Category: Arabic

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

On By JonathanIn Arabic, History, Islam, Ottoman1 Comment

National_Library_of_Israel_Jerusalem_Israel_Ms._Yah._Ar._765.pdf_page_8

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.

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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” →

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:

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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” →

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:

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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” →

The Seven Sleepers In Islamicate Textuality: Complex Crossings

On By JonathanIn Arabic, East & West, History, Islam, Ottoman, Ottoman Turkish1 Comment

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During an Islamicate manuscripts reading group I am coordinating this semester, I was looking around in my archive of digitized manuscripts for some nice examples of marginal texts and came across the manuscript from which the above image comes, a majmū’a (a collective volume of many discrete texts between two covers) of various sorts of material, produced somewhere in the Turkish-speaking part of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century or so. As we read through some of the marginal comments surrounding this particular main text (a compilation of awrād, devotional litanies for use throughout the day), we came to the one in the top right corner of this page. Written in Ottoman Turkish, the note claims to relay information from the tafsīr of al-Nīsābūrī concerning the effaciousness of writing out the names of the Aṣhāb al-kahf, generally known as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in Christian tradition, which will ward off all manner of evil and bring much good. Briefly for those not familiar with the story, the ‘Companions of the Cave’/’Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’ were seven (though the number varies in pre-Islamic traditions, variance which is referenced- and not resolved- in the Qur’an) young men who fled from Roman persecution into a cave and were granted divine sleep for three hundred and nine years, awoke to find a totally transformed world in which Christianity was now dominant, disclosed themselves to the wondering population, then died. While the exact origin of the story and devotion to the Sleepers is now obscure, their hagiography circulated in numerous languages, from Sogdian to Old Irish, ending up in the Qur’an as a sizeable portion of Surat al-Kahf (‘the Cave’), alongside other material (including renderings of the names of the Sleepers, which are not given in the Qur’an).

In the marginal notation above only six of the human Sleepers’ names are given out of the usual Islamic seven (a number not however fixed by the Qur’an), plus that of their dog, Qiṭmīr, himself a de facto saint in Islamic tradition (his name has sometimes been treated as prophylactic aid on its own in fact). The notation is brief, but it got me thinking about the textual traces of the Seven Sleepers in the Islamicate world, which I’d like to explore a bit here. The use of names of the Seven Sleepers/Aṣhāb al-kahf provide a good view into the ways in which elements of ‘manuscript culture,’ of the textual materia of the book, crossed over into other media and spheres of life, parallel to the boundary-crossing nature of devotion to and the semantic traces of the Seven Sleepers themselves. As I discuss in a parallel but more philosophical and speculative essay on my Substack, there is a lot that we can continue to glean from this strange story and its incredible historical afterlives.

In Islamic contexts, devotion to the Seven Sleepers was expressed in multiple ways, but two stand out: one, the ‘finding’ and veneration of caves associated with them, to the point that caves reputed to have held the Sleepers in their several centuries of sacred slumber proliferated across the Islamicate world, from Turkestan to the Maghrib (with a similar proliferation present in Christian lands). But even more widespread were the names of the Sleepers: as with several other sites of Islamic devotion, in the general absence of pictorial icons, names and verbal descriptions served as de facto ‘icons’ reproducing the presence and the sacred power of holy figures. In the early modern Ottoman context, beyond Muhammad and his house, verbal ‘icons’ of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, of the Ahl al-Badr (fighters and martyrs in the Battle of Badr), and the Aṣhāb al-kahf were frequently reproduced within manuscripts and across other media, in some cases also embedded in other texts. There are no doubt many reasons for this focusing on names; in the case of the Companions/Sleepers, it is partially an inheritance of the late antique heritage, as visible in lines from the sixth century Syriac poet St. Jacob of Serug (translated here by Sebastian Brock):

There were there two wise men, sons of the leading men,
and they reckoned that the Lord would resurrect them,
so they made tablets of lead and placed them beside them,
on them they wrote down the names of the children of light…

Already there is a sense of their names having an important function, if not quite the prophylactic one they would gain in early modern Islam. By whatever routes however, those names- which as we will discuss below, were inherently distinctive just in their spelling- would be the locus of devotion and power for Islamic audiences, and traces of that devotion and power are readily visible in the manuscript tradition.

