The Dancing Martyr: Violence, Identity, and the Abbasid Postcolonial
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/692315
ISSN1545-6935
Autores Tópico(s)Byzantine Studies and History
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe Dancing Martyr: Violence, Identity, and the Abbasid PostcolonialThomas SizgorichThomas Sizgorich Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEditor’s Introduction by Michael E. PregillThe untimely death of Tom Sizgorich in January 2011 deprived not just one but several intellectual communities of a talented, eloquent, and uniquely insightful voice. Tom’s work intrigued and spoke to scholars in a number of fields. Well before the publication of his monograph, Tom’s seminal articles caught the attention of scholars working on early Christianity, Late Antiquity, early and classical Islam, and, more diffusely, the complex relationships between religion and violence—both literal and discursive—that feature prominently in much of his research and that may be considered the characteristic theme of all of his studies. The function of boundaries in and between communities—their elaboration and maintenance, as well as their transgression—is another overarching theme in Tom’s work, entirely fitting for a scholar whose concerns and proficiencies straddled and blurred the lines between disciplines and whose work brought different constituencies into contact and conversation.Tom’s book, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam, is an incipient classic; just a few years after its publication, its wide impact is already discernible.1 The rise in religious intolerance and intercommunal violence in the late Roman Empire, which eventually evolved into the distinctive conjunction of militant piety and imperial statecraft in early Islam, is one of the most significant overarching currents of the late ancient period. However, despite the attention Peter Brown paid to this phenomenon in his classic The World of Late Antiquity, as well as later treatments such as Garth Fowden’s From Empire to Commonwealth, this subject remained largely unexplored in a way that did justice to both the late Roman and the early Islamic material until Tom took it up. The publication of his article “Sanctified Violence: Monotheist Militancy as the Tie That Bound Christian Rome and Islam” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2009 served to bring his approach to the attention of a broader audience, as well as making the deeper social and political implications of his work, largely unstated in his monograph, more transparent: “if, as some now suggest, the institution of jihad underscores within Islam some penchant for fanaticism or violence undertaken in God’s name, so too is jihad legible as a trace of the penchant for violence individual Christians and whole Christian communities have manifested since long before the birth of Muhammad.”2The article presented here, which Tom was working on before his death, represents a new direction in his research. While his monograph examines particular continuities between late Roman and early Arab Muslim cultures, here Tom turns his attention to the relations—real or imagined—between Muslim elites and Christian subalterns in the early Islamic period. It must be read in tandem with another publication that would turn out to be one of his last, his contribution to the 2009 Festschrift for Stephen Humphreys, “‘His Girdle Wrapped about His Waist/It Is as Though It Is Made from My Heart’: The Christian Exotic in Medieval Muslim Imperial Literature.”3 In that article, Tom explores the role of the objectified and idealized Christian subaltern in Muslim self-fashioning in the early Islamic empire, juxtaposing two very different topoi in Arabic literature of the Abbasid period: the Christian ascetic as forerunner to and analogue for the ideal Muslim, and Christian monasteries as idealized havens of seduction and delight for elite Muslim men. The common thread that draws them together is the “enticing alterity” of the subjugated and domesticated Christian subaltern.“The Christian Exotic” is the critical link between Tom’s older research and his new project, a second monograph he provisionally entitled Where the Dark Wine Flows: Memory, Desire, and Dominion in Islamic Late Antiquity. The role of ascetics in late antique culture, especially the continuities between the askesis of the militant monks of the late Roman Empire and their later Muslim analogues—both in the pursuit of jihād fī sabīl Allāh, or “striving in the path of God,” among the Prophet’s followers and in the distinctive place of renunciants or zuhhād in the social and religious landscape of formative Islam—is a recurring theme in Violence and Belief. “The Christian Exotic” returns to this topic, emphasizing the importance of the Muslim portrayal of Christian ascetics as a site not only for expressing affinity with and sympathy for Christian culture but also for locating Islam as the manifest successor to the legacy of these