Introduction
The study of Arabic poetry of the Fatimid period (358/969–1171) in Egypt, during which an Ismāʿīlī Shiite caliphate based in Cairo controlled, at various times, North Africa, the Levant, the Hijaz and Yemen, suffers from a complicated range of primary sources.Footnote 1 Because the Fatimids were supplanted by Saladin's (d. 589/1193) Sunni Ayyubid dynasty, primary sources documenting the period are often biased, late, or lost.Footnote 2 Poetry associated with the Fatimids’ unique sectarian ideology is increasingly well-documented, as for example the case of the missionary (dāʿī) al-Muʾayyad fī al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (470/1078).Footnote 3 The poetry of even major Sunni poets from this period, however, is often poorly studied or even unpublished.
A further complicating factor is that several of these Sunnis, like Saladin himself initially, were nominally or enthusiastically complicit members of the Fatimid court. This is the case, for example, with the “blacksmith poet” Ẓāfir al-Ḥaddād (d. 529/1135) or ʿUmāra al-Yamanī (d. 569/1174), a jurist and merchant from Yemen turned diplomat and court poet under the Fatimids.Footnote 4 Both poets composed panegyric for the Fatimid caliphs, praising them as descendants of the Prophet, imāms of the Islamic polity and manifestations of the divine. Negotiating competing allegiances under Saladin was difficult, and some failed, like ʿUmāra, who was executed as the result of his alleged involvement in a Frankish-Fatimid conspiracy to overthrow Saladin.Footnote 5 Saladin's attitude towards such figures was not straightforward, and in Syria, he displayed little patronizing explicitly Shiite literary culture in the form of ʿArqala al-Kalbī.Footnote 6
Much of our picture of Arabic poetry during this period comes from ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (d. 597/1201), who was not only a Sunni but a secretary, biographer and apologist for Saladin. His Kharīdat al-qaṣr wa-jarīdat al-ʿaṣr (“The Pearl of the palace and annals of the age”), organized geographically, contains two volumes (in its published form) on Egypt, and was completed in 573/1178. ʿImād al-Dīn was primarily interested in poets from the sixth Islamic century, but he cites poets from throughout the Fatimid period. He draws both on poetry transmitted to him orally, directly or indirectly, from the poets themselves, and on older written sources, many of which are no longer extant.
An important but under-examined Fatimid-era Sunni poet is Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm b. al-Kīzānī (d. Muḥarram 562/November 1166), an Islamic jurisprudent (faqīh), ḥadīth-transmitter (muḥaddith) and ascetic (zāhid) poet.Footnote 7 Like ʿImād al-Dīn and Saladin himself, he followed the Sunni Shāfiʿī rite, to such a degree that he had himself buried near the tomb of its founder Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820) in the Qarāfa cemetery outside Cairo. Ibn al-Kīzānī is now chiefly remembered as the most important Sufi poet of the Fatimid period, before the appearance of the much more famous Egyptian Sufi Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235).Footnote 8 One might have expected Saladin and ʿImād al-Dīn to have viewed Ibn al-Kīzānī as a fellow traveller in the project of restoring Sunnism to Egypt. However, ʿImād al-Dīn reports that Ibn al-Kīzānī had fallen prey to unorthodox bidʿa (innovation). In Ramaḍān 575/February 1180, Najm al-Dīn al-Khabūshānī (also vocalized al-Khubūshānī, d. Ṣafar 587/March 1191), Saladin's appointee to a new madrasa built on the site of al-Shāfiʿī's tomb, unceremoniously dug up the body of Ibn al-Kīzānī, whom he considered too unorthodox to be buried next to the great imām. Footnote 9
The sole output of Ibn al-Kīzānī to have survived consists of 69 poems or fragments, almost all of them transmitted by ʿImād al-Dīn. I have found three new poems (or fragments) in a Judaeo-Arabic bifolio from the University of Cambridge Library (T-S AS 160.50). While the new poems can be quite clearly situated stylistically within Ibn al-Kīzānī's extant oeuvre, they fail to shed any light on his alleged unorthodoxy. The bare fact of Ibn al-Kīzānī having a Jewish readership, however, perhaps explains his marginalization in the milieu of Ayyubid Sunnism. In the transition from the Ismāʿīlī Shiite Fatimid caliphate to the explicitly Sunni rule of Saladin, the poet's informal multi-confessional appeal was probably a liability. Such a multi-confessional appeal was, however, only one factor in Ibn al-Kīzānī's posthumous reputation.
Saladin actually knew Ibn al-Kīzānī and his poetry, which he admired. This did not, however, save either the poet's reputation or his body from desecration. Several factors were evidently at work during the period of transition from Fatimid to Ayyubid rule. The bureaucratic Sunni elite that shaped Sunni Cairo was somewhat autonomous from military rule, and it is not even certain that Saladin was entirely in control of the official dissolution of the Fatimid caliphate in 567/1171 (in which al-Khabūshānī also played a role).Footnote 10 This elite was also in the process of being reshaped ethnically, as a number of easterners, mostly Iranian Shāfiʿīs such as ʿImād al-Dīn and al-Khabūshānī, were playing a larger role in post-Fatimid Cairene Islamic institutions.Footnote 11 The modus vivendi obtaining in Egypt under the weak, late Fatimid caliphs gave way to a new social landscape under the Ayyubids. Ibn al-Kīzānī's fate is evidence of just such a transition. With both Mālikī and Ḥanbalī associations, he had been a less rigidly doctrinaire Shāfiʿī, his tomb was the site of popular visitation and his poetry had Jewish readers. In this last regard, the most striking feature of his poetry is a dearth of reference to the Qur'an or ḥadīth, a characteristic which, in all likelihood, facilitated his popularity in pietist circles of Egyptian Jews (Hasidim).
