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:

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” →