symbolic forebears, thus serving as a mechanism of colonial appropriation.4 The monk becomes a metonym for all Christian subalterns, although an occasionally slippery and elusive one.5“The Christian Exotic” revisits other aspects of the theme of imperial dominion Tom explored in various ways in Violence and Belief, although here he takes up the problematics of empire in antiquity from a new perspective, explicitly invoking the work of Edward Said:The study of the early Islamic caliphate … holds fantastic potential for applications of the various theoretical insights articulated in Said’s Culture and Imperialism, primary among these the observation that cultural forms produced in an imperialist or colonialist context, whether in the metropole or in the territories subject to imperial domination, are most usefully analyzed as artifacts of the imperial political and social circumstances under which they were produced. For historians, like myself, whose work considers the social, political and cultural lives of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities of the Mediterranean and Middle East in the decades and centuries before and after the futūḥ [Arab conquests] period, attention to the imperial contexts in which members of those communities lived, thought, and wrote allows for new and more insightful analyses of the texts and institutions produced within those communities.6At the beginning of this article, Tom criticizes the reception of Said’s work in recent years, in that it has become the basis for “moralizing attacks on the vocation, intentions and personal characters of generations of Arabists, Islam scholars and students of Middle Eastern cultures, politics and histories.” The invocation of Said’s Orientalism as inspiring and justifying such attacks—indeed, for a blanket condemnation of a monolithic and conspiratorial “West”—is particularly unfortunate because the result has actually been an inhibition of constructive conversation; “crucial opportunities occasioned by the postcolonial critique have [thereby] been lost.”7Tom then proceeds to describe the genre of diyārāt, remembrances of fond dalliances in monasteries, as a form of romantic travel literature that facilitated elite self-fashioning in the high Abbasid period—“a specifically imperial privilege, a function of the ability of Muslim men to enter such luridly alien environments and partake as they wished of forbidden pleasures in an environment that could not reject them, and among persons who could not say no.”8 If we substitute “European” for “Muslim” in the foregoing lines, these words could practically have been written by Said himself; travel (and specifically what we would now call sex tourism) as a discourse of self-fashioning of European elites is of course readily recognizable as a favorite theme of Said’s in Orientalism. Tom’s daring maneuver here is to brilliantly reverse the Saidian lens, for it is the role of Muslim men as imperial masters and not colonial subjects that he investigates here. Although this point is only implicit in “The Christian Exotic,” I believe Tom intended this new project to challenge, if not subvert, the parameters of the Saidian critique as it has generally been understood and practiced—at least in contemporary American academia—and thus restore some of that critique’s original potential for interrogation of historical (and contemporary) power structures. When Said’s name and ideas are invoked as a blunt instrument for promoting specious claims and divisive agendas, this potential is squandered.The diyārāt or monasteries literature is examined in only a few pages of “The Christian Exotic,” but Tom explores this subject in a much more vigorous and nuanced way in the current article. The distinctive move that Tom makes here, which well justifies our bringing this final article to light, is his juxtaposition of the diyārāt literature with contemporary Arab Christian martyrological accounts, which he provocatively reads here as a literature of resistance. This is another link with Tom’s earlier work, although the insights into early Christian martyr accounts he developed previously are now brought to bear in analysis of Christian literature of the early Islamic period, a rich corpus that is only now beginning to receive wider critical attention despite the seminal work of Griffith and others on this material going back decades.In editing the conference paper that is the basis of this article, I have attempted to intervene only minimally in the language and structure of the piece as Tom originally conceived it, preserving the author’s characteristically complex, dramatic, and vivid prose as much as possible. Only occasionally has it proved necessary to reorganize or relocate entire sentences or paragraphs in the body of the text. In a couple of instances I have added paragraphs in order to make use of material derived from “The Christian Exotic” or other materials at my disposal.The original text was supplied with only a handful of skeletal hints