Life, afterlife, reception in Arabo-Islamic sources
Before turning to the Judaeo-Arabic versions of Ibn al-Kīzānī's texts, it is worth attempting to untangle the confused statements related to his life in the copious Arabo-Islamic biographical literature. Information on him derives from several groups of sources. Only ʿImād al-Dīn's biography in the Kharīda, which was completed about ten years after Ibn al-Kīzānī's death, is anything like contemporary, and ʿImād al-Dīn is also the primary litterateur voice dealing with Ibn al-Kīzānī's style and craftsmanship. The second and most numerous group of reports on his life are found in the great cleric-biographers Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī (d. 654/1256), Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282), al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363), Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771/1370) and Ibn Rajab (d. 795/1392). These have the disadvantage of being late, mutually dependent and mostly non-Egyptian. But as they are primarily concerned with Ibn al-Kīzānī as a religious scholar, they provide some interesting information on his teachers and students, and some insight into his afterlife in intra-Sunni sectarian polemical memory. Ibn al-Zayyāt's (d. 814/1411) guidebook to the cemeteries of Cairo records some folk memories of Ibn al-Kīzānī's spiritual charisma.Footnote 12 Finally, the Maghribī Ibn Saʿīd (685/1286) provides very valuable first-hand information on Ibn al-Kīzānī's reputation, literary and otherwise, in Egypt some one hundred years after his death.
Ibn al-Kīzānī is often called al-Miṣrī, either meaning “the Egyptian” or “the Cairene”, but he does not seem to have been from Egypt originally, as ʿImād al-Dīn calls him Miṣrī al-dār, “of Egyptian abode”, a phrase usually used with immigrants.Footnote 13 Ibn Khallikān and al-Maqrīzī both also call him al-Ḥāmī, but the manuscripts contain numerous variants on this uncertain word.Footnote 14 On its own, al-Ḥāmī would imply that he hailed from a place called al-Ḥām, but no such place seems to exist. Ibn Saʿīd says that he lived in Iraq for a time,Footnote 15 and Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī lists him among the disciples of the famous Ḥanbalī Sufi ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī at his Mukharrimī madrasa in Baghdad.Footnote 16 His name, al-Kīzānī, may refer to a place in Azerbaijan from which he or his ancestors hailed, or to the manufacture of the kūz, a kind of clay mug.Footnote 17 In Mamluk times he was primarily remembered as a poor ascetic.Footnote 18 He was conversant in a wide range of Islamic subjects: the Qur'an, fiqh, ḥadīth and kalām.
Aside from his poetry, and as mentioned, for being disinterred by Abū Najm al-Khabūshānī, Ibn al-Kīzānī is chiefly remembered in the biographical sources for a heated theological dispute with the Ḥanbalī jurist (faqīh) and Sufi ʿUthmān b. Marzūq (d. 564/1169). In the secondary literature the dispute with Ibn Marzūq and al-Khabūshānī's actions are often considered very minor or even freakish,Footnote 19 but they are both representative of several significant theological trends in the sixth/twelfth century. Broadly speaking, Sunnism in this period was undergoing gradual consolidation, spurred on after 1171 by Saladin's dissolution of the Fatimid caliphate and Ayyubid state sponsorship of selected Sunni institutions. By consolidation, what is meant is that several characteristics that became normative (“orthodox” in a quasi-consensual, majoritarian sense) were being introduced or promoted in Egypt. These include: the establishment of madrasas with endowed professorial chairs for jurisprudence,Footnote 20 the institutionalization of Sufism,Footnote 21 and the attempted association of the theological school of Ashʿarism with the legal rite of Shāfiʿism.Footnote 22 In the case of Egypt, all of these were occurring at least partially as the result of the immigration of scholars from Iran towards the west, bringing with them institutional forms such as the madrasa and the Sufi khānqāh.
Ibn al-Kīzānī's case is relevant to all of these processes to varying degrees. A Shāfiʿī, he studied with the fellow-Shāfiʿī Abū Ṭāhir al-Silafī, the Iranian head of the first madrasa established in Egypt (by the Sunni vizier Ibn Sallār, in Alexandria in the year 544/1149).Footnote 23 Although he was evidently not an Ashʿārī, he engaged heavily in theological disputation.Footnote 24 It is difficult to say whether he was a Sufi in an institutional sense. Nathan Hofer does not believe he was,Footnote 25 but some evidence indicates a participation in proto-institutional Sufism, which will be discussed below. His dispute with Ibn Marzūq is illustrative of several of these engagements.