In the example below, a short poem (for those who do not read Arabic, it is the section marked with what look like red commas) off gives their names in succession and then details the particular potencies of each name when written down, either for a certain thing or upon certain media. The names of the Sleepers are written in red (fifth through seventh lines), the virtues of each then adumbrated in a series from ‘the first’ to ‘the seventh,’ the numbering also rubricated:

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Early modern Islamic audiences took such messages to heart: the names of the Companions do indeed appear in many, many contexts outside of manuscripts. Here are two of them: first, a prophylactic seal made in the eighteenth century Ottoman world (Met. 1983.135.11), the text consisting primarily of the Sleepers’ names intertwined; the stamp produced by this seal could have been applied to manuscripts, or perhaps for the production of stand-alone amulets, upon documents, and so forth (perhaps even on walls, one wonders). As with many such calligraphic amuletic devices, human legibility is not primary in terms of the effectiveness of the writing; and in this case, even a cursory look at the writing suggests whose names are given here:

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At the other end of portability (well, almost- obviously it was disassembled and moved at some point!) is this fireplace of Iznik tile (V&A 703-1891), built in 1731 for the home of someone quite well off indeed; the names of the Sleepers run across the very middle of the installation, the only instance of text in the entirety of the piece: Continue reading “The Seven Sleepers In Islamicate Textuality: Complex Crossings” →

A Day in the Life of an Early Modern North African Scholar-Farmer

On By JonathanIn Arabic, History, IslamLeave a comment

17th century Moroccan Tile V&A 1718-1892
17th century Tunisian tile with floral motifs (V&A 1718-1892)

[‘Alī bin Yaḥyā al-Salaksaynī al-Jādīrī, d. 1564] would spend his daytime fasting, teaching ‘ilm all day long, not stopping from his teaching except during the times of the ritual prayers and the call to prayer, and if he wanted to deliver the call to prayer a reciter who was with him reading out texts with him in his cell would accompany him on the way, coming and going, reading out loud, and he would give the call to prayer, and so maintain the duties of his position as imām. He was, God be pleased with him, extremely avid about teaching ‘ilm, and was an imām in the Ajādīr Masjid wherein he taught ‘ilm until late morning, then he depart and go down to his plot of land by Wādī al-Ṣafṣīf, which he cultivated by hoe. His students would go out with him, he teaching coming and going along the way. When he reached his plot of land he would get down off his mount, unload manure, remove the packsaddle from his mount, and tether her in place by his own hand, no one else being able to tether her but he. He would take up his hoe and set to cultivating his plot of land, the reciter still reading out loud, and [‘Alī bin Yaḥyā] giving exegesis until he was done with his work. Then he would remount his beast of burden, the reciter on his right or left—this was his custom!

When he was young and in the maktab [somewhat equivalent to an elementary school] he struggled with memorization, until one day a man came passing by and took from him his tablet and wrote upon it more than what the teacher had written out to be copied, which did not make the teacher happy, but he was unable to speak to the man about why he had written those things. A few days that man came to Sīdī ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā and commanded him to come out to him, which he did, and the two of them to the wādī named Būyaḍān. The man said to Sīdī ‘Alī, ‘Ride on my back!’ Then he forded him over the wādī and prayed for him- and from then on he was able to memorize [what was written on] his tablet.

Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Maryam, al-Bustān fī dhikr al-awliyā’ wa-al-ulamā’ bi-Tilimsān

*

When we read biographical accounts such as this, we can read them a bit against the grain in that we are as much interested in what would have been ordinary and uninteresting things to the original author(s) and readers as we are those matters that stood out at the time. In the first of these two vignettes, it is ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā’s sheer dedication to teaching that is of course exceptional: the man is kind of a machine! We can understand from this description that such dedication was unusual, which is not surprising (one also wonders if all teachers’ students would have been dedicated enough to follow behind their instructors’ donkeys out to the fields). For us in the present, who are far removed from early modern North Africa, one of the more interesting details is that ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā supplemented his income from teaching and work as an imām with small-scale farming, either on land he owned (which would be my guess) or which he held on lease. Either way, his farming- which based on the description here would no doubt have been a sort of market gardening, as we would say now- was something he himself did, every day at the same time, with his own hands, including dumping manure for compost.