about sources and references, and so the voice in the notes is entirely mine. I have often been able to draw apposite references from Tom’s other works, particularly “The Christian Exotic,” which I have also used to flesh out some of the quotations from primary sources from the diyārāt literature cited here. In other instances it has been necessary for me to go farther afield to supply necessary cross-references in the pertinent literature.After this revision of Tom’s article was sent to the publisher for review, it came to our attention that a third posthumously published piece by him on similar themes had appeared in print: “Monks and Their Daughters.”9 Remarkably, although that piece treats subject matter that is very similar to that surveyed here and in “The Christian Exotic,” there is actually almost no overlap between the current article and “Monks and Their Daughters,” where Tom adduces an almost completely different set of primary sources to pursue points complementary, but by no means identical, to those explored here. We thus urge readers interested in Tom’s work to compare the current piece and “Monks and Their Daughters.” Viewed together, they indicate the rich and provocative work Tom planned to do in Where the Dark Wine Flows and perhaps may point the way forward for future research building on the significant legacy Tom bequeathed to us in these short pieces.When I first met Tom in 2008, I was immediately impressed by his erudition, his wide-ranging interests, his unique perspective on all manner of topics, and his kindness and humility. We spoke excitedly about the strange coincidences between certain Greek and Arabic accounts of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus—the Ahl al-kahf of the Quran—and necromantic traditions about talking heads that foretell the future in medieval Jewish and Islamic sources. We immediately committed to pursuing an article on this together, but in true academic fashion, we procrastinated, thinking we had all the time in the world. I thank Kim Stratton, the editor of this issue, for allowing me the great honor of having this opportunity to collaborate posthumously with Tom here, at least in this small way.MP, Boston, February 2017IntroductionIt is always exciting to find evidence of conversation and exchange between confessional communities of the late ancient and early Islamic Mediterranean and Middle East. This is particularly so when such exchanges are reflected not in intercommunal debate or polemic but rather in texts composed and consumed within Muslim and non-Muslim communities that indirectly reveal their shared concerns, conceits, anxieties, and preoccupations. These sorts of discoveries are uncommon, however, and require reading the texts produced among the Muslim and non-Muslim literary communities of the late ancient and early medieval Muslim world in tandem with and, when possible, in dialogue with one another.This is not an easy mode of reading to pull off, however, because of the apathy the Muslim and Christian communities generally inspired in each other. By the ninth century of the Common Era, with the flourishing of a new golden age of literary production among both Muslims and Christians, those communities, conjoined and enmeshed with one another in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iberia, and other parts of the Dār al-Islām, produced texts that were, with occasional exceptions, markedly inward-looking. This is not to suggest that the hagiographers or chroniclers of the Christian communities of these regions took no notice of the Muslims and their status as rulers of the formerly Roman and Persian lands now subsumed within a specifically Muslim empire, nor is it to suggest that the Muslims who ran that empire could completely ignore their non-Muslim subjects.10 Rather, it is to say that the local communities now producing texts describing the past or the contemporary world most often seem to have written in a historical moment in which religious others had in many ways become merely part of the backdrop to the stories they felt compelled to tell, and often rather muted figures within that backdrop at that.It may seem strange to modern readers that the oldest texts by Muslims available to us with which to reconstruct the early history of the Islamic world (i.e., texts from the late eighth and ninth centuries) should so often fail to remark on the non-Muslim communities of the empire. However, modern readers must bear in mind that while these sources represent our earliest window into the early Dār al-Islām, they were produced within a world in which Muslim and non-Muslim communities were no longer strangers to one another and in which the “shock of the new” that comes with first contact would have long since melted away.11 Similarly, the initial confusion regarding Islam that one senses in our earliest non-Muslim accounts of Muhammad and Islam has, by the eighth and ninth centuries, given way to depictions of Islam and Muslims that communicate