Premodern Islam Research Articles

Imam Al-Nawawi: Latar Pemikiran dan Pengaruhnya (Imam al-Nawawi: Historical Context of His Thought and Influence)

This paper discusses classical and contemporary works that analysed the influential works of Imam al-Nawawi, focusing on his principles works of hadith and law, and its traditional authority and impact in premodern Islam. Its primary aim is to provide an analysis of the historical background of Imam al-Nawawi in light of the historical works of his contemporaries and later biographers. Al-Nawawi was hailed as the mainstay (‘umda) of the madhhab in the 7th century AD, that his creative works of hadith (prophetic tradition) and law continued to be referred to and commented upon in the uninterrupted line of traditional scholarship in Islamic intellectual history, particularly in the majority Sunnis and Shafiite school of law. The study is based on qualitative method in the form of documentative and library research. It used historical, descriptive, analytical and comparative approaches to survey and analyse various documents and data related to the topic, in order to make accurate finding and conclusion. The finding shows that al-Nawawi’s traditional works had profoundly influence the theological current of Sunni Islam and its authority and traditional orthodoxy while his masterful juridical method, opinion and ruling had decisively impacted the historical work of Shafiite school of law. It has momentously contributed to the rigorous tradition of scholarly works produced in the Shafiite school, that mainly derived from his major works and commentary as the school’s leading groundwork and classic masterpiece representing its traditional opinion and ruling. Thanks to his outstanding commentary and dynamic interpretation of the shariah, that offered significance method in giving preference (tarjih) in determining the preferred ruling between legal text, forthcoming from his independent reasoning and high level of ijtihad.

Belief as Status: Premodern Islamic Law, Duties, and the Martyr Conundrum

Abstract The normative universe of the premodern Islamic legal tradition revolves around duties. These duties are determined by an individual’s status both as an autonomous entity and as part of the collective. The duties one owes and those that one is owed, are primarily constructed around belief. Belief, and its absence, function as the primary vehicles for affirming or denying an individual’s place within the moral community. In the jurists discourse on warfare, during the fifth ah/eleventh ce and sixth ah/twelfth ce centuries, we find an illustrative example of how belief dictates the duties that must be performed. Who is obligated to fight, who must be fought, and what obligations are owed in death all depend, though not exclusively, on the belief status of the relevant actors. In the process jurists constructed status hierarchies based on belief and, as in the case of martyrs, negotiated a delicate balance between preserving the sacredness of belief status and accounting for the pragmatic requirements of the battlefield.

Current debates and emerging trends in the history of science in premodern Islamicate societies.

This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. The contributions reflect upon some of the challenges that have historically constrained the subfield, how they have sought to overcome them, and what they see as some of the more productive and fruitful turns the field has taken and/or should take in the future. A central trend in all contributions is how they seek to confront the combined weight of colonialism, Orientalism, and the teleological history of science that continues to haunt contemporary discussions in both academia and the general public with regards to science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. Without diminishing the pioneering achievements of the generations of historians who have preceded us, and upon whose work we continue to rely, this combined weight has tended a) to marginalize the study of occult sciences in Islamicate societies; b) to emphasize investigations of content from an etic perspective of how we got to the present, which is primarily seen as how the scientific content is connected to the rise of modern science in Europe; and c) to concomitantly marginalize the study of science in post-1200 Islamicate societies, particularly those with little to no connection to the rise of "Western" science. The contributions build upon conversations that took place among participants in December 2019 at a workshop at New York University (NYU), Abu Dhabi Institute in New York City, funded by a grant from NYU Abu Dhabi.

Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making. By Rachel M. Scott

In Recasting Islamic Law, Rachel M. Scott draws from a rich body of literature, including classical Islamic texts, to show “the relationship of the religious to the political” in Egyptian constitutionalism (p. 2). Venturing into both historical and contemporary debates on sharia and its relationship to state law, the book shows how norms deriving from pre-modern Islam have been given a different form to fulfill the needs of a modern state. When it comes specifically to the Egyptian Constitution, Islamic legal norms are recast as part of national culture and identity, thus serving not only a religious purpose but also a civic one, as the glue of the national fabric. This dynamic also emerges from the case studies of women’s and non-Muslims’ constitutional rights. In the author’s view, the redefinition of sharia is common to both non-Islamist and Islamist forces, and this makes the traditional polarization between them an inadequate lens to assess the Egyptian constitution making.

Navigating Consent: On Women’s Sexual Agency in the Premodern Islamic West

Navigating Consent: On Women’s Sexual Agency in the Premodern Islamic West

Musical Instruments in Samāʿ Literature: al-Udfuwī’s Kitāb al-Imtāʿ bi-aḥkām as-samāʿ

Abstract Samāʿ literature reveals a tension in premodern Islamicate societies. While musical practices were ubiquitous and practiced in many contexts, Islamic legal tradition regarded them with suspicion. Musical instruments occupied a central place in these discussions, perhaps, because as physical objects associated with what is otherwise in the non-tangible domain of sound they were seen as the quintessential manifestation of music. Udfuwī’s Imtāʿ is one of the most comprehensive works in the genre, and its chapter on instruments is unique in both the length and place it ascribes to percussion instruments. Udfuwī argues for their permissibility and stresses their social importance throughout history.