Such bivocationalism comes as little surprise: indeed, probably the vast majority of pre-modern Islamic scholars (as well as scholars and associated identities in other traditions) had usually not one but multiple ‘side hustles,’ their incomes being derived from many sources patched together, often shifting over time. Farming or, better, market gardening was perhaps not the most frequent such supplementary (or in some cases, primary) source of their income, but it was not rare either, or at least that is my impression from years of reading biographical accounts of saints and scholars across the Islamicate. Because virtually all cities, with a couple of exceptions, in the premodern Islamicate world interfaced very directly with semi-rural or fully rural hinterlands, it was rarely very onerous for a scholar to make the walk from his madrasa or sufi zawiya to his field, and for rural sufis orchards and fields might be immediately adjacent to one’s home. There are a number of interesting take-aways from this situation, but one I want to suggest here and which I should at some point develop in a more formal manner is that the widespread existence of scholar-gardeners helps to explain the popularity and intended audiences of the Islamicate agronomy handbook tradition. To be sure, many of the users of manuals of filāḥa were no doubt estate owners who rarely or never got their own hands dirty; but I suspect not a few were like ‘Alī bin Yaḥyā, highly literate individuals who took up the hoe along with the pen. Continue reading “A Day in the Life of an Early Modern North African Scholar-Farmer” →

Ibn Zakrī Has to Get His Mother’s Permission

On By JonathanIn Arabic, History, IslamLeave a comment

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Detail of a woven curtain from Tunisia, 17th or 18th century, postdating the time of Ibn Zakrī but perhaps in the vein of the sort of work he might have undertaken as a weaver in 15th century Tlemcen (Cleveland Museum of Art 1916.1361)

From among them the sign of the age, the shaykh of verification and precision, sea of knowledge, imām of the folk of understanding, Abū al-‘Abbās Aḥmad bin Zakrī al-Tilimsānī (d. 1492)…. At the beginning of his career he worked in the craft of weaving [in Tlemcen], being an orphan without a father, sending to his mother [earnings] that which would help her to maintain her daily sustenance. Now, there arose a disputed question between Shaykh Abū ‘Abdallāh Muḥammad ibn al-‘Abbās (or Abū ‘Abdallāh Muḥammad bin al-Ḥasan, I am in doubt as to which of the two it was) and his students, and the tumult around it increased and the debated question became so well-known that it began to circulate among the ordinary people. But Ibn Zakrī said, ‘This question that is so occupying the fuqahā’ is really easy to untangle!’ The weavers said to him, ‘How is that?’ So he began to explain it to them. A student overheard him and was impressed by his words, so he related it to the shaykh and he was amazed, so that the shaykh went to the weaving workshop with his students and presented himself before Ibn Zakrī and listened to his words. Then the shaykh said: ‘The like of this one is fit for nothing save the pursuit of knowledge!’ But Ibn Zakrī replied, ‘It’s not possible for me to enter myself into something save with the sanction of my mother.’ So the shaykh went to his mother and said to her: ‘How many dirhams does your son give you each day?’ She told him, and he replied: ‘That much will come to you from my own wealth for as long as you live, God willing! I will ensure that your son can totally devote himself to training in knowledge.’ She replied, ‘What love and generosity oh sīdī!’

Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn b. Miṣbāḥ Ibn ‘Askar, Dawḥat al-nāshir li-maḥāsin man kāna bi al-Maghrib min mashāyikh al-qarn al-ʿāshir (Rabat: Dār al-Maghrib, 1977), 119-120.

Ibn Zakrī would go on to have an illustrious career as a scholar in many different fields, ranging from rhetoric to theology to sufism, and like many pious and ascetic ‘ālims of his day would be venerated as a saint during his lifetime and after his death.

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Of a Lion, Dog, Shayṭān, and Snake: Sīdī al-Ḥasan Abirkān of Tlemcen

On By JonathanIn Arabic, History1 Comment

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The walls of the village of Manṣūra outside of Tlemcen, 1870, by Sir John Baptist Joseph, 12th Baron Dormer (V&A SD.340)

That sainthood and social and cultural marginality have a tendency to go together, in Christian and Islamic traditions anyway, will hardly come as a surprise to anyone versed in such things: this is not the place for such speculations, but my personal working theory is that when we see Late Paleolithic burials of unusual individuals whose grave goods mark them as special, what we are seeing is a trace of something very much like sainthood. Regardless of the veracity of such speculatory reconstruction, it is quite clear from medieval and early modern hagiography in both Christian and Islamic traditions that while hardly a prerequisite for sanctity, difference, marginality, even outright societal opposition were all potential entryways into sainthood, not necessarily barriers. To discuss the reasons for this sustained relationship through time would require a book, or several of them (though, this is as good a place as any to mention that I have in various states of development not one but two such books in the offing, details to come!).