Ibn Marzūq and Ibn al-Kīzānī actually had numerous things in common.Footnote 26 It seems that they were both immigrants to Egypt from the east. They both had popular followings. Ibn Marzūq was admired by both al-khāṣṣ wa-l-ʿāmm (the elite and the populace),Footnote 27 in part on account of his ability to invoke God's assistance in flooding the Nile, while Ibn al-Kīzānī had a great deal of support “in the street” (la-hu atbāʿ kathīrūn min al-shāriʿ).Footnote 28 Like Ibn al-Kīzānī, Ibn Marzūq was associated with al-Jīlānī,Footnote 29 from whom he received an initiatory robe (al-khirqa). Just as Ibn al-Kīzānī, a Shāfiʿī, seems to have studied with Ḥanbalīs, Ibn Marzūq, a Ḥanbalī, was also known to have associated with the Shāfiʿī ʿAbd al-Wahhāb b. Abī al-Faraj.Footnote 30
The dispute that they became embroiled in, and which apparently caused some level of popular violence (fitna), revolved around the ontological status of human actions, that is, whether afʿāl al-ʿibād (acts of the worshipers) are “created” (makhlūqa) or “eternal” (qadīma). Almost all of the sources, including ʿImād al-Dīn (presumably the best-informed), take Ibn al-Kīzānī to have advocated the less popular opinion, that human acts were eternal.Footnote 31 However, the Ḥanbalī Ibn Rajab attributes this position to Ibn Marzūq. The matter is difficult to ascertain, since we do not possess the theological works of either man. While Ibn Ḥanbal did reportedly assert that acts were eternal at one point,Footnote 32 by the Mamluk period the Ḥanbalī school considered this position anathema: works were part of God's creation.Footnote 33 It was, moreover, not a position commonly found among Shāfiʿīs or any major kalām school.
In fact, it does not seem that the dispute between Ibn al-Kīzānī or Ibn Marzūq can be attributed to a Shāfiʿī-Ḥanbalī, rationalist-traditionalist or any other kind of sectarian conflict. Beneath the surface of our texts, some conflict between popular groups in Egypt who followed these two relatively similar figures seems to have been playing out – Hofer describes the debate as an attempt “to speak for and wield authority on behalf of the Sunni community in Egypt”.Footnote 34 It is actually difficult to differentiate the opinions of the two men from those of their students, and Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) went so far as to deny that Ibn Marzūq held the position on eternal acts and thought it had been foisted on him by his followers.Footnote 35 There is also some evidence that both figures held more sophisticated positions than recorded in most of their biographical blurbs. Ibn Rajab quotes from an “uṣūl al-dīn” work he saw attributed to Ibn Marzūq that states, “Faith, statements of it and its acts (afʿāluhu), are uncreated, but the physical movements (ḥarakāt) are created – yet the eternal becomes manifest within them, just as [divine] speech can be manifest in human words”.Footnote 36
About Ibn al-Kīzānī's arguments we can say even less, but ʿImād al-Dīn also attributes a heretical (bidʿa) position to him of al-tanzīh fī al-tashbīh. Tanzīh refers to God's transcendence from created forms, usually His nominal attributes in Muʿtazilī thinking, while tashbīh is the opposite, and is usually employed as a slur against “anthropomorphist” traditionalists who, too happily, affirm literally the descriptions of God found in the Qur'an. ʿImād al-Dīn's expression seems to be in oblique reference to al-Khabūshānī's objections to Ibn al-Kīzānī, who was a mushabbih (anthropomorphist) according to al-Khabūshānī. Whatever this formulation al-tanzīh fī al-tashbīh means, it is evidently more nuanced than can easily be reconstructed.
Ibn Taymiyya may be quoting from Ibn al-Kīzānī in one of his fatwas. Asked whether acts are eternal or not, he says he has seen some Shāfiʿīs and Ḥanbalīs of Persia and Egypt make that argument and he quotes the arguments of “a certain Egyptian” (baʿḍ al-Miṣriyyīn). This Egyptian believes that the reward (thawāb) for deeds is eternal, following (a) on the ḥadīth “the believer sees his deeds in the image of a handsome, well-scented man”, (b) since acts are fated via God's decrees, they participate in his attributes, (c) the law is eternal and acts are performed in accordance with or at variance with it.Footnote 37 Ibn Taymiyya goes on to refute these points.
This was not a marginal debate, but rather turned on a central problem in Islamic rationalist theology (kalām). The question of the created/eternal dichotomy was posed most famously in the “Miḥna” (218–34/833–49) or inquisition of non-Muʿtazilites under the caliphs al-Maʾmūn and al-Muʿtaṣim.Footnote 38 While rationalist Muʿtazilites held that the Qur'an was created by God, traditionalists took verses in the Qur'an literally asserting the eternality of the heavenly book and its identity with the revealed Arabic scripture. Based on this rupture, debate followed regarding the believer's pronunciation of the Qur'an, his expression of faith and his acts.
The sum of this is that both Ibn Marzūq and Ibn al-Kīzānī were engaging in the sort of debate that must have characterized late Fatimid-era Sunnism.Footnote 39 They both had associations with Sufism, even if its institutional structures were weak in Egypt at the time, and both had been moving in the same milieu wherein members of the four canonical rites were interacting with each other, and theological positions were susceptible of some degree of nuance and, as it were, creativity of the sort conceivable in an environment mostly lacking in institutional constraints. At the same time, the Ayyubid-era consolidation of Sunnism continued the trends they represented, rather than overturning them – eastern influence, state-patronized, madrasa-based scholarship and theological (kalām-related) polemic.