familiarity, understanding, and, frequently, even comfort.12In other words, although we might like to find some traces or remnants of first-contact fascination in such texts, we should not be surprised to find instead a frankly complacent indifference born of a century and more of relatively pacific, if not dull, coexistence. This is true even in those texts in which Muslims and non-Muslims debated the relative merits of their respective systems of belief. Differences of creed remained, of course, but even the discussion of difference tended to be conducted in a manner sparing of polemic and on the basis of exceedingly intimate mutual knowledge concerning scripture, mythos, and organizing communal narratives.13However, when we read closely and with the benefit of the critical insights of a generation or more of postcolonial critique and analysis, the literature of both the Muslims and the Christians of the Abbasid world confesses—however unintentionally—an abiding set of anxieties and fascinations with the dynamics of imperial power, and in particular with problems of intimacy, mimicry, desire, and seduction. This shared array of concerns is often difficult to detect because it is expressed in literary idioms specific to the Muslim and Christian communities that articulated them. Nevertheless, when we listen closely to the tone and tenor of the voices that these texts have preserved, and note the themes and plots in accordance with which their texts were articulated, it becomes clear that for Muslim and Christian literary communities alike, the problematics of imperial power and the responses it invited and incited constituted an acute and enduring dilemma. What is more, as recorded in both Christian and Muslim texts of the early Abbasid period, these were not autonomous meditations on the problem of imperial power; rather, they were produced by conjoined, dialogical, and relational processes of reflection and debate.For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on two genres of Abbasid writing, one Muslim, the other Christian. The subgenre of early Abbasid Muslim writings I will examine is known as the diyārāt, or “monasteries,” literature.14 It is a subgenre of the Abbasid-era Arabic literature known as adab, most often translated in Western scholarship as “belles lettres.”15 Only one relatively complete example of diyārāt literature survives, although one other has been reconstructed from material preserved in other texts. We know of the popularity of this genre in part because of references to diyārāt works within other extant texts and in part because of the survival of material from these now-lost texts incorporated within other still-extant texts from different genres. The two works on which this essay will rely are al-Shābushtī’s Kitāb al-Diyārāt, a large and diverse work of the tenth century that preserves material from earlier examples of the genre, and a diyārāt work attributed to the major tenth-century author Abū’l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, author of the famous Kitāb al-Aghānī, reconstituted by Jalil al-Attyeh from later sources that are still extant.16Multiple discourses converge in these works, including geographical writing, faḍāʾil and ʿajāʾib traditions cataloguing and extolling the “virtues” and “wonders” of certain cities or regions, historiography, and biographical or ṭabaqāt traditions. They produce narratives of travel that are particularly remarkable for their capacity to communicate a sense of radical dislocation even as they describe elite Muslim men exploring geographical expanses that were in fact located at the very center of Abbasid imperial power. As we encounter the monasteries in these texts, each emerges as a kind of portal through which elite Muslim men pursued and discovered fulfillment of imperial fantasy and, more specifically, sought the resolution of certain irresolvable tensions and discontents inherent to the early Muslim imperial project. The desire that motivates this pursuit pretends, in these texts, to resolve itself via an imperially inflected mutual jouissance shared between dominant but gentle and enlightened Muslim men and submissive but admiring Christian women, boys, and men.Among Christian communities, however, reciprocal concerns about the problematics of empire manifest themselves in the well-worn genre of the martyr narrative. In many ways this is unsurprising, despite the stark contrast with the attitude and ethos of the diyārāt literature. The governing themes and plots of early Christian and late ancient martyrologies bear the indelible imprint of older Roman imperial conceits concerning the function of juridical ritual and the truth-making capacity of that ritual and its attendant vocabulary of rationalized violence.17 Indeed, the dramatic tensions that animate martyr narratives derive in part from the unmasking of the ultimate impotence of the violence that so long served as the guarantor and consort of imperial Roman reason as manifested in juridical ritual. That