Instead, I want to introduce here an early modern- well, really, on that cusp between what we think of as medieval and as early modern- saint of the city of Tlemcen (in modern-day Algeria) who exemplifies inhabitation of both ‘centrality’ and ‘marginality,’ Sīdī al-Ḥasan Abirkān, as described by the late sixteenth century century hagiographer Ibn Maryam (d. 1605) in his al-Bustān fī dhikr al-awliyāʼ wa-al-ulamāʼ bi-Tilimsān. The saint’s name already identifies him as occupying two areas of identity sometimes indicative of marginality relative to scholarly urbane culture: ‘Abirkān’ is Kabyle Amazigh for ‘black’; J. M. Dallet’s dictionary gives the following definition: ‘Noir; noiraud; teint foncé, basané (nuance défavorable, dépréciative pour les personnes).’ And indeed Ibn Maryam, in giving Shaykh Abirkān’s genealogy, includes a couple of stories in which the shaykh is shown to be of a holy genealogy through his father and grandfather, without any trace of his ancestors’ apparent servility remaining. The suggestion of course is that the casual observer night take the shaykh’s skin color and evident ‘racial’ origin (not precisely the language a sixteenth century observer would have used, but close enough) as evidence of his inferiority. That this is the case is reinforced by a story that Ibn Maryam tells in which a young man who has come to Tlemcen to study initially disparages Shaykh Abirkān’s exoteric knowledge, but is urged to study with the shaykh in a dream, and in so doing finds the shaykh’s depth of knowledge confirmed. Overall, as is often the case in premodern Islamicate societies generally, racial origin and skin color were neither invisible nor were they totalizing facts about an individual; in Shaykh al-Ḥasan Abirkān’s case they were arguably part of his identity in a complex manner, both placing him somewhat at the margins but in a powerful manner, his being marked out as different both a feature of his sainthood as well as a sometime social stumbling block on the part of others.

That I have led with this particular saint’s racial background is very much indicative of our own contemporary concerns and interests; it is not addressed in Ibn Maryam’s lengthy treatment until well after many other stories and discussions. Instead, the picture that emerges, which I have tried to pick up in my translations below, is of a saint marked by both the scholarly and the, for lack of a better word, ludic. His encounters with animals stands out in this regard, with several of the stories below having to do with such interactions, all with creatures which were themselves generally seen as on the edge of human society if not an outright danger. I’ll discuss them a bit more after the text itself.

[Shaykh al-Sanūsī] used to say: ‘I have seen [many] shaykhs and saints but I have never seen the like of Sīdī al-Haṣan Abirkān!’ He was not absent from the presence of God for even an instant, and whenever he laughed his teeth would show. He was merciful towards the believers, solicitous towards them, rejoicing in their joy and feeling pain over evil inflicted on them. He had prayer beads from which he was rarely ever parted, for he was constant in remembrance of God. He was held in great esteem by the common and the elite alike. [He was] devoted to the Risālah of Ibn Abū Zayid, and whenever al-Sanūsī came to visit he smiled broadly and would open their conversation with theological discussion, [al-Sanūsī] saying to him, ‘God has made you to be among the God-fearing imāms.’ He was graced with many miracles and wonders, among them one that al-Sanūsī and his brother Sīdī ‘Alī described:

He was performing ablutions out in the wild desert one day when an enormous lion approached and knelt down over [Sīdī Abirkān’s] shoe. When he was finished with his ablutions, he turned to the lion and said to him three times, “May God, the most beautiful of creators, bless you!” The lion bowed his head to the earth as if were bashful, then arose and went on his way.’

Also, that which Shaykh al-Sanūsī mentioned, saying, ‘The illustrious saint Sīdī Sa’īd bin ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd al-‘Aṣinūnī related to me at his home in the Ouarsenis Mountains—he was from among [Sīdī Abirkān’s] oldest companions—saying, “I visited Sīdī al-Ḥasan one hot day and found him in great fatigue, sweat running down him, and he said, ‘Do you know why I’m so exhausted?’ I replied, ‘No, Sīdī!’ He said, ‘Yesterday I was sitting in this spot when Shayṭān entered in a particular form so I stood up to him and he fled before me, so I followed him and recited the call to prayer—he did not stop running from me, and he farted, as is mentioned in the ḥadīth, until he was hidden from me. And now I am just returned from pursuing him!’”’

