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: Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/690653

1545-6978

Sean W. Anthony,

Medieval and Classical Philosophy

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsKitāb al-Taḥrīsh. By Ḍirār ibn ʿAmr al-Ghaṭafānī. Edited by Hüseyin Hansu and Mehmet Kaskin. Istanbul: Shirkat Dār al-Irshād and Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2014. Pp. 153. $5 (paperback).Sean W. AnthonySean W. AnthonyThe Ohio State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe volume under review is the first published edition of the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh, a short treatise attributed to the famous second/eighth-century Muslim theologian and qāḍī Abū ʿAmr Ḍirār ibn ʿAmr al-Ghaṭafānī (ca. ah 110–200/ad 728–815). Stated plainly, the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh is the earliest stand-alone work written by a theologian associated with the Muʿtazila known to have survived, and as such, the wider availability of the work to scholars promises to lead to new insights with ramifications not just for the history of early Muslim theological rationalism but also for the intellectual history of the Islamic world in the second/eighth century as a whole. The book is a volume bound to pique the curiosity of historians of early Islamic intellectual history even beyond specialists in kalām.Prior to the publication of this work, Ḍirār has been known through secondary accounts of his life and thought as a prolific disciple of the Baṣran founder of Muʿtazilism, Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ (d. 131/749), who gained notoriety for his idiosyncratic views on topics debated among the kalām-masters of his age (e.g., humankind’s freewill, the creation of human acts, the composition of atoms, the nature of accidents, etc.). Despite the book’s preoccupation with a panoply of sectarian doctrines—represented by the likes of the Murjiʾa, the Khārijites, the Shiʿa/Rāfiḍa, and the Ḥashwiyya (viz., the ḥadīth folk) to just name of few—it is not really a work of heresiography nor even a work of kalām per se.1 The Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh is a treatise on the use and authority of prophetic traditions, or ḥadīth, and an intriguing witness to the rapid proliferation of ḥadīth in the second/eighth century and the debates over their status as normative sources for religious belief and practice.The title of the book, Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh, means simply The Book of Instigation. The famous bookseller of Baghdād, Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 380/990), knows the work under a slightly longer title, Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh wal- ighrāʾ, which one might translate as On Instigation and Provocation. Whatever title one chooses, the keyword in the title remains taḥrīsh, for it alludes to a famous ḥadīth in which the Prophet “forbade instigating fights between beasts (nahā ʿan al-taḥrīsh bayna l-bahāʾim)” (p. 41). Ḍirār is not interested in denouncing animal cruelty; rather, he compares the taḥrīsh proscribed by the Prophet to a new sort of taḥrīsh afflicting the Muslim community that has led to the division of community into hostile sectarian factions: debates over religious doctrine. “Every religious community (umma) with a prophet has its own ‘Samaritan’ (sāmirī) to lead it into perdition and its own ‘Paul’ to seduce it like Paul the Christian and Sāmirī the Jew” (p. 33), Ḍirār warns, alluding to the Qurʾanic “Samaritan” who instigates the Israelites to worship the golden calf (Q. Ṭāhā 20:85) and to a non-Qurʾanic story in which the apostle Paul dupes the disciples into corrupting the gospel of Jesus.2 Muḥammad’s community, Ḍirār asserts, finds itself in a similar moment of crisis after its prophet’s death as the communities of Moses and Jesus: like their predecessors, they seek refuge in the learning of the erudite scholars in their midst only to be led into further dissension and strife.Throughout the work, Ḍirār lists a given controversy and then provides the texts of ḥadīth each faction cites to support their position, as he regards these ḥadīth as instrumental in the instigation of communal strife. Although this is a short treatise, the sheer range of topics covered is astounding. Mainstays of theological disputation appear, such as the conflict over the succession to the Prophet, the nature of God’s attributes, and freewill versus predestination. Also appearing in the work are disagreements over mundane topics, such as traders and those who barter with people and lend