Pre-Modern Islam: The Practice of Tasawwuf and its Influence in the Spiritual and Literary Cultures

The modern narrative of Islam is one which differs from the pre-colonial narrative. The practice of Tasawwuf is a sacred one and not many people are aware of the actual core and values of it. However, its concepts of Tawheed, Ihsan, and Tahqiq have been present since pre-colonial South Asian Islam. This paper focuses on pre-modern South Asian Islamic traditions along with the influence of Tasawwuf during the Mughal era and their evolution with time by comparing them to global Islamic traditions while outlining some similarities as well by exploring the literary culture. This paper argues how Islam now is a rigid system but that had not always been the case and also rebuttals the claims of western historians.

The Churning in the Flogging of ʿUmayra: Or, Towards a History of Masturbation in Premodern Islamic Law

Abstract This article traces juristic debates on the ethics of masturbation from the formative period of Islamic law to the early nineteenth century. I document the appearance of discussions of the practice in the earliest extant sources and explore how masturbation figures in the Sunnī and Šīʿī ḥadīṯ corpora with attention to regional patterns of dissemination. I also address the terminology used by jurists and point to material in encyclopaedias, adab and other works where relevant, and include some comparative observations from other cultures. My overall findings include the fact of clear regional patterns of opinion across the amṣār (garrison cities) in the early period and an unmistakable increase in “conservatism” on sexual matters with the consolidation of the legal schools (maḏāhib), as well as a clear distinction between Sunnī and Šīʿī views on the practice. I conclude by attempting to explain the relatively low visibility of masturbation in legal sources and to account for the doctrinal shift more generally.

Innovation in premodern islam: between non-religion, irreligion and the secular

Abstract Premodern Muslim juristic discussions on religious innovation (bidʿa) frequently invoke a distinction between religion and its other: the irreligious and/or non-religious secular. This demarcation disrupts accounts of the unavailability of the secular beyond the precincts of the modern West, even as the imperfect translation of premodern Islamic non-religion as secular discloses the ethnocentric provincialism of the master categories of European thought that continue to facilitate European colonialism. An alternative, premodern, Islamic account of the secular is found in the thought of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), al-Shāṭibī (d. 790/1388) and their intergenerational interlocutors who summon an opaque and shifting, yet real, boundary between religion and the irreligious and/or non-religious secular, which they posit as distinct, oppositional, yet also co-constitutive terms. The distinctions between religion and the secular, for these scholars, arise out of their (i) purposive account of divine law, (ii) compartmentalization of religious ‘worship’ from secular ‘custom’, and (iii) creation of distinct orders of religious and secular spatio-temporality.

Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought, written by Luke B. Yarbrough

Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought, written by Luke B. Yarbrough

Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought By Luke Yarbrough

<i>Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought</i> By <scp>Luke Yarbrough</scp>

Future Avenues in the Study of Islamic Law

In his essay, Najam Haider calls for “more cohesive and integrated scholarly engagement with the pre-modern Islamicate world.” To that end, the author urges scholars to creatively engage and treat legal texts as valuable sources for understanding the social and political predicates of Islamic societies. For example, tracing the creation and migration of legal texts across regions can yield valuable insights into multiple ideas and ideologies across the pre-modern Islamic world, as a part of a larger intertextual world where scholars study all actors in Islamic history as interacting with, complementing, and arguing against one another.

Religion, war, and peace in premodern Islamicate polities and the Christian West

The plural Islams and the various Christianities deriving from late Antique Catholicism constitute two families of monotheisms whose relation to armed violence and to peace can be compared over the longue durée. In both, war and peace coexist as values, with the sense however that there can be a corrupting bad peace and a wicked bad war. Both—albeit through different media—produced norms governing warfare. For both, there is a strong correlation between holy war and societal reform. In both, the potential to sacralize a space that then has to be defended (New Jerusalems or second Hejaz) figures prominently. In both, radical warfare, reform, and purge of one’s own group can be triggered by apocalyptic or eschatological expectations (with figures such as a person anticipating typologically the return of the vengeful Christ, a last world emperor, a mujaddid, or a Mahdī). While this contribution focuses mainly on the pre-modern world, it ends on an attempt to relate the current war waged by Boko Haram to this past.

How were young Muslim minds shaped? A critical study of the kuttāb in Medieval Islam

AbstractIn medieval Islamic times and afterwards, the kuttāb was a modest institution for elementary education, with most emphasis being placed on learning the Qurʾān by heart―hence a ‘Qurʾānic school’ in English. Thus far, the topic of the kuttāb has been addressed by only a few modern works, leaving inadequately researched a number of critical related issues. This article is an attempt to give insights into the intellectual development of Muslim pedagogy in such archetypal primary schools. It looks into the teaching programmes and methods adopted for that intellectual preparation as well as their assumptions, rationales, implications, and consequences. The kuttāb's objectives are usually thought of as being universally identical, to help in the formation of a good Muslim. The picture, however, was more multifaceted, and the objectives, as well as means of their realisation, were moulded based on what a ‘good Muslim’ would mean according to those in command. Administrating the katātīb was a source, and a symptom, of competitive rivalry between the different intellectual tendencies in medieval Islam, who jostled for control over these critically significant institutions. The article thus delves into the intellectual, cultural, and socio-economic contexts in which primary education materialised and was practiced in pre-modern Islam.

