part of the Ottoman ‘ilmiyye system of learning and instruction, and died in Constantinople (he is evidently buried in the cemetery of Emîr Buhârî Tekkesi), there is little information available on his life. Notably, our manuscript has on the final, otherwise blank page, a note in Arabic reading: ‘Kūmuljina is a town (qaṣaba) in the district of Edirne,’ suggesting it was not exactly a household place-name. In addition to this treatise and his work on the Mevlid, he wrote some fairly popular treatises on Maturidi theology, suggesting overall the profile of a scholarly broadly in favor of theological investigation, popular devotional activity, and, as we will see in the treatise in question, the authority and charisma of the Friends of God. In short, he was a man of his age, with his finger to the pulse of many of the major controversies of the time. 

Let us turn to the title page of the work, which follows a well-crafted if plain cover with closing flap and a few blank pages:

National_Library_of_Israel_Jerusalem_Israel_Ms._Yah._Ar._765.pdf_page_7

We can immediately identify three features, common to perhaps the majority of Islamicate manuscripts, especially from this period (as in anything, conventions changed over time, and had regional variation). First, the title block itself, Risāla fī ruʾyat al-nabī ṣalā Allāh ta’alā ‘alīhi wa salam yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, neatly identifying the work, though not including the author’s name (probably because this was his own copy). Of rather more interest to us however are the three impressions of seals and the two ownership statements in the margins. Two of the three seals indicate prior possession by Ottoman sultans- Sultan Mustafa III (r. 1757 to 1774) at the top, and his successor Abdul Hamid I (r. 1774 to 1789). The third, smaller seal, dated 1805, is that of a later owner, Qārṣīzāda Muḥammad Jamālī (d. 1845).

Seals were a common feature in early modern Islamic manuscripts, and had a range of functions, not just indication of ownership or placement in a waqf (endowed foundation). Many, such as Sultan Mustafa III’s above, contained pious phrases, and might well have had a talismanic or prophylactic function (which other, ‘devotional’ seals lacking any ownership information certainly did). Ottoman sultanic seals are particularly striking visually and symbolically, dominated as they are by the intricate calligraphic personal emblem of the sultan, the tuǧra. For more on the question of seals in manuscripts, see Boris Liebrenz, ‘What’s in a Seal? Identification and Interpretation of ʿAbd al-Bāqī Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 971/1564) Seal and Its Function.’ Continue reading “Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part I” →