Ibn al-Kīzānī's posthumous encounter with al-Khabūshānī around 581/1185–6 is emblematic of all these trends. Al-Khabūshānī was a Shāfiʿī faqīh from the region of Nishapur in Iran. Before coming to Egypt, he spent time in Damascus and was affiliated there with the al-Sumaysāṭī khānqāh. Also in Damascus he met Saladin's father, Najm al-Dīn Ayyūb, and his uncle Shirkūh, then serving under Nūr al-Dīn Zangī, the ruler of Damascus.Footnote 40 He may have played a role both in encouraging Shirkūh, Saladin's uncle, to march on Egypt, leading to the Zangid intervention in Egypt that brought an end to the Fatimid caliphate.Footnote 41 He came to Egypt in 565/1169–70, during which time Saladin was serving as the Fatimid vizier, and played a role in the official dissolution of the caliphate Saladin was nominally serving.Footnote 42 The secondary sources pay much attention to his irascible personality; he knocked Saladin's headgear (qalansuwa) from his head because he refused to abrogate illegal taxes, threatened Jews if they illegally rode horses (they were supposed to be limited to donkeys and mules) and badgered the Ayyubid family about their investments in alcohol production.Footnote 43
Al-Khabūshānī objected to Ibn al-Kīzānī on theological grounds, and to his being buried very close to Imām Shāfiʿī, the founder of their mutual rite. Al-Shāfiʿī's tomb was the site of the Ṣalāḥiyya madrasa, probably the most magnificent and well-endowed of the madrasas built by Saladin.Footnote 44 Al-Khabūshānī wanted to remove Ibn al-Kīzānī's body, saying either, “This ḥashawī does not deserve to be buried next to al-Shāfiʿī”,Footnote 45 or, “the ṣiḍḍīq (righteous) and zindīq (atheist) should not be buried together”.Footnote 46 The reasons behind this event seem clearer than the conflict with Ibn Marzūq. The language of the statements attributed to al-Khabūshānī is that of a kalām advocate disparaging a traditionalist as an anthropomorphist (ḥashawī, mushabbih). The foundational inscription of the Ṣalāḥiyya madrasa, which is all that survives of it, invokes God's aid on the side of Shāfiʿī Ashʿarites, the true “monotheists”.Footnote 47 This is in keeping with Saladin's apparent sponsorship of Ashʿarism, which was taught in all of his endowed madrasas.Footnote 48 This sort of theological conflict continued throughout the Ayyubid period, often with al-Khabūshānī's involvement,Footnote 49 and long afterwards, for the biographical sources themselves take sides with or against Ibn al-Kīzānī, depending on their pro-kalām or traditionalist inclinations.
It would be wrong to view al-Khabūshānī as an irritable freak. The methodological problem here is that those who agreed with him passed over his actions in silence. ʿImād al-Dīn fails to refer to them at all, although he was a contemporary and peer of al-Khabūshānī, while Ibn Khallikān simply says that Ibn al-Kīzānī was “moved to al-Muqaṭṭam” without detailing the episode or its cause.Footnote 50 On the other hand, the Ḥanafī, traditionalist Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī tacitly reproaches al-Khabūshānī, who “acted in a sectarian fashion” (taʿaṣṣaba ʿalā) against Ibn al-Kīzānī. Later authors were even harsher, with Ibn Taghrī Birdī, who cites Sibṭ approvingly, calling al-Khabūshānī “rash and irresponsible” (ṭāʾish wa-mutahawwir).Footnote 51 Again, the rite of the author did not matter so much as their general approach to theology. Although, like Ibn al-Kīzānī, a Shāfiʿī, the pro-kalām al-Subkī describes Ibn al-Kīzānī as “one of the anthropomorphists” (rajul min al-mushabbiha). When al-Khabūshānī began “throwing around his bones and those of his dead followers” the “anthropomorphists (mushabbiha) fanatically ganged up (taʿaṣṣaba)” against al-Khabūshānī! Al-Subkī goes on to display his usual animosity to his teacher and fellow-Shāfiʿī, the traditionalist al-Dhahabī, who had sided with Ibn al-Kīzānī. “Do not”, he tells the reader, “pay any mind to what al-Dhahabī says about Ibn al-Kīzānī being a Sunni, for al-Dhahabī, may God have mercy upon him, is a staunch fanatic (mutaʿaṣṣib jald).”Footnote 52
The image, then, of al-Khabūshānī as a violent crank is largely derived from the biographical works penned by traditionalists. Partisans of kalām sided with him, and described him as a pious and righteous ascetic. In fact, in several ways the incident is representative of Ayyubid-era shifts in the demographic of Egyptian Sunnism. Al-Khabūshānī was representative of a flow of eastern scholars into Egypt in this period, although this trend had already begun in the Fatimid period. As Leiser notes, violent theological conflict was more common in the east, but the easterners (or eastern-affiliated) Sunnis, Ibn Marzūq and Ibn al-Kīzānī, were already engaged in such a struggle, albeit more obscure to our eyes.Footnote 53 It was exactly at this period that Ibn ʿAsākir in Damascus was also engaged in a relentless pro-Ashʿarī polemic within the Shāfiʿī school in an attempt to legitimize rationalist theology.Footnote 54
Al-Khābūshānī was engaged in a very similar project, but on an institutional level this necessitated competition with other Shāfiʿī scholars for Saladin's patronage.Footnote 55 By attempting to consolidate his vision of an Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿī synthesis via his madrasa project at a site of popular piety expressed in tomb-visitation (ziyāra), it is clear that he had popular support in mind. It is in this sense that we get a glimpse of the most fascinating aspect of this whole event, the street-level support for these scholars in Cairo. In his lifetime, Ibn al-Kīzānī had also enjoyed much popular support, as several scholars inform us.