De-Universalising Male Normativity: Feminist Methodologies for Studying Masculinity in Premodern Islamic Ethics Texts

Abstract Historically, texts of the Islamic intellectual tradition characterised the ideal Muslim by exclusively referring to men and their concerns. Only recently have scholars of Islam begun to engage in critical study of the category of masculinity. This essay focuses on theories and methodologies of studying masculinity and manhood in premodern Islamic ethics. I demonstrate the gains to be made from gender-critical study of masculinity by way of consolidating approaches scholars have taken and arguing for feminist reasons and methodologies for unpacking male normativity. Because premodern Islamic ethics texts across multiple genres of the scriptural and intellectual tradition presume male readers and subjects, we must take male normativity, the assumption that Muslim ethics is for men, male bodies and practiced by persons marked by maleness, as our critical starting point.

Qur’ānic imaginations in the making: New religious movements in Mughal‐era Islam

AbstractIn the study of premodern Islam, is it possible to draw fruitfully upon the theories and methods that characterize the study of new religious movements? This article examines three approaches to the Qur’ān in the sixteenth‐century Mughal Empire: the Qur’ānic imitation of Bāyazīd Anṣārī, the lipogramatic exegesis of Fayżī, and the moral commentary of Badā’ūnī. These works reveal the innovation, contingency, and “newness” of Islamic Qur’ānic traditions in the Mughal domain. Though they disagreed vehemently, Bāyazīd, Fayżī, and Badā’ūnī all approached the Qur’ān as a revelation that is emergent and ongoing rather than fixed in the historical past. This article argues that the study of premodern Mughal religion – and the history of Islam more generally – benefits from heuristically understanding Islamic texts as part of ever‐emergent “new religious movements” rather than as examples of a single transhistorical religion.

Documentary Constellations in Late-Mamlūk Cairo: Property- andWaqf-Related Archiving on the Eve of the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt

AbstractThe scholarly discussion of archives in the premodern Islamicate world is beset by problematic generalisations. Such a view to some degree stems from a top-down view of archiving that focuses on state archives at the expense of practices of archiving occurring outside a chancery context. This article challenges the assumptions that support an enduring narrative of paucity, by examining non-chancery archival practices in Mamlūk Cairo on the eve of the Ottoman conquest in 922/1517. In doing this, it looks to some of the surviving original documentary material: legal property deeds with connections towaqfendowments whose potential to shed light on archival history has largely remained untapped. Surviving in large numbers in modern collections in Cairo, these documents contain abundant traces of their own archival histories. By presenting a micro-scale case study drawn from this material, this article shows the energetic and meticulous documentary and archival practices that surrounded property transactions in late-Mamlūk Cairo.

Princesses Born to Concubines: A First Visit to the Women of the Abbasid Household in Late Medieval Cairo

Abstract This article presents a study of the women of the Abbasid household in 8th-/14th- and 9th-/15th-century Cairo. Following a discussion of the size and growth of the Abbasid family, the article juxtaposes a late fourteenth-century marriage document, which extolls the virtues of unions made with the caliph’s family, against the historical record of marriages made by Abbasid and non-Abbasid spouses in search of social capital. The study seeks to understand the meaning attached to marriages made with Abbasid family members, and the social advantages the caliphal family hoped to gain in return. By thus reconsidering the role of Abbasid concubines and princesses, we challenge preconceived notions about the agency and mobility of Abbasid family members in late medieval Cairo and demonstrate their freedom of movement in pursuing valuable marriage connections. The article is thus a contribution to broader understandings of notable women in premodern Islamicate societies.

Luke B. Yarbrough, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought

Luke B. Yarbrough, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought

Ritual Time, Civil Time, and Cosmic Time: Three Co-Existing Temporalities in Premodern Islamic Society

Abstract Most studies on time in the premodern Islamic world have focused on philosophical and theological aspects of time. The present article concentrates on time practices in daily life. Iconic for Muslim time practices are the five daily prayers, the weekly Friday prayer, the yearly fasting in the month of Ramaḍān, and the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. They all have the character of a time-out from everyday routine and are well characterized by the term “ritual time.” For work, business and administration, the day and night are divided into twelve hours each, the seasonal hours. It is appropriate to call that “civil time.” Besides these two forms of time practices, a third is based on astrological concepts. The daily changing aspects which the moon forms with the sun and the planets are taken as favorable or unfavorable signs for particular actions, and enabled the individual to organize his or her life in accordance with the heavenly bodies. It seems apt to call that “cosmic time.”