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Ballaghanā ʿan an-Nabī: early Basran and Omani Ibāḍī understandings of sunna and siyar, āthār and nasab
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2020
Abstract
This paper explores the usages of four concepts – sunna, sīra, āthār, and nasab – mainly in early Ibāḍī epistles, but also in other types of Ibāḍī literature, to examine how early Ibāḍīs understood the legacy of the Prophet Muḥammad, and their relation to that legacy. It argues that before the sixth/twelfth century a notion of communal pedigree occupied pride of place in early Ibāḍī conceptualizations of legality and legitimacy. Thus, Ibāḍī sunna was “communal sunna”. The accumulated weight of Ibāḍī tradition – what is known as āthār in Ibāḍī literature – operated authoritatively as a counterpart to sunna; and the Ibāḍī siyar tradition did not focus on the Prophet exclusively, but rather described the scholarly community as an imagined whole. Moreover, Ibāḍīs explicitly articulated their communal pedigree in “teacher lines” (called nasab al-dīn or nasab al-islām) in Omani literature, and through the structure of their ṭabaqāt/siyar works in North Africa. Appreciating the importance of this communal pedigree, and the nexus of concepts through which it was articulated, helps us to understand the relative lack of emphasis placed on collecting and documenting ḥadīth (Ibāḍīs employ ḥadīth, but they did not use isnāds, nor did they appear to have a ḥadīth collection until the sixth/twelfth century), as well as the general absence of Prophetic biography among them (which also does not appear until the sixth/twelfth century).
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- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 83 , Issue 3 , October 2020 , pp. 437 - 448
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- Copyright © SOAS University of London, 2020
References
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17 al-Rabīʿ b. Ḥabīb, al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, 36 (no. 42),
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27 Al-Salimi and Madelung, Ibāḍī Texts from the 2nd/8th Century, 65–6, 70.
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29 Dutton, “ʿAmal v ḥadīth in Islamic law”, 16.
30 See also Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, 62 (quoting Ibn Qāsim using āthār and sunna of the Companions interchangeably).
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36 Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Kindī, Bayān al-sharʽ (Muscat: Wizārat al-Turāth al-Qawmī wa'l-Thaqāfa, 1984), 3: 270–71.
37 See Adam Gaiser, Shurāt Legends, Ibāḍī Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism, and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 126–8.
38 Ennāmī, Studies in Ibāḍism, 26.
39 See Crone and Zimmerman, The Epistle of Sālim Ibn Dhakwān, 57–99.
40 See Kāshif, Sayyida Ismāʿīl, al-Siyar wa'l-jawabāt li-ʿulamā’ wa ā’immat ʿUman (Muscat: Wizārat al-Turāth al-Qawmī wa'l-Thaqāfa, 1986), 2: 314–5.
41 Ibn Sallām, Kitāb Ibn Sallām, 79 ff., 89 ff., 91 ff. The North African Ibāḍī concept of silsilat al-dīn requires more research to determine when it came into use, and to what extent it overlaps with the Omani Ibāḍī notion of nasab al-dīn. My thanks to my anonymous reviewer for pointing out this term, and apologies for not being able to pursue it further.
42 On the North African Ibāḍī siyar tradition, see Love, Paul M., Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 The five principal North African Ibāḍī siyar are: Abū Zakariyya Yaḥyā b. Abī Bakr al-Warjlānī's Kitāb siyar al-ā’imma wa akhbārihim (Algiers: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1979), which was written after 504/1111; Abū al-Rabīʿ Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Salām b. Ḥassān al-Wisyānī's (d. sixth/twelfth century) Siyar al-Wisyānī (Muscat: Wizārat al-Turāth al-Qawmī wa'l-Thaqāfa, 2009), on which see Love, Ibadi Muslims of North Africa, 55; Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Saʿīd al-Darjīnī's (d. c. 670/1272) Kitāb ṭabaqāt al-mashāyikh bi'l-Maghrib (Algiers: Alger-Constantine, n.d.); Abū al-Faḍl/al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm al-Barrādī's (d. 2nd half of eighth/fourteenth century) al-Jawāhir al-muntaqāt fī itmām mā akhalla bihi kitāb al-ṭabaqāt (Cairo: Lithograph, 1885); and Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Saʿīd al-Shammākhī's (d. 928/1522) Kitāb al-siyar (Beirut: Dār al-Madār al-Islāmī, 2009).
44 Love, Ibadi Muslims of North Africa, 3.
45 Abū Zakariyya, Kitāb siyar al-ā’imma wa akhbārihim, 82–4.
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55 Ibāḍīs may indeed be preserving earlier conventions in the details of their practice, such as the holding of one's hands at one's sides during prayer (i.e. sadl al-yadayn), but that is not to imply that the larger conceptual apparatus that buoys Ibāḍī approaches to sunna and siyar is itself preserved from the earliest periods. See also Dutton, “ʿAmal v ḥadīth in Islamic law”, 38.
56 Stodolsky, A New Historical Model and Periodization, 45.