As already mentioned, Ibn al-Kīzānī had “followers in the street” in his lifetime. The conflict over the exhumation of his body amounted, according to al-Dhahabī, to gang warfare.Footnote 56 For some time after his death, Ibn al-Kīzānī had a sect of followers known as the Kīzāniyya who shared his theological beliefs, whatever they were, in Egypt and perhaps also in Syria.Footnote 57 ʿImād al-Dīn asserts that they were the equivalent of the Karrāmiyya, an Iranian sect accused, like Ibn al-Kīzānī, of tashbīh and tajsīm (anthropomorphism and incarnation).Footnote 58 There are varying locales given for the place his body was transferred to, but several biographical notices indicate that it was still visited, at least throughout the seventh/thirteenth century.Footnote 59
His poetry was likewise very popular; according to ʿImād al-Dīn, people “scramble to obtain his dīwān and praise and shower it with plaudits”.Footnote 60 Visiting Egypt in the early 640s/1240s, Ibn Saʿīd testified to the same thing – Ibn al-Kīzānī's dīwān was everywhere (khathīran yubāʿ) in both the markets of Fusṭāt and Cairo.Footnote 61 According to Ibn Saʿīd, his readership was very low-brow. His poetry was “accessible to the understanding of commoners” (qarīb min afhām al-ʿāmma), but not pleasing to poets, specialists in kalām, or political leaders (fursān al-niẓām, lit. “military cavalry”).Footnote 62 Ibn Saʿīd describes having an acquaintance unknowledgeable in decent poetry encourage him to read Ibn al-Kīzānī, but, he says, “I have not copied anything from his dīwān, because I became exasperated searching through it to choose anything pleasing; I am only transmitting his biography because of his fame.”Footnote 63
Ibn al-Kīzānī does not really seem to have been known outside of Egypt. Like Ibn Saʿīd, Sibṭ and ʿImād al-Dīn only saw his dīwān while travelling in Egypt. None of the other biographers, even those from Damascus, seem to have actually read it. The only indicator of an international reputation comes in ʿImād al-Dīn, who had heard poetry of Ibn al-Kīzānī's recited in Baghdad in Dhū al-Ḥijja 650/October 1165, but this was from an Alexandrian source.Footnote 64
Ibn Saʿīd is the only source with a very negative view of the overall quality of Ibn al-Kīzānī's poetry. ʿImād al-Dīn praises him as a fine stylist with a good command of rhyme and meter. His poetry is edifying.Footnote 65 ʿImād al-Dīn had initially obtained one of the two copies of the dīwān he draws on from Saladin, who while in his mid-twenties had himself met Ibn al-Kīzānī in the year 559/1164.Footnote 66 Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī, who, as we have seen, defended Ibn al-Kīzānī against al-Khabūshānī out of theological sympathy, notes that he had seen the dīwān in Egypt and praises its style highly. Of interest, moreover, he tells us that none other than Murhaf b. Usāma b. Munqidh transmitted some lines, which he gives the text of.Footnote 67 Later biographers tend to repeat earlier citations rather than record their own experience with the dīwān and describe the poetry in general terms as “good” (ḥasan, jayyid). The testimony of Saladin, Sibṭ, ʿImād al-Dīn and Murhaf is a sufficient indicator (at least in the hundred years after Ibn al-Kīzānī's death) that Ibn Saʿīd was in a minority, and that whatever his dubious theological reputation, Ibn al-Kīzānī's poetry was enjoyed across all social classes. We now know that Jews read him as well, and we can turn to the documents found in the Geniza.
Cambridge University Library T-S AS 161.50
Paper bifolium, no date
Leaf height: 12.5 cm, width: 17.7 cm
(1 leaf: 8.7 cm)
SIDE A, RIGHT LEAF
No. 1
Transcription
Meter: mujtathth: mustafʿilun fāʿilātun x 2
Translation
1 Labour for your soul
while the bough of your life runs with sap;
2 [then] go to your final end
when you have become dust in the earth.
3 And be content, for you will be happy
so long as you are content with lowliness.
LEFT LEAF
No. 2
Transcription
Meter: al-hazaj: mafāʿīlun x 2
[2 partial lines unreadable]
Translation
1 The pious admonition vexed him,
yet he neither felt fear nor turned to righteousness,
2 and he desisted not from frivolity,
nor left off his erroneous ways.
3 When he goes forth, in morning or evening,
how heavy will fate (al-ayyām) rebuff him;
4 there is no hope in his returning [to reason]
and he pays no heed to council.
5–6 [2 partial lines unreadable]
(continues on side B, right leaf)
SIDE B, RIGHT LEAF
Translation
(cont. from side A, left leaf)
7 You rejoiced at finding me
subject to the judgement of passion.
8 If you try to tip the scales,
the scales of passion are more carefully weighed.