is, the latent violence coiled within Roman juridical ritual was without the power to compel or coerce if through the exertion of force it actually produced not an object upon whose body was inscribed a text testifying to the might of Roman imperial power but instead a novel and in many ways monstrous subject whose own claim to power resided in his or her capacity to absorb and nullify Rome’s most fearsome juridical violence.18 In this sense, Christian (and, to a lesser extent, Jewish) martyr texts had already presented strategic glosses on the limits of imperial power half a millennium before the advent of Islam. As we will see, however, martyr literature produced under Muslim rule departed in unprecedented ways from martyrologies produced during the previous centuries of Roman dominion.“A Human Gazelle Stalking Man and Jinn”: The Diyārāt LiteratureWe will begin with a sampling of the sort of narratives with which Muslim men of the Abbasid world dreamed the dreams of a dominant imperial class. Central to those dreams were the themes of seduction of desirable Christian men and women by cultured and desired Muslim men and the admiring and longing gaze of the conquered in which bearers of imperial privilege luxuriated and frolicked.Sometime in the ninth century of the Common Era, an Abbasid prince named Abū ʿAlī b. al-Rashīd was stretched out before a Christian monastery and flogged. The rationale given for the flogging was that Abū ʿAlī had offended against the dignity of the caliph and violated the norms of the Muslim community. The nature of his specific offense is suggested by the following excerpt from al-Shābushtī’s Kitāb al-Diyārāt:Dayr Mudyān [the monastery in which Abū ʿAlī cavorted] was an ancient structure,19 with water flowing into it and then overflowing, for its flow is blocked and brought to a halt by a floodgate, which then opens into the Euphrates. It is a beautiful monastery, magnificent, surrounded by gardens and buildings. Poems were composed in honor of its beauty and in honor of its wine. …There was one Abū ʿAlī b. al-Rashīd, who was always hanging around this monastery, always drinking in it. And he had singing girls that he would load up and take along to the monastery, and he would spend days in it, producing unending music and racket, and he was amazingly shameless!20An example had been made of Abū ʿAlī in part because his raucous parties had created a scandal among the Muslim neighbors of the monastery.21However, Abū ʿAlī was hardly alone in his affection for Christian monasteries as locations in which to partake of forbidden pleasures. Indeed, early Abbasid literature contains volumes of stories in which elite Muslim men entered Christian monasteries and found there a long list of exotic delights.22 One ʿAmr b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Warrāq described “human gazelles” who stalked and tempted male Muslim visitors to another monastery as they passed cups of wine among them:I see that my heart has inclinedToward Dayr Mar YuḥannāToward its fields, the fragrant [or grassy] onesToward its baraka, its richesToward a human gazelleStalking man and jinn. …And when dawn shines forthWe share a jug among usAnd as the cup goes ‘roundWe pass among us a songAnd when our entertainers slumberWe sleep entwined with them.23Evidently these “gazelles”—an ancient description of desirable young men and women common in Arabic poetry—were quite adept at taking their prey, given the entanglement at its denouement. ʿAmr, we are told, was famous for his passion for “the beardless ones in the monasteries” and for the wine about whose qualities he composed many poems.24The identity of one of these “beardless ones” is made more specific in a passage in Abū’l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’s reconstituted Kitāb al-Diyārāt describing the amorous exploits of another Abbasid aristocrat:Bakr b. Khārja was passionately in love with a Christian boy whose name was ʿĪsā b. al-Barāʾ al-ʿIbādī al-Ṣayrafī.25 Bakr composed a two-piece qaṣīda about him, mentioning in it the Christians and their religious prescriptions and their holidays and naming their monasteries and ranking them.One who heard the poem informed us about it, and recited Bakr’s words about ʿĪsā b. al-Barāʾ al-ʿIbādī thusly:His girdle wrapped about his waistIt is as though it is made from my heart.And Bakr further said about ʿĪsā b. al-Barāʾ al-ʿIbādī:By the Gospels that the monkish old men recite in Dayr al-JāthlīqAnd by the Mass and by the crossesIf you do not have pity on my stricken, longing heart, rewarding me,I will die from my heart’s grief.26Bakr’s words emphasize the Christianness of his beloved ʿĪsā (not incidentally, the Arabic version of “Jesus”) repeatedly, for example, through reference to the zunnār, or “girdle,” all Christians living under Muslim rule were obliged to wear to mark them as Christians.27 Elsewhere we read of another Muslim man who fell in love with a Christian boy in a monastery, this one a young monk. The man’s devotion