them money (al-tujjār wa-man yuʿāmilu l-nās wayuqriḍuhum, p. 152), poverty and the poor (al-faqr wa-l-fuqarāʾ, p. 102), the merits of Syria (faḍīlat arḍ al-Shām, p. 120), singing and songstresses (al-ghināʾ wa-l-mughanniyāt, p. 133), and even anal sex with women (nikāḥ al-nisāʾ fī adbārihim, p. 131). The work thus lends itself to broad historical investigation as it samples a surprisingly broad array of views on sundry topics, and there is much new material here. Notable as well is the work’s early attestation to a broad array of religious and theological terminology (e.g., ṣāḥib sunna wa-jamāʿa on p. 72, badāʾ on p. 106), the continued relevance of debates over the validity of Ibn Masʿūd’s reading of the Qurʾān (pp. 107–108), as well as early Christian polemic against the Qurʾanic depiction of Paradise (p. 82).Ḍirār’s treatise amounts to an early Muʿtazilī attempt to systematically engage the problems of epistemology and religious authority engendered by the proliferation of ḥadīth. Throughout the Taḥrīsh, Ḍirār shows deference to the previous position of his teacher, Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ, that only ḥadīth boasting broad consensus—“al-akhbār al-mujtamaʿ ʿalayhā” is the term he uses (p. 41, l. 1)—carry weight, inasmuch as he employs ḥadīth to bolster his arguments, but he clearly adopts a more radical position than Wāṣil. Due to the rife manipulation of ḥadīth reports in factional polemics, Ḍirār regards them as all but useless as evidence in religious disputation and appeals to the unanimity of the communal consensus (ijmāʿ/ijtimāʿ al-umma) as the only possible arbiter of religious authority (pp. 144–45). The Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh stands as an important forerunner of later Muʿtazilī attempts to address this issue, such as the Kitāb al- Nakth by Abū Isḥāq al-Naẓẓām (d. 221/836) and the Qabūl al-akhbār wa-maʿrifat al-rijāl of Abū l-Qāsim al-Balkhī (d. 319/913).3Hüseyin Hansu and Mehmet Kaskin had to rely on a unique sixth/twelfth-century manuscript discovered in the Arabic manuscript collection of the Friday mosque in Shahāra, Yemen. The Arabic edition has also been published with a Turkish translation by the same editors under the title Kitâbu’t-Tahrîş: İlk Dönem Siyasî ve İtikâdî İhtilâflarında Hadîs Kullanımı by the publisher Litera Yayıncılık in 2014. As I am unqualified to attest to the quality of the Turkish translation, the present review focuses on the standalone Arabic edition.In as much as the volume itself neglects to recount the history of the text’s discovery, a short overview here is in order. The first scholar to note the existence of this Yemeni manuscript was ʿAbd al-Salām al-Wajīh, whose prodigious catalog of the Arabic manuscripts held in the privately owned libraries of Yemen has facilitated the discovery of a wealth of new manuscripts.4 However, Hassan Ansari was the first scholar to write about the significance of the find and to examine the contents of the manuscript in any significant detail. Ansari not only built the first credible case for the authenticity of the treatise ascribed to Ḍirār, but he also discovered that the treatise was bound together with yet another significant find for early Muʿtazilism: the Kitāb al-Maqālāt of the Muʿtazilī scholar Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 303/916). This second work remains unpublished, but Ansari and Wilferd Madelung claim to have an edition currently in preparation.5Hansu and Kaskin provide the edition with a brief biography of Ḍirār ibn ʿAmr, a description of the manuscript, and an introduction that convincingly argues for the authenticity of its attribution to Ḍirār. The argument relies, firstly, on the obvious: the title page of the manuscript clearly attributes the work to Ḍirār in large, red lettering. The mention of the title and its attribution to Ḍirār in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist bolster the credibility of the claim. The editors strengthen attribution of the text to Ḍirār beyond reasonable doubt by cataloging important citations and references to the work in later literature.One of the earliest authors to mention Ḍirār’s treatise by name is the third/ninth-century heretic Ibn al-Rāwandī (d. 298/910–11 or 301/913–14). This mention survives, albeit indirectly, in an excerpt from Ibn al-Rāwandī’s Kitāb Faḍīḥat al-Muʿtazila, which is partially preserved in its refutation, the Kitāb al-Intiṣār of Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Khayyāṭ (ca. 220–300/835–913). In the Intiṣār, al-Khayyāt quotes Ibn al-Rawāndī accurately describing the contents of