LEFT LEAF
No. 3
Transcription
Meter: mutaqārib: faʿūlun x 4
Translation
1 I found contentment with little to be the greatest wealth.
I thus went about, holding fast to the train of her (sc. contentment's) dress
2 and I emancipated my soul – rather than sell her
for a pittance, to be possessed like any slave –
3 so her (sc. the soul's) glory garbed me in a garment
that would not fray with the passing of time.
4 I thus lived wealthy, although possessing not a single dirham,
and lord over all with the pride of a king.
Hebrew transcription
T-S AS 161.50 Side A. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
T-S AS 161.50 Side B. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Description of document and philological commentary
The paper is stained and torn along almost the entire bottom length of the bifolio. The attribution of the poem is confirmed by the heading li-bn al-Kīzānī on the upper-right lead of side A. The paper has been reused. Some Hebrew liturgical formulations on the upper-left leaf of side A and upper-right leaf of side B have been crossed out. The Judaeo-Arabic is in a good Oriental square hand, with sporadic Arabic vocalization. A possible match for the handwriting is T-S NS 205.89, another detached bifolium containing piyyuṭim; however, this is difficult to verify as the hand is not very distinctive.Footnote 68
No. 1, l. 3, the short a at the end of innaka has been dropped for metrical purposes. No. 2, l. 7, I read bi-ilfānī as meaning bi-annaka alfaytanī, but this is somewhat conjectural as this would be an unusual construction. An alternative reading would be bi-l-fānī, in which case an alternative translation would be:Footnote 69
You began rejoicing in the transient
as is the rule of desire,
so if you set it in the scales,
desire weighs more heavily.
No. 3, l. 2: this form II usage of ʿattaqa is not attested but is required to fit the meter; maʿ shortened to fit meter.
Analysis
All three poems belong firmly to the genre of renunciant or ascetic poetry, zuhdiyyāt.Footnote 70 This genre typically emphasizes the transient nature of worldly life, general piety and proverbial wisdom and advice. It is characterized by simple language and structure, rhetorical parallelism and direct address. It also typically lacks much explicit reference to the Qur'an or ḥadīth, and apparently draws not only on pre- and early Arabic poetic antecedents, but to a large extent on pre-Islamic Near Eastern gnomic literary traditions.Footnote 71 As a result, like Ibn al-Kīzānī, early zuhd-poets such as Ṣāliḥ b. ʿAbd al-Quddūs or Abū al-ʿAtāhiya were accused of heresy, or even atheism.
In these three poems, then, Ibn al-Kīzānī does not give much that is unexpected. The reference in poem no. 3, l. 2, to “selling his soul for a pittance (bi-bakhs)” may be said to allude to Joseph in Q. 12:20, where his brothers “sell him for a pittance” (sharawhū bi-thamanin bakhs), or Q. 2:207, which states, “there are those who sell their souls (or: sell themselves – yashrī nafsahu) for the sake of God”.Footnote 72 There is otherwise no real reference to Islamic doctrine. There is likewise no further evidence for the doctrines of tashbīh or qidam al-afʿāl attributed to him by his biographers.
The first poem, in the second person, blends advice, ascetic values and wisdom. In particular, it is worth noting that the end of life is not referenced in order to invoke paradise, although this is implied, but simply because it is axiomatic that the transient nature of earthly existence dictates that we accommodate our desires to its miserable reality.
The second poem is somewhat unusual in that the reprobate figure is discussed in the third person. This poem is difficult to interpret as two lines are unreadable. The final two lines are in the same rhyme and meter as the first four, and thus appear to be part of the same poem. However, in these lines the speaker has switched to a second-person address in celebration of passion (hawā). In much Arabic love poetry, it is impossible to determine whether erotic passion or love for God is intended, but the latter is strongly implied in this poem because of the religio-ethical content of the first four lines, which is to say, the last two lines perhaps express a typically Sufi valorization of the love of God, depending on how the line is read (see commentary above).
This poem is a good specimen of the rhetorical balance typical of zuhdiyyāt. Each line, as in nearly all Arabic poems, is divided between two hemistichs. In the first line, the man being discussed hears pious admonition (al-waʿẓ) but fails to react to it. Rather than the symmetry of cause and effect, the division of the line emphasizes his perverse non-reaction. This is further emphasized by the parallelism within the second half of line 1, “he neither (fa-mā) felt fear nor (wa-lā) turned to righteousness”. A similar parallelism is reused in line 2, and line 3 makes use of merism (where morning or evening indicate his constant rejection, and the likelihood of punishment at any time) to emphasize the justness of fate's punishment. Line 4 is also parallel. In lines 1, 3 and 4, the negative particles (mā, lā) are repeated to structure the parallelisms.
The third poem, in the first person, is a valorization of qanāʿa, or contentment, the same value enjoined on the addressee in the first poem. Parallel versions of this poem are found in texts attributed to Imām al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), Imām al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) and others. It is the only poem with any significant use of figurative language. The soul is personified, in a fairly elaborate conceit, as a female slave who is emancipated and then rewards the speaker, who in turn becomes like a king. The grammatically feminine nafs is gendered as biologically feminine and socially inferior, which are in turn common (ultimately rooted in Neoplatonic metaphysics) tropes for gross materiality, an image of abjection and slavery (to the world). By relinquishing his desires for these aspects of worldly existence, the speaker attains an ethical superiority beyond the reach of any monarch.