to the boy was so extreme—and indeed so abject—that it eventually caught the attention of the older monks. Fearing that the Muslim would persuade the young monk to leave the monastery and his faith, the older monks conspired to launch the besotted Muslim from the walls of the monastery itself.28Of course, it was not just beautiful young males that besotted Muslim visitors to the monasteries; young Christian women also attracted the attention of their elite male visitors. Take, for example, the following narrative included in another passage from al-Iṣbahānī:I went with Abū’l-Fatḥ … to Dayr Thaʿālib … and there was a young woman there, shining like a dīnār as they say, and she was swaying and swinging like a branch of sweet basil in the northerly breeze. And she thrust her hand into the hand of Abū’l-Fatḥ, and she said, “O Master, come and read this poem written on the wall of the martyr shrine.”And we went with her, and God knows we were delighted with her, and with her elegance and the wit of her speech. And when we entered the shrine, she bared an arm like silver and she motioned to a spot, and on it was written:She goes out on the day of her holidayIn the garments of a nunEnrapturing all who come and go with her haughtiness.To my misfortune I saw herOn the day we visited Dayr al-ThaʿālibWalking among the womenA swollen-breasted one among the swollen-breastedShe among them like the moon among the stars.And we said to her, “By God, you are the one described in these verses!” And we had no doubt that she had written the verses herself. She did not depart from us for the rest of the day … and after that there began between her and Abū’l-Fatḥ an affair. Then he set out for Syria, and she was with him when he died, and I do not know what happened to her after that.29Elsewhere in al-Iṣbahānī’s diyārāt text, the caliph Mutawakkil (d. 892) meets a dark-eyed Christian beauty in a Syrian monastery. The girl, whose name was Saʿānīn, also happens to be the daughter of one of the monastery’s monks. Immediately, Saʿānīn ensnares the caliph with her devastating beauty and her refined manner. When she recites exquisite stanzas of Arabic poetry, the caliph is transfixed; he begs the girl to spend the day with him and his companions, and she agrees. The desire the caliph feels for the monk’s daughter is reciprocated, and when she passionately sings one of the songs of her people, the mutual seduction of Muslim caliph and Christian monk’s daughter is complete.30 As we have also seen in the passage cited above in which Abū’l-Fatḥ seduces and is seduced by a nun who “shined like the moon among the stars,” refined, consensual, and mutual seduction between Muslim men and their love objects was the abiding theme in Abbasid diyārāt literature.31The element of consensuality is absolutely key here, bringing the critical background to these stories sharply into focus, namely, the origins of the Christian subaltern in the brutality of the Arab conquests that established Islamic dominion over much of the eastern Christian world in the seventh century CE, as well as in the continual raiding and slaving that occurred at the frontiers of the Abbasid world throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. The continuing procurement of slaves at the imperial marches—especially at the northern Syrian frontier with Byzantium—furnished Muslim elites with concubines and slave girls who played an essential role in the literal propagation of Islam by bearing children who were predetermined to be Muslim according to the dictates of Islamic law. This role is acknowledged in a particularly candid way in a prophetic hadith: “Seek a child from the ummahāt al-awlād [i.e., the umm walads, slave concubines who bore their masters children], and God will make a miracle within their wombs.”32 To borrow the phrasing of Donna Haraway, through the economy of raiding, coercion, and reproduction, early Islamic society undertook “the construction of the self from the raw material of the other.”33In this context of imperial subjugation and ongoing conquest, Muslim elites responded as colonial elites often have: by reimagining a world created and maintained through violence and domination as one in which mutual erotic fascination, and even love of the subaltern for the master, was possible. The fantasies of the diyārāt thus serve as a kind of internal apologia for consumption by enlightened Muslim males, who both transcended the realities of their culture’s fundamental power dynamics and secured their place as members of the dominator class through such consumption. There were other modes of apologetic popular at this time, of course; for example, some of the literature of this period confronts the allegation by subalterns that Islam was spread by the sword with remarkable frankness. Others reacted more viscerally to the realities of imperial subjugation:When the cities of Cyprus were conquered, the people fell upon the captives, dividing them
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