Volume 82, Issue 1

The ἉAlawīs in Syria have long been viewed as an esoteric Shiʽī sect, known to outsiders as extremist and considered by their Muslim neighbors as heretics. As they kept their beliefs in secret, we have no published accounts of the community’s tenets by insiders until the end of the Ottoman period. This article analyzes the religious arguments by which insiders of the community have been attempting to integrate into Islam. It does so by focusing on the Ἁlawī writings since the Mandate when Ἁlawīs began formulating new historical and religious claims to help facilitate the adoption of nationalism together with Islamism.

The Musnad dictated by Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. Baghdad, 241/855) to his son Ἁbd Allāh (d. Baghdad, 290/903) is the largest of the great ninth-century collections of ḥadῑṯ to survive. It did not gain a place among “the Six Books” that became more or less the Sunnī canon of ḥadῑṯ   from the tenth to the twelfth century C. E. But it was included in most lists that went beyond the Six Books; for example, al-Ḥusaynī’s directory of men in the ten books. Al-Ḥusaynī, al-Taḏkira bi-maʽrifat riǧāl al-kutub al-ʽašara , ed. Rifʽat Fawzī Ἁbd al-Muṭṭalib (Cairo 1418/1997), covering the six plus a collection from each eponym, mainly Abū Ḥanīfa, Mālik, al-Ǎāfiʽī, and Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal. What follows is an attempt to determine above all how it was collected and what makes it so much longer than other collections.

Von diesem Kommentar zum Muwaṭṭaʼ des Mālik b. Anas, der in der Erforschung der mālikitischen Rechtsliteratur bisher weitgehend unbenutzt geblieben ist, sind nach meinen heutigen Kenntnissen nur zwei Handschriften erhalten. Ein Exemplar davon liegt in der Ḫizāna al-ʽāmma in Rabat unter der Katalognummer 64 Ḥ (davon Mikrofilm, Nr. 911) und ist bis auf einige fehlende Seiten am Schluss vollständig. Die andere Handschrift habe ich 1998 in der Moscheebibliothek von Qairawān (Raqqāda) unter mehreren ungeordneten Blättern und Heftresten unterschiedlicher Provenienz identifiziert; sie trägt bisher keine endgültige Katalognummer. Der Fund, wie so oft unerwartet und zufällig, bestätigt allerdings die vagen und nur wenig informativen, vor allem aber nicht mehr aktuellen Angaben im alten Siğill der Bibliothek aus dem Jahr 693/1294, in dem der Muwaṭṭaʼ -Kommentar von al-Qanāziʽī angeführt wird.

The academic study of Islamic ritual, interested scholars agree, has been sorely neglected. Particularly in the 1980s, a number of voices arose identifying and lamenting this lack. “Neither in terms of rich comparative study nor in terms of interpretive study of Muslim ritual on its own terms,” wrote William Graham in 1981, “do we have any really significant work to build upon”. Although “Islam itself places great emphasis on ritual activities”, wrote Frederick Denny in 1985, “the systematic study of ritual within traditional Islamic studies has been recessive”. Almost a decade after Graham’s essay, Kevin Reinhart could still speak in 1990 of “a desiccating lack of studies … of Islamic ritual life” by either Islamicists or historians of religion.

Like the commentary of al-Ṭabarī (311/923), that of Ibn Abī Ḥātim, of which an important part has survived, contains the exegetical reports of the first three centuries of Islam. The extant commentary covers from Sūra 1 to the end of Sūra 13 and from Sūra 23 to the end of Sūra 29. Ibn Abī Ḥātim’s commentary has been edited and published in ten volumes by Asʽad Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib, but for several reasons this edition cannot be considered a successful work of scholarship. In al-Ṭayyib’s edition the isnāds are numbered, but the editor prefers to use a naive and misleading method of numbering: on the one hand, he numbers the isnāds contained in the existing manuscripts of this exegesis; on the other he has tried to complete the isnāds of the missing part of Ibn Abī Ḥātim’s commentary by using those later works that have benefited from Ibn Abī Ḥātim’s work. Thus the original part of this exegesis is combined with its later compilations. Further, according to this edition, the latest isnāds is given as number 19541. Although this figure is supposed to indicate the total number of isnāds in the commentary, we find that there is a fundamental mistake in the numbering, especially after isnād no. 9061, where this isnād is followed by no. 8328, and the sequence continues 8329, 8330 … and so on. Nor is this the only error. We find that the order is frequently disrupted. Because of these discrepancies in the numbering of the isnāds we will give the page number in the footnotes concerning our own findings rather than referring to the editor’s numbering system. In addition, the large number of misreadings of text and misquoted names bears witness to the insufficiency of this edition. Despite these mistakes the publisher made no corrections in its second printing (1999), although this did include four-volume indices and takhrīj prepared by Kāmil ʽUwayḍa. There thus remains an urgent need for a critical edition.