Al-Sanūsī also related that when [Sīdī Abirkān] returned from the East, he came across a Friday market village which had fallen into ruin, though it had once been inhabited by his forefathers. He decamped to Tlemcen but his thought reverted to returning to that village and revitalizing what had fallen into decay. He said: ‘So I went out to it and sat down contemplating its traces, how ruin had overtaken it and its inhabitants compelled to depart, when a dog came up to me and sat down next to me, looking sad and dejected like me. I thought to myself, “Will this village ever be inhabited again or not?” Then the dog lifted his head and said in clear speech, “[Not] until the day they are resurrected,” that is, it will never be inhabited again. When I heard what he had said to me I returned to Tlemcen.’ Continue reading “Of a Lion, Dog, Shayṭān, and Snake: Sīdī al-Ḥasan Abirkān of Tlemcen” →

Discovering the Nature of True Alchemy

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

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An illustration from a text on aspects of literal alchemy (and quite a few other topics), Kitāb al-Burhān fī asrār ‘ilm al-mīzān, copied in the Maghrib in the mid to late 19th century (National Library of Medicine MS A 7)

From the medieval period down to the dawn of modernity, sufi saints and the discipline of alchemy have had a long and often fraught relationship with one another, reflective of the sometimes positive, sometimes ambiguous position alchemy held in Islamicate societies (and elsewhere in the medieval and early modern world). To contend that a given sufi shaykh was an adept of the alchemical arts, or of other occult sciences for that matter, could be a form of praise or condemnation or caution. The delightful story I’ve translated below represents an interesting juncture in the relationship of alchemy and sufi saint: it comes from a source into which I’ve dipped several times now, the hagiography of the nineteenth century Ottoman Syrian saint Shaykh Muḥammad al-Jsir written by his deeply learned (in both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ arts and sciences) son Ḥusayn. The context and ultimate message- the true alchemy is the practice of piety- would have been familiar to generations of sufi devotees before the nineteenth century, just as many a previous shaykh no doubt had to field similar requests for instruction in the arts of material transfiguration of the elements. There is however here I think a more marked sense of irony, the implication that alchemy isn’t just suspect for its occupation of the fringes of proper belief and practice but also that it is really no longer imaginable as a pursuit- which might have been true for Ḥusayn al-Jisr but was not necessarily true for all of his contemporaries, as the copying and presumable use of the treatise illustrated above would indicate. The subtext might well be that while alchemy is outmoded, the true and ultimately alchemy is not, and that devotional piety remains capable of transforming human beings in ways that neither the ancestor of chemistry nor other systems of knowledge could ever hope to do.

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And from that is what my aforementioned uncle related to me also: he said: my barber, Shaykh Ḥusayn ‘Alwān used to say to me, ‘Your brother Shaykh Muḥammad knows how to do alchemy, so you ought to get him to teach you its art!’ So I went to your father one day looking vexed, and he said to me: ‘What’s with you O brother?’ I replied, ‘You know how to perform alchemy, so what’s keeping you from teaching it to me, your own brother?’ The shaykh laughed and said to me, ‘Oh Muṣṭafā, I’d like to spend the next three days alone at home in order to prepare an alchemical course—it’s your duty to turn away from me anyone who seeks me out.’ So I said yes, after which he stayed in his home three days, in the uppermost floor, and I made sure that anyone who came to see him was kept away from the shaykh, turning him away politely. And as the shaykh had withdrawn your mother into seclusion [with him] too I did not see her either, as she stayed with him in the upper floor. It was impossible that I go up and see what was going on; however, I asked a servant girl who was serving him and said to her, ‘What is my brother doing?’ She replied, ‘For a while he prays, then he recites taṣliya, then he reads books.’ I replied, ‘He’s not lighting any fire or asking for any specific amounts of substances from you?’ She said, ‘No.’ I was amazed at that and said to myself, ‘How does he perform this alchemy?’ All that was from the vain thoughts of youth.

