Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus by Janina M. Safran

Author:Janina M. Safran [Safran, Janina M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Medieval, Spain & Portugal, Religion, Islam
ISBN: 9780801468018
Google: V45HDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2013-04-09T16:06:42+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Between Enemies and Friends

An ascetic buried in the cemetery of the poor visited the jurisconsult Ibn Waddah in his dreams after Ibn Waddah failed to visit his grave. When the jurist expressed surprise that the dead man was aware of his regular visits and his greetings and invocations, the ascetic informed him that on that very day Ibn Waddah’s son had sat on his grave with a Jew discussing matters which were nothing but unbelief (kufr).

The father in the story related in this chapter’s epigraph, Ibn Waddah, was actively involved in protecting his community from innovation and heresy.1 He compiled a collection of hadiths of the Prophet and reports from the early community of Muslims in his Kitab al-bidaʿ, the earliest extant Andalusi treatise dedicated to the subject of innovations. He and other Maghribi and Andalusi fuqahāʾ (jurists) were concerned about the corruption of the faith by the insinuation of ideas and practices that deviated from the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet and the upright ancestors, as interpreted by Malik and his disciples and by the religious authorities dedicated to upholding their teachings.2 In the continuation of the story, Ibn Waddah questions his son about his graveside meeting and learns that he and his interlocutor talked about “God, the Qur’an, and other things.” Fierro suggests that the identification of the man in the cemetery as a Jew should not be taken at face value—the term “Jew” may have been used as a way to disparage a Muslim of dubious conviction, someone the son claimed had faith in rational disputation (kalām).3 Whether or not we are to understand that the son is being led astray by a Jew, the story identifies wayward belief (and disputation) with “the Jew.”

Although the story may reflect a specific concern about kalam among Andalusi Maliki ‘ulamāʾ (religious scholars) in this period, the image of the Muslim and the Jew meeting clandestinely in the graveyard evokes general suspicions about cross-confessional intimacy. In the view of those who were anxious about deviation from the true path, engaged communication and interaction with Christians and Jews posed a serious danger. From this perspective, Christians and Jews had long ago deviated from the truth revealed to them by their prophets, and their very presence among Muslims served as a source of corruption. Numerous censures of innovations related to ritual practice cited by Maliki authorities such as Ibn Waddah (and later al-Turtushi) are attributed to imitation of Jews and Christians, such as embellishing mosques, visiting and praying in places associated with the Prophet’s life and mission, raising hands and voice during invocation in prayer, and not working on Friday (comparable to the Sabbath).4 Al-Wansharisi reports that the corrupt practice of blowing the horn of the Jews (shofar) at sunset to mark the end of the daily fast during Ramadan (as Jews marked the end of the fast of Yom Kippur) originated in al-Andalus.5

The corruption of the faith was understood to have eschatological significance as a patent sign of the End Times.

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