the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh in a passage aimed to refute the Muʿtazilite al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–69). Ibn al-Rāwandī writes, “And do not forget the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh by Ḍirār and all traditions it contains in which each sect attributes its beliefs to the Prophet (mā fīhi min riwāyat kull firqatin li-mā hiya ʿalayhi ʿan al-nabī).”6One of the most important insights that Hansu and Kaskin bring in their introduction is into the reception of the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh outside Muʿtazilī circles. The editors forcefully argue that, although Ḍirār and his Taḥrīsh are not mentioned by name, large sections of the Taʾwīl mukhtalif al-ḥadīth by Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889) directly quote Ḍirār’s treatise. Although Hansu and Kaskin’s discussion extensively documents Ibn Qutayba’s quotation of Ḍirār’s work (pp. 18–22), it neglects to entertain the possibility that Ibn Qutayba quotes a different work of Ḍirār on ḥadīth, which Ibn al-Nadīm lists in his Fihrist under the title Kitāb Tanāquḍ al-ḥadīth (On Contradictions between Ḥadīth). Nevertheless, they do convincingly show that Ḍirār and his works on ḥadīth, and not just al-Naẓẓām and his Kitāb al-Nakth, were a key target of Ibn Qutayba’s treatise.Perhaps the most important attestation to the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh comes from the Kitāb al-Maqālāt of the Muʿtazilite scholar Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 303/916), bound within the same manuscript compilation as the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh. The copyist of the K. al-Taḥrīsh, in fact, cites a couple lines about Ḍirār and his treatise from the Maqālāt on the title page of the manuscript. Hansu and Kaskin note this but do not pursue the issue any further. This is a shame since the passage from al-Jubbāʾī’s Maqālāt is actually quite illuminating.Prima facie the passage from Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī’s Maqālāt is simply a story about how Ḍirār came to join the ranks of the Muʿtazila in Baṣra after being a staunch anti-Shiʿite (nāṣibī) and is related on the authority of a certain Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. Ḍirār al-Ḍirārī (fols. 134a.1–135a.-5). Al-Jubbāʿī’s authority for the account is called al-Ḍirārī and, therefore, may be an adherent of Ḍirār’s school. The story claims that the first dispute about the createdness of the Qurʾān (awwal mā hadatha l-jidāl fī khalq al-qurān) transpired when ʿAlī al-Uswārī, a disciple of Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ, left his native Baṣra to debate Ḍirār b. ʿAmr in Kūfa after Ḍirār’s renown as a debater and author of numerous treatises had already spread far and wide. The debate between Ḍirār and ʿAlī al-Uswārī is not actually about the createdness of the Qurʾān as much as it is about freewill and predestination. By the end of the debate, Ḍirār repents of his belief in predestination (al-ijbār) and embraces “belief in divine justice” (al-qawl bi-l-ʿadl)—that is, the capacity of humankind to act without God’s predetermination—and joins the ranks of the Muʿtazila.Shocked by his conversion, Ḍirār’s Kūfan brethren ask him what is to be done about the many books he had authored beforehand and that are now spread across the lands. To this, Ḍirār simply replies that they must investigate the truth just as he has in order to arrive at the truth regardless of what he may have written before. Then “a shaykh of the ignorant ḥadīth folk” (shaykh min al-ḥashwiyya al-juhhāl) accuses Ḍirār of having abandoned “the religion of the adherents of the sunna and community” (dīn ahl al-sunna wa-l jamā ʿa) for “the doctrine of infidel Muʿtazilī heretics” (qawl al-muʿtazila al-zanādiqa al-kuffār) (fol. 135a, ll. 2–3). While at first, Ḍirār takes the accusation seriously, after realizing the man’s stupidity he mocks the old shaykh in a farcical debate that dupes the fool into denying not only the createdness of the Qurʾān, but also that Jesus was a descendant of Adam and that ʿUmar was not a prophet.The conversion story is more than a mere biographical curiosity. It also explicitly claims that the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh was written in Kūfa before Ḍirār debated ʿAlī al-Uswārī and thus prior to his embrace of Muʿtazilism (fol. 134b, qad kāna waḍaʿa fī tilka l-ayyām kitāb al-taḥrīsh). In my estimation, one should be wary of taking this just-so story too seriously. The story seems all too eager to rehabilitate Ḍirār in Muʿtazilī circles by disassociating him from accusations