Then, after the three days were up, I was in the market when the shaykh sent for me. I came quickly and found him sitting in the lower part of the house in the iwān, a satchel of riyāls in front of him. He looked at me and said, ‘O my brother, take them!’ So I took those riyāls, imagining that they were the product of alchemy, it not occurring to me due to the intensity of my happiness that alchemy doesn’t produce minted coin but rather bullion, or so they allege. Then the shaykh grabbed my ear and turned it, saying to me, ‘You and your barber ‘Alwān are nuts! O brother, our alchemy is blessing upon the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace! Don’t listen to the words of the like of this fellow!’ I paid heed to these words and learned that the shaykh did not perform alchemy at all as I had initially supposed, but rather had taken advantage of the secluded retreat of those days in order to be away from people and devoted to worshiping his Lord.

Ḥusayn al-Jisr, Kitāb nuzhat al-fikr fī manāqib mawlānā al-ʻārif billāh taʻālá quṭb zamānih wa-ghawth awānih al-Shaykh Muḥammad al-Jisr (Beirut: al-Maṭbaʻah al-Adabīyah, 1888), 132-133.

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Fifteenth Century Text Searching with Aḥmad al-Wansharīsī

On By JonathanIn Arabic, History, IslamLeave a comment

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Other Maghribī scholarly textual practices on display: a page with marginalia from the grammatical text Awḍāḥ al-masālik fī sharḥ Alfiyyat Ibn Mālik, copied c. 1700; note the prominently sized words used in dividing the text and making more conventional forms of browsing/searching easier. (BnF, Département des manuscrits, Arabe 7323)
As anyone with even passing familiarity with Islamic history will probably be aware, Muslim scholars of the medieval and early modern periods produced a lot of texts, not a few of them of truly prodigious length. Many of these texts, across genres, included numerous citations of previous authors, of material from various hadith collections, even long passages or parts of entire books effectively ‘recycled,’ with or without attribution. The question naturally presents itself: how did these scholars manage with so many texts and such long texts? How did they find material, remember or record it, and then cite or otherwise reuse it? The enormity of such tasks is compounded by the fact that their textual worlds were entirely of the handwritten variety, not only predating digital texts and their relative ease of searching and copying, but also predating typographic print and things like comprehensives indices.

There is no single answer to the ‘how’ of pre-modern Muslim scholars (and others operating in similar circumstances both in the Islamicate world and beyond) and their textual activities. Methods of work varied from region to region, from period to period, and from scholar to scholar, dependent upon available infrastructure, scholarly goals, attitudes towards opinion and transmission, and so on. The story that I’ve translated here, of the text search and composition practice of one luminary of the late medieval into early modern Maghrib, Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā al-Wansharīsī (c. 1430-1508), is only one possible approach, and probably not a terribly common one- otherwise it likely would not have been recorded! Aḥmad al-Wansharīsī is best known for his massive compilation of fatwas, al-Mi’yār al-mu’rib wa al-jāmi’ al-mughrib, though he produced other works as well dealing with questions of Islamic law. Here is how the biographer Ibn ‘Askar in his Dawḥat al-nāshir describes al-Wansharīsī’s daily work:

More than one person I met related to me that all of his books were loose-leaf, not bound into volumes, and that he had an empty lot which he walked to every day, having loaded a donkey with the pages of books, selecting two or three pages from each book. When he entered his lot he stripped down to only a woolen qashāba which he bound with a leather belt, his head uncovered (and he was bald). He arranged the loose pages one-by-one into two rows, stuck his inkwell into his belt, and, with his pen in one hand and a piece of paper in the other, he would walk between the two rows, writing down transmitted material from each page. Then when he was finished procuring material relevant to the given topic, he would write down what he had thought and what had been made manifest to him in terms of rebuttal and acceptance. This was his practice.

Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn b. Miṣbāḥ Ibn ‘Askar, Dawḥat al-nāshir li-maḥāsin man kāna bi al-Maghrib min mashāyikh al-qarn al-ʿāshir (Rabat: Dār al-Maghrib, 1977), 47-48

Two things are especially striking about this account: one, Ibn ‘Askar’s language stresses the sheer physicality of such work- the pages must be selected (presumably each volume had either a container or was bound with twine, akin to chancery practices in some places), then loaded onto the donkey, then taken to al-Wansharīsī’s plot of ground (perhaps enclosed- the word can also mean a courtyard but clearly it was some ways distant from his house), then unloaded and distributed in the two rows on the ground. Only then could the proper scholarly work begin- that is, after al-Wansharīsī switched to his ‘work clothes,’ wearing nothing but a basic garment, a qashāba (usually known as a djellaba in Morocco, and still a common outer garment in North Africa). The image is one of a manual laborer, divested of the clothing typical of an esteemed scholar. Where the modern scholar carries out text search with a few key strokes, we see al-Wansharīsī literally pacing the ground examining the pages he has dis-aggregated, gathering material, which he can then synthesize with his own thoughts and composition.