Ursache und Wirkung von Verdruss und Unmut werden von Goethe in seinen Noten und Abhandlungen zum West-östlichen Divan im „Buch des Unmuts“ aufs trefflichste geschildert: Der Unmut „ist anmasslich, abstossend und erfreut niemand, selbst diejenigen kaum, die von gleichem Gefühl ergriffen sind …. Jeder Unmutige drückt zu deutlich aus, dass seine persönliche Erwartung nicht erfüllt, sein Verdienst nicht anerkannt sei. So auch er! ….“

Lawrence I. Conrad , Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed. Encyclopedia of the Qurʼān: Volume Two E–I . Leiden, 2002: Brill, xxiv, 572 pp. ISBN 90 04 12035 1. € 228.00/$ 278.00. Volume Three J–O . Leiden, 2003: Brill. xxiv, 608 pp. ISBN 90 04 12354 7. € 228.00/ $ 278.00. Florian Sobieroj , Manfred Götz: Islamische Handschriften. Teil 1. Nordrhein-Westfalen . Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland. Herausgegeben von Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel. Band XXXVII,1. Stuttgart 1999: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 3-515-05405-7. € 171,00. Lawrence I. Conrad , Al-Balāḏurī: Ansāb al-ašrāf . Teil 2, herausgegeben von Wilferd Madelung. Beirut 2003: In Kommission bei “Klaus Schwarz Verlag”, Berlin. Bibliotheca Islamica, Band 28b. pp. viii, 781. ISBN 3-87997-130-7. € 49,00. Teil 4/2, herausgegeben von ʽAbd al-ʽAziz al-Dūrī und ʽIṣām ʽUqla. Beirut 2001: In Kommission bei “Das Arabische Buch”, Berlin. Bibliotheca Islamica, 28e. pp. 701. ISBN 3-86093-304-3. € 48,00. Teil 7/2, herausgegeben von Muḥammad al-Yaʽlawī. Beirut 2002: In Kommission bei “Klaus Schwarz Verlag”, Berlin. Bibliotheca Islamica, Band 28j. pp. 493. ISBN 3-87997-131-5. Bernd Radtke , Alexandre Popovic et Gilles Veinstein (hrsg.): Les Voies d’Allah. Les ordres mystiques dans le monde musulman des origines à aujurd’hui . Paris 1996, 711 s. Abbas Poya , Rainer Brunner: Die Schia und die Koranfälschung . Würzburg 2001: Ergon Verlag. ISBN 3-933-56367-4. Abbas Poya , Annemarie Schimmel: Das islamische Jahr. Zeiten und Feste . München 2001: C. H. Beck Verlag. 167 S. mit 12 Abb. ISBN 3-406-47567-1. € 9,90. Frank Peter , Thomas Eich, Abū l-Hudā aṣ-Ṣayyādī. Eine Studie zur Instrumentalisierung sufischer Netzwerke und genealogischer Kontroversen im spätosmanischen Reich . Berlin 2003: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. 301 S. (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, 249). ISBN 3-87997-305-9. € 44,00. Michael Kemper , Austin Jersild: Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 . Montreal & Kingston – London – Ithaca 2002: McGill-Queen’s University Press. IX + 253 pp., 28 illustr. ISBN 0-77352-328-6. $ 24.95. Frank Peter , Jochen Blaschke/Marianne Rückwart/Norbert Schmidt u. Thomas Schwarz (Hrsg.): Muslims in Europe. A Bibliography . Berlin: edition Parabolis, 2002, 384 S. Lawrence I. Conrad , Barbara Flemming and Jan Schmidt, eds.: The Diary of Karl Süssheim (1878–1947): Orientalist between Munich and Istanbul . Stuttgart, 2002: Franz Steiner Verlag. Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Supplementband 32, viii, 334 pp. 8 pp. photographs. ISBN 3-515-07573-9. € 60.00. Lawrence I. Conrad , Suad Joseph (general editor), Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures , volume I: Methodologies, Paradigms and Sources . Leiden 2003: Brill. xlix, 682 pages. ISBN 90 04 11380 0. € 215,00. Schirin Fathi , George Joffé (ed.): Jordan in Transition, 1990–2000 . London 2002: C. Hurst & Co. pb, xxii, 367, index. ISBN 1-85065-488-3