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The Barāhima: literary construct and historical reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Norman Calder
Norman Calder
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

John Wansbrough's rebukes to historians find their wittiest expression in his ‘Res ipsa loquitur’, an essay in which the nub of the problem seems to be this, that he thinks historians are writing novels and they think they are presenting the facts. Accused of engaging with language games, narrative structures and creative mimesis, a wise historian might decide to be flattered, and stick to his last. Wansbrough, after all, is also a historian: a typological assessment of his work will not (yet) find that he has slipped into the genre of novel, or theology. Even his extensive exercises in literary criticism are part of an effort to tell the history of a community. His objections are to the arbitrarily privileged position of ‘reality’, the tyranny of some narrative structures, the eschewal of interpretative versatility, and a lack of methodological and literary self-consciousness. Significant criticisms, but presented in a context which implies not only serious concern with but enjoyment of the achievement of these historians, novelists malgré eux.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 40 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1994

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References

1 cf. Wansbrough, , ‘Res ipsa loquitur: history and mimesis’ (Albert Einstein Mem rial Lecture, Israel Academy of Sciences, Jerusalem, 1987)9Google Scholar.

2 ibid., 23–5.

3 Stroumsa, Sarah, ‘The Barāhima in early Kalām’, JSAI, 6. 1985, 241.Google Scholar

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8 ibid., 8.

9 Ess, Van, ‘Ibn ar-Rewandī’, 21.Google Scholar

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34 Bazdawī's disassociation of the Barāhima from the notion of the denial of prophecy is so deliberate and so odd that it perhaps justifies the following speculation. One of his known sources was Abū Mutī' Makḥul al-Nasafī (an early proponent of the Hanafī-Māturīdī school of theology which was also Bazdawī's—see Bernand, M., ‘Le Kitāb al-Radd 'ala l-bida' d'Abū Mutī Makḥul al-Nasafī’, Annales Islamologiques, 16, 1980, 41–5).Google Scholar The unique manuscript of Nasafī's heresiographical work identifies, under the general heading of the Qadariyya, a group known as the Rāwandiyya. His discussion of that group is just sufficient to link them to the Barāhima, a point already noted by Stroumsa. While discussing this group Nasafī specifies that he has met and debated with the spokesman for the Harābidha of Balkh. But why should the Harābidha of Balkh—the word signals Zoroastrians—be cited in the context of a group who are otherwise identified as Rāwandiyya and Qadariyya? The manuscript (Oxford, Pococke 271) quite clearly reads harābidha, but, dated 847 (A.H.), it is a late exemplar. The possibility of a scribal malformation deriving from an original outline reading barāhima should perhaps be entertained; though nothing more for the moment than that. Entertaining the thought, one merely notes that the group actually existed in Balkh in the fourth century and had a spokesman {mutakallimuhum) who debated with Nasafī.

35 See n.34. I see no problems in the move from Ibrāhīm to either Ibrāhīmī or Barhamī (cf. Abu Ḥanīfa, Ḥanafī), and likewise no problems with the plural form Barāhima (cf. Ḥanafī, Aḥāifa).

36 Lawrence, , Shahrastānī, 90.Google Scholar The work referred to is by Abu '1-Ma'ālī, and can be dated to 485/1092. Later than Ibn Ḥazm, and roughly contemporaneous with Bazdawī, the work reflects what was clearly a widespread confusion.

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39 See Thomas, , Anti-Christian polemic, 9–30Google Scholar, for a lengthy analysis of Abū 'Īsā's possible religious affiliation; I do not myself find that the arguments that point to ‘distinctly Shrīte sympathies’ (p.22) are all that obvious.

40 See Calder, , ‘Tafsīr from Ṭabarī to Ibn Kathīr: problems in the description of a genre’, in Hawting, G. R. and Shareef, A.-K. A. (ed.), Approaches to the Qur՚ān (London, Routledge), 115–27.Google Scholar

41 This may be implied in the distinctly unclear set of arguments attributed to Abū 'Isā in Muhammad b. Muhammad Abū Manṣur al-Māturīdī, Kitāb al-Tawḥīd, ed. Kholeif, Fathalla (Beirut, 1970), 191–2Google Scholar. See Thomas's, interpretation, Anti-Christian polemic, 28 ad. n. 95Google Scholar.

42 Ibn al-Jawzī, Abū ՚l-Faraj ՙAbd al-Raḥmān, Talbīs Iblīs, ed. Isṭambulī, M. M. (Damascus, 1396/1976), 65 and 69–70Google Scholar. Cf. Kraus, , ‘Beiträge’, 342–59.Google Scholar

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