T-S AS 161.50 in the context of Ibn al-Kīzānī's extant poetry
Ibn al-Kīzānī's dīwān is not independently extant in manuscript. The main source for his poetry is the part devoted to him in the section devoted to Egypt in ʿImād al-Dīn's Kharīdat al-qaṣr.Footnote 73 The poems in the Kharīda amount to 65 poems or fragments, to which four additional poems or fragments can be added from biographical sources. All 69 texts have been compiled by ʿAlī Ṣāfī Ḥusayn in his Ibn al-Kīzānī: al-shāʿir al-ṣūfī al-Miṣrī. This edition unfortunately has numerous textual errors, but they can be corrected against the edition of the Kharīda. Since it is comprehensive, I will refer to the extant texts heretofore known from Islamic sources as the Ḥusayn dīwān, and I have numbered the texts given by Ḥusayn in the Appendix, along with the poems’ rhyme, meter and subject matter.
In terms of an original dīwān, ʿImād al-Dīn draws on two written sources, and he quotes extensively from both.Footnote 74 The first is the dīwān of Ibn al-Kīzānī lent to him by Saladin, and the second is an anthology (majmūʿ) which also included some of Ibn al-Kīzānī's verses. However, there are also a handful of verses (four fragments) transmitted by other biographers.Footnote 75 These circumstances suggest that Ibn al-Kīzānī did not author a comprehensive dīwān, or at least, that there were multiple texts or versions in circulation. Ibn Saʿīd reports on just such a situation. He found nothing of value in the dīwān, but nevertheless transmits one poem orally from a friend.Footnote 76 The texts of T-S AS 161.50 are not found in any of the Islamic sources. Ibn al-Kīzānī was also said to have been the author of prose (al-naẓm),Footnote 77 and Ibn Zayyāt gives the title of a couple of books, the Kitāb al-Raqāʾiq and another, “known as Malīk al-khuṭab”, both of which sound like the titles of prose works (in fact, dīwāns tend to lack titles).Footnote 78 No other source gives information on the titles of works.
While Ibn al-Kīzānī is said primarily to have been a poet of waʿẓ (pious admonition), ʿImād al-Dīn mostly preserves love poetry of the ʿUdhrī type.Footnote 79 Sixty-three out of the 69 (91.3%) extant poems from Islamic sources are love poetry. The remainder consist of three gnomic poems (ḥikma), two ascetic (zuhdiyya) and one on wine (khamriyya).Footnote 80 This is the first regard in which the three poems of T-S AS 161.50 differ from the extant corpus, for all three are of the ḥikma/zuhdiyya-type. With regards to length, however, the Geniza poems are typical; the mean length is five lines, while the mean length of the poems from Ḥusayn's collection is 4.83 (median 4). This suggests that, although ʿImād al-Dīn mostly only gives excerpted poems for the other poets he cites, he is in fact giving Ibn al-Kīzānī's complete poems – they are simply not very long.
The question of Ibn al-Kīzānī's ʿUdhrī poetry is related to whether or not he was a Sufi. ʿUdhrī love poetry was “an elegiac amatory genre [that] emerged among poets of the [ʿUdhra] tribe, who expressed passionate desire for an unattainable beloved, chastity and faithfulness until death”.Footnote 81 One of the prototypical ʿUdhrī lovers was the legendary Majnūn Laylā, and Ibn al-Kīzānī does in fact address a Laylā in one poem.Footnote 82 An example of one of his ʿUdhrī poems both illustrates the genre and gives an instance of the difficulty in interpreting allegedly Sufi poetry.Footnote 83
1 They may have hidden your body from my sight,
but they cannot hide my memory of you from my mind.
2 Your spectre visits me while I sleep –
what a lovely visitor to have!
3 You come to me, may I be your ransom when you come to me –
and you abandon me, may I be your ransom when you abandon me.
A convention by this period was the use of the masculine pronoun. However, the love expressed is idealized and non-corporeal. The speaker feels no sensual desire but is content to be able to speak of or remember (dhikr) the beloved, and to see him (or her) in sleep as a disembodied spectre (ṭayf). The courtly element of ʿUdhrī poetry is manifest in the third line, where the speaker expresses absolute devotion to the beloved whether he abandons him or not. This is clearly taking place in the same universe of values as the Geniza poems of Ibn al-Kīzānī, with his emphasis on contentment with the vicissitudes of life, but in neither case is a theological interpretive framework such as we find in Sufism readily evident behind the superficial meaning of the text, although it is possible that dhikr can be read as polysemous, signifying both the memory of the beloved, recitation of the Qur'an and/or the Sufi practice of reciting the names of God or other pious formulae. But there is no way to know. This example of ʿUdhrī love poetry can be read simply as a little love ditty.
There are, however, several reasons to believe that Ibn al-Kīzānī's texts were composed within a Sufi interpretive framework. Hofer has highlighted a key methodological problem related to later Islamic sources anachronistically interpreting Fatimid ascetics as Sufis. It is worth quoting this important point at length.