Yet there is something very familiar to us in the digital age about al-Wansharīsī’s methods. Instead of slowly reading through a given book, taking notes or otherwise relishing its contents, his purpose here is to find and use material, information, perhaps scanning the pages for keywords or indications of particular passages he has in mind or is looking for. Presumably- it is a bit unclear to me- he had some sort of selection process beforehand, perhaps based upon whatever subject or topic he was tackling that day. The pages are to no small degree decontextualized, they become repositories of information al-Wansharīsī needs, not simply for recopying or regurgitation but some kind of critical engagement. Al-Wansharīsī modified the usual technology of texts in his world by unbinding (or never binding at all, as the case may be) the books in his library, which allowed him to do a kind of early text search, walking up and down among the pages scanning for the material he needed. No doubt other scholars did the same, driven by exigencies of their disciplines and social contexts. The nature of the book changed, too, well before the transition from manuscript to print. Continue reading “Fifteenth Century Text Searching with Aḥmad al-Wansharīsī” →

A Basket of Halwa Sent by God

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

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Window with colored panes (not really visible in this view) from a house in 17th century Ottoman Damascus (Met. 93.26.15)

Dear reader, I’m aiming to have some more substantial posts here soon- our family has been in the midst of a move and the post-move work of getting our new house and budding (hopefully!) small farm up and running, while I have also been busy with my day-job work, elements of which I will cover in more detail on my Substack newsletter. In sharp contrast to all that busyness, I’ve translated the following story, which is related by Ḥusayn al-Jisr in his hagiography of his saintly father; it does not however directly relate to his father’s life, but is instead precipitated by an episode in the shaykh’s career that involved a large basket filled with tobacco and money, the latter fulfilling the need of one of the shaykh’s disciples. Ḥusayn al-Jisr does not tell us from whence he got this story, but it is part of a long tradition of sufi tales having to do with tawakkul, which might best be translated as ‘extreme trust in God.’ It’s also really quite funny, and could have come from a collection of popular stories, ḥikāyāt. Otherwise it is pretty self-explanatory- enjoy!

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I have seen a similar story in a book concerning what happened to one of the people of pious trust in God. A man from among them was continuously present in a mosque when another man who prayed there noticed him, seeing that he did not leave the mosque nor did he have a job, so he came to him and said, ‘O brother, how do you manage to eat?’ He replied, ‘God, exalted is He, provides for me.’ The man replied, ‘You speak truthfully, but still God makes a means for everything—is He going to send your sustenance down in a basket?’ The man who put all his trust in God replied, ‘Verily God is able to do that.’

So the man invited him to his house, making him to believe that he wanted to honor him, but instead he seized hold of him and put him down in a well that belonged to him and left him there, saying to him, ‘Now we’ll see whether God sends a basket down to you or not!’ Then he went away to his shop stall. Now it so happened that the man’s wife and her maidservant really wanted some halwa, so they made some and were about to eat it when the man, her husband, knocked at the door, and the two were afraid of his displeasure over their making halwa, so they put it in a basket and in their alarm dropped it down in the well. The man who trusted in God who was down in the well took hold of it and began eating from its contents. The wife of the man opened the door and he came in to attend to some business of his, then he remembered the man who was in the well so he went to the brim of the well and called out to him, ‘Hey so-and-so, has God sent you a basket down yet?’ The man replied, ‘Yes, He sent me some halwa in a basket, in spite of you!’ So he took him out of the well, and, things becoming clear to him took admonition from this happening, honored the man and sought from him his forgiveness.

Ḥusayn al-Jisr, Kitāb nuzhat al-fikr fī manāqib mawlānā al-ʻārif billāh taʻālá quṭb zamānih wa-ghawth awānih al-Shaykh Muḥammad al-Jisr (Beirut: al-Maṭbaʻah al-Adabīyah, 1888), 132-133.

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