This post concludes my series introducing, discussing, and rendering in translation a short Arabic treatise by an eighteenth century Ottoman scholar, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī. In this final section he brings together additional authorities to defend the validity of waking visions of Muḥammad and their fundamental reality (the exact ontological and metaphysical contours of which remain somewhat mysterious however, no doubt deliberately). The authorities upon which he draws will be familiar to anyone with broad familiarity with medieval and early modern Islam, I suspect, with a couple of individuals of a more Ottoman range. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, a late Mamluk era polymath who seems to have written on quite literally everything (including not one but three sex manuals!), is perhaps unsurprisingly a key figure, particularly since he wrote an entire treatise on this controversy. Today we tend to think of figures like al-Suyūṭī primarily as scholarly authorities, speaking from a position secured by their extensive learning and command of the canonical Islamic disciplines; however, as is visible here, al-Suyūṭī was seen as much if not more as a man of personal sanctity, his authority proceeding from his special connections with God and with Muḥammad, including through waking visions. The distinction between the authority of the faqīh, the jurist, and that of the sufi saint was not a sharp dichotomy, or even a dichotomy at all, as the example of al-Suyūṭī in particular illustrates.

It is certainly the case, as al-Kūmuljinawī argued in a previous section, that saintly authority and its validity are assumed here: the witness and experience of the saints form a central pillar of al-Kūmuljinawī’s argument, while vice versa the validity of communication with Muḥammad served as a support to sainthood. At the same time al-Kūmuljinawī draws upon the most broadly ecumenical sources and authorities as well, most obviously ḥadīth, but also other basically canonical texts, such as the famous devotional poem Qaṣīdat al-Burda, the ‘Poem of the Mantle,’ which by the eighteenth century was all but globally ubiquitous among Muslims of many different persuasions and affiliations. All in all, al-Kūmuljinawī situated himself within a much larger universe of texts and ideas and debates, drawing upon a wide range of texts from the late medieval period forward. How he would have accessed these texts is an interesting question, and one I cannot answer here: it is possible that he had something like library access, with a number of possibilities by this period of Ottoman history; he almost certainly would have maintained some kind of personal notebook or curated majmū’a, material copied and collected from libraries, endowed collections, the libraries of friends, books found in the market, and so forth.

Sections of this last portion proved the most challenging to translate, primarily because- if I may be a bit blunt- our author’s Arabic was not always quite up to speed, but I can hardly be one to judge; if I were to try and write a treatise of any sort in Arabic it would probably have similar issues! His relation of the ḥadīth in the first section here is marked by the only significant misspellings and suggestions of lack of full comprehension, though it is not too surprising given that hadith tend to retain quite archaic usages, challenging any readers no matter their linguistic background (and thus giving rise to commentaries to tease out the meanings of often quite opaque texts).

Finally, it is worth noting here how al-Kūmuljinawī sees himself as an author- or not as an author as the case may be. The word he uses for himself is best translated in this instance as ‘compiler,’ literally one who brings things together, and this is an apt description, as his primary mode of work here is locating appropriate sources, finding the relevant material within them, and then judiciously excerpting from those sources to make his arguments. The marginal materials, the minhu notes, can be seen as supplementing his in-text strategy, charting the lines and sources of authority and expanding upon them.

I hope this short series has proven helpful and hopefully interesting, both in terms of the content- about which there is much more that can be said (and interested readers should consult among other things the articles in the recent open-source volume The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam, Volume 3)- and the codicological and related matters.

The firmly established one al-Jalāl al-Suyūṭī says in Tanwīr al-ḥalak fī ruʾyat al-Nabī wa-al-malak: ‘Vision of his noble essence in body and spirit is not impossible, because he—God bless him and give him peace—and all of the prophets—God’s blessing and His peace be upon our Prophet and upon them all—are alive, their noble spirits returning to them after they die, and they are given leave to go forth from their tombs and leave to act in the upper and lower realms.’ And he mentions the ḥadīth of Ibn ’Abbās: ‘We traveled between Mecca and Medina with the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, and we passed by a valley. [Muḥammad] said, “What valley is this?” They replied, “Wādī al-Azraq.” He said, “It is as if I am gazing at [the prophet] Yūnus, wearing [a jubba of] wool, passing by this valley upon a red she-camel, saying the talbīya.’ Then he said, “It is as if I am gazing at my brother Mūsā, placing his fingers in his ears, supplicating God, saying the talbīya, passing by this valley.” Then [al-Suyūṭī] said, ‘It is not improbable that they make the ḥajj, pray, and draw close [to God] as they are able. And if they are in the other world they are [also] in this one which is the abode of action until its term is concluded, and it is succeeded by the other world, which is the abode of reward, in which action ceases.’ He then quotes Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ [author of the famous devotional work al-Shifā’], God be merciful to him: ‘“Now, if the prophets, upon whom be blessing and peace, separate from their tombs and make the ḥajj in accordance with what he related, then how improbable is our Prophet’s, upon him be peace and blessing, separation from his noble tomb?”’

However many senseless prattlers have denied such, someone who argues thus, saying that the rudiments of intellect understand its rottenness, as his coming out of the tomb and going about in the markets meeting people and people meeting him necessitates that his tomb be empty of his holy body, nothing of it remaining therein, such that people are visiting the tomb along and bestowing peace upon mere absence. But al-Ghazālī indicates the rebuttal of such an idea in that the one who sees [Muḥammad] in a dream vision sees his reality (ḥaqīqa), then sees him thus in waking life, but the attribution of some necessity [entailing the previous argument] to that [state] is the essence of ignorance and obduracy. The proof of that is that the waking vision of him, God bless him and give him peace, does not require his going out from his tomb is because from among the miracles of the saints is that God, exalted is He, rends for them the veils, such that nothing of reason, sharī’a, or custom gainsays that the saint, whether he be in the furthest east or west, be granted by God the grace of having no obstructing veil between himself and between the noble essence of [Muḥammad], it still in its place in the noble grave, nor is there any need that He make these veils like the glass which assimilates itself to what is behind it. And then it is possible that the saint’s gaze falls upon him, upon him be peace—and we know that he, God bless him and give him peace, is alive in his grave, praying, and if one is blessed with the befalling of his sight upon him then there is no reason to preclude that it be in relation to his doings and speech and asking about things (and none of this goes against sharī’a or reason), and that he would answer him is also correct. So it is [discussed] in my commentary on al-Qārī and [in] ibn Ḥajar on Shamā’il al-Tirmidhī. Continue reading “Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part III” →