Medieval Arabic historiography is full of individuals who appear Sufi-like, but were not actually Sufis. Indeed, there are many ascetic, pious, or esoterically inclined individuals from Fatimid Egypt in these late sources. It is tempting to count them among the Sufis of Egypt, as did some later Sufi authors like al-Munāwī (d. 1031/1621). But supererogatory prayers, devotions and mortifications alone do not a Sufi make. Sufism is a practical and discursive tradition fundamentally rooted in and shaped by the institution of the master–disciple relationship (al-ṣuḥba) and legitimized through the purportedly unbroken links to the early Sufi masters, and ultimately to the Prophet himself. Sufi prosopographers often incorporated as many persons as possible into these linked chains as a legitimization tactic – even when such categorizations were patently impossible.Footnote 84
For Hofer it is formal and informal institutional practices – such as the codification of canonical Sufi manuals, the master-disciple relationship, the endowed khānqāh – that define Sufism.Footnote 85 On this basis, having examined the biographical evidence, he does not think Ibn al-Kīzānī is a Sufi. Two reasons have already been adduced for considering him one, however. In the first place, a point Hofer overlooks, he apparently studied with ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī in Baghdad at the latter's madrasa, in an institutional setting. His peer, Ibn Marzūq, was clearly a Sufi for Hofer, having been a student of al-Jīlānī as well, although Ibn Marzūq also received the initiatory khirqa robe.
The poetic evidence is also relevant, however, to the institutional definition of Sufism. Very much in the same way that Sufism's institutionalization entailed later writers rewriting early generations of Muslims or followers of diverse pietistic movements as “Sufis”, the wine poetry of Abū Nuwās and the love poetry of Majnūn Laylā were incorporated, almost exegetically, into Sufi texts by supplying alternative interpretive frameworks. This social practice among communities of readers is most evident in the commentary tradition, but there are indicators in Ibn al-Kīzānī's poetry that the texts exceeded the generic conventions of either zuhdiyyāt or ʿUdhrī love poetry as belles lettres. I have already mentioned how in the second text from the Geniza fragment, the speaker praises the value of passion (hawā). In the context of a love poem, this could be interpreted as amorous passion, but it has no role in the lexicon of zuhd poetry. The text thus suggests that the reader supply a Sufi interpretive rubric.
There are a couple of other examples worth citing from Ibn al-Kīzānī's published corpus that support this reading. A four-line poem from the dīwān combines genres in a style similar to poem no. 2 from the Geniza document:Footnote 86
1 O you who, it is now known, has abandoned me
you are not the first to abandon [a lover].
2 It is an age-old custom (sunna)
among those who have come and gone before.
3 Keep on thusly, as you have been,
and the world will teach its lessons.
4 I have accustomed my soul to patience;
he who is patient will be rewarded greatly.
Like Geniza no. 2, this poem shifts grammatical tense in the fourth line, from second to first person. The crucial element that indicates the combination of genres, however, is the attitude towards patience, or ṣabr, an extremely common topic in Ibn al-Kīzānī's poems. Generally speaking, the speaker in his poems takes a condemnatory attitude towards ṣabr within the context of a stock ʿUdhrī scenario: the beloved has abandoned the speaker and his companions counsel him to be patient and bear the separation with fortitude, which the ʿUdhrī speaker characteristically rejects.Footnote 87 However, here self-restraint is valued over love or anguished passion, indicating the combination of ʿUdhrī and gnomic genres.
The gnomic genre appears in its purer form in poem no. 20:Footnote 88
1 If you must spend time with other humans,
be patient; to be patient shows wisdom.
2 And if they transgress against you,
respond to that transgression with kindness,
3 like the earth, which constantly has filth flung upon it,
but then brings forth flowers, beautiful to behold.
This is one of a handful of gnomic or ascetic poems in the Ḥusayn dīwān that corresponds quite clearly in type to the three new Geniza poems.Footnote 89 For example, it draws a comparison between an ethical stance and natural cycles, as in no. 1 from the Geniza document, which encourages repentance while “the bough of your life runs with sap”. No. 20 is, however, not really a Sufi text. Although there was certainly such pious, renunciant verse composed by Sufis, it could be composed by anyone. It does not demand Sufi hermeneutic commitments from the reader.
This is not the case with poem no. 49, which demands a Sufi reading.Footnote 90
1 Which path should I tread
and can I find a heart I truly rule over?
2 What manner of patience should I wish for
when all of it has been spent on you?
3 Love for you has spun me around
just as the wheeling stars spin round.
4 Should I turn away from the danger,
when your snares are set within my very limbs?
5 I am devoted to you from within –
with an unfulfillable desire,
6 sublime – in its pure clarity
there is no mote, no other object [than you].
7 Devotion to you is my madhhab,Footnote 91
and remembrance (dhikrukum) of you my worship (nusuk).
8 My soul has been enslaved,
and how fortunate its possessor (mumallik) is!
9 If you wish, spare my blood,
and if you wish, spill it –
10 you are not one of those whose love
can be given up and abandoned.
This is certainly a Sufi, and not an ascetic (zuhdī) text. Much of the content is given over to Sufi terminology: the “path” (l. 1, ṭarīq); a possible reference to a whirling dance in l. 3; and the “interior” (l. 5, bāṭin). The primary indicators of a Sufi interpretive framework, however, are the explicit uses of Islamic terminology: madhhab (rite); dikhr (recitation of the Qur'an, or Sufi chanting); nusuk (worship, pious practices). In l. 6, the speaker tells the beloved that s/