that he affirmed divine predestination. Scholars have long known that Ḍirār’s views on humankind’s freewill put him at odds with later Muʿtazila who closely defend Abū Hudhayl’s “five fundamentals” of belief. Ḍirār’s view that God creates humankind’s actions before a person chooses to perform and generate his actions was rejected and regarded as incompatible with the mainstream Muʿtazilī view that the sole agent in humankind’s actions is the agent himself. In Hansu and Kaskin’s short biography of Ḍirār (pp. 8–9), they provide a long quotation about Ḍirār from the Kitāb al-Maqālāt of Abū l-Qāsim al-Kaʿbī al-Balkhī (d. 319/931), only known to be extant in a single, inaccessible manuscript kept in the private library of Professor Rājiḥ ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kurdī of the University of Jordan. In this passage al-Balkhī counts Ḍirār not among the Muʿtazila but rather al-Mujbira, those who affirmed divine predestination, and thus reflects this very tendency of later Muʿtazila to exclude Ḍirār from their ranks. Aḥmad ibn Ḍirār’s story rebuts this tendency unequivocally by attributing this view to Ḍirār’s pre-Muʿtazilite phase—a claim directly at odds, for example, with the assertion of al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār that Ḍirār’s deviation from the Muʿtazila came after he had joined Wāṣil’s circle.7Aḥmad b. Ḍirār’s story also clearly aims to assign the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh to the pre-Muʿtazilite phase of Ḍirār’s life as well. But is this claim credible? Prior to joining the Baṣran circle of Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ, Ḍirār worked as a judge (qāḍī) in Kūfa, but when exactly he left Kūfa is unclear. The move must have transpired prior to 131/749, the year his teacher Wāṣil died. Wāṣil’s death falls a year before the Abbasids achieved their final victory and toppled the Umayyads in 132/750, so if the work really did belong to Ḍirār’s pre-Mutʿtazilite phase, he must have written it prior to 132/750, too.Yet, the contents of Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh exclude this possibility categorically. The Taḥrīsh exhibits considerable knowledge of the propaganda behind the Abbasid revolution: many passages show a direct, and even immediate, awareness of the Hāshimid daʿwa that brought the Abbasids to power. Ḍirār speaks of the controversy over “the Easterners” (ahl al-mashriq) and the apocalyptic propaganda disseminated regarding “the black banners,” and he also responds to inquiries about the permissibility of “joining the fighting ranks of those who don the black” (al-dīwān maʿa l-musawwida wa-l-dukhūl maʿahum) (pp. 121–23). These are just the sort of things one would expect a Kūfan qāḍī to encounter during the heyday of the Hāshimid daʿwa, whose very clandestine headquarters was in Kūfa, so one might chalk up these passages to knowledge of the daʿwa prior to its eventual triumph. However, the strongest evidence that Ḍirār composed his Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh after 132/750 comes from an incidental comment he makes in the section discussing ḥadīth forged by the pro-ʿUthmān faction. Those who trade in these ḥadīth, Ḍirār claims, “are the followers of the Umayyad tyrants and the tyrants themselves” (atbāʿ mulūk banī Umayya wa-mulūkuhum). He then comments, “they defamed all those who pray towards Mecca and oppressed them until God wiped out every trace of them and those who donned the black [the Abbasids] slaughtered them” (akalū ahl al-qibla fasta ʿbadūhum ḥattā abāda ’Llāhu khuḍarāʾahum waqattalahum al-musawwida) (p. 46). The claim made by Aḥmad b. Ḍirār about Ḍirār’s conversion would place the composition of the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh prior to Wāṣil’s death and, therefore, during the twilight of the Umayyad caliphate. That timeframe is simply impossible and must be rejected.Yet, the story still leads one to wonder just how controversial the Kitab al-Taḥrīsh became and why Aḥmad b. Ḍirār’s tendentious account sought to disassociate the work from the Muʿtazila at all. By 170/786, Ḍirār had moved to Baghdād to join the disputation circles patronized by the Barmakid viziers. While one may expect this to have been a great boon to Ḍirār, life in Baghdād proved hazardous for him despite the Barmakids’ patronage. The opposition he met from the ḥadīth folk in Baghdād nearly cost him his life. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) boasted that he was among those scholars who testified against Ḍirār before the qāḍī Saʿīd ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jumaḥī (d. 174/790 or 176/792), who declared Ḍirār an apostate and heretic who could be killed on sight. Ibn Ḥanbal’s grandfather Ḥanbal also claimed to have happened upon Ḍirār in Baghdād sometime before, and though at the time Ḍirār was an invalid afflicted with palsy (kāna mushawwahan wa-bihi fālij), he describes how a group of ḥadīth folk trounced him and beat him to a pulp for denying the reality of Heaven and Hell. After the death sentence issued by Saʿīd ibn ʿAbd al- Raḥmān, Ḍirār passed the rest of his days in hiding under the protection of Yaḥyā ibn Khālid al-Barmakī.8 One wonders whether the attacks against ḥadīth—and the ḥadīth folk in particular—that one finds in the Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh factored into these threats and provide some insight into why Aḥmad ibn Ḍirār’s story about Ḍirār’s conversion to Muʿtazilism tries to disassociate the work from the Muʿtazila. As Hansu and Kaskin discovered, the work was clearly a prominent target for rebuttal in Ibn Qutayba’s Taʾwīl mukhtalif al-ḥadīth.Hansu and Kaskin’s edition lacks an index and offers a minimal critical apparatus, but it does provide extensive cross-references to the ḥadīth cited in the work where such references could be found. This last contribution proves to be particularly important, as Ḍirār includes not a single chain of transmission (isnād) for the ḥadīth he cites in the Taḥrīsh. The Arabic text does occasionally suffer from errors and therefore merits careful scrutiny when reading. Orthographic irregularities and inconsistences are common (e.g., the Arabic Murjiʾa is often printed as المرجية and المرجئة), though not exceedingly distracting. There are also instances where the text of manuscript has been misread, or vowels and diacritics are inserted that actually mar and distort rather than elucidate the text.The following errata caught my eye: for وكان عيسى لغير رشده, read وكان عيسى لغير رشدةٍ (“Jesus was a bastard,” p. 42, l. -1); for أن أبا بكر وعمر ظلمًا وضربًا فاطمة, read أنّ أبا بكر وعمر ظَلَمَا وضَرَبَا (“Abū Bakr and ʿUmar defrauded and struck Fātima,” p. 52, l. 5); for البشارة بالنبي مَنْ بحيرا, read البشارة بالنبي مِنْ بحيرا (“the annunciation of the Prophet from the monk Baḥīrā,” p. 53, l. 9); for بذلك صفي الدين من كل دنس وعلا كلَّ قذر , read صُفِّي الدينُ من كلّ دنسٍ وعُلِّي كلُّ قذر (“thus is the faith cleansed of all filth and every impurity lifted,” p. 60, ll. 11–12, a reading which matches the ductus of the manuscript); for متزمّنين, and الجلسية, read متزمّتين and الحلسيّة (p. 87, ll. 3, 4–5); for يقراها, read يقرأها (p. 101, l. -4); for لم يبتلي النبي, read لم يُبتلَ النبي (p. 139, l.-2 and .-5); etc.Notes1 J. van Ess, Der Eine und das Andere: Beobachtungen an islamischen häresiographischen Texten (Berlin, 2011), 1:132–40.2 Such anti-Pauline sentiments seem to have had some currency in Ḍirār’s day. Ḍirār’s peer and fellow Kūfan, the anti-Shiʿite historian Sayf ibn ʿUmar al-Tamīmī, likewise cites the archetype of Paul to diagnose the direst threat to the Muslim community—the legacy of the arch-heretic Ibn Sabaʾ. S. W. Anthony, “Sayf ibn ʿUmar’s Account of ‘King’ Paul and the Corruption of Ancient Christianity,” Der Islam 85 (2008): 164–202. Ḍirār was also infamously anti- Shiʿite, which may partially account for how frequently he is bested by Shiʿite theologians in works like al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā’s al-Fuṣūl al-mukhtāra.3 Cf. Racha El-Omari, “Accommodation and Resistance: Classical Muʿtazilites on Ḥadīth,” JNES 71 (2012): 231–56.4 ʿAbd al-Salām al-Wajīh, Maṣādir al-turāth fī l-maktabāt alkhāṣṣa fī l-Yaman (Amman, 2002), 2:616.5 H. Ansari, “Ketābī Kalāmī az Żerār b. ʿAmr,” Ketāb Māh-e Dīn 89–90 (2004–2005), 4–13, and “Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī et son livre al-Maqālāt,” in A Common Rationality: Muʿtazilism in Islam and Judaism, eds. C. Adang, S. Schmidtke, and D. Sklare (Würzburg, 2007), 23–24.6 Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Khayyāṭ, Kitāb al-Intiṣār wa-l-radd ʿalā Ibn al-Rāwandī al-mulḥid, ed. H. N. Nyberg (Cairo, 1925), 136–37.7 ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī, Faḍl al-iʿtizāl wa-ṭabaqāt al- Muʿtazila, ed. Fuʾād Sayyid (Tunis, 1974), 163.8 Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlam al-nubalāʾ, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ et al. (Beirut, 1996), 10:545. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 76, Number 1April 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690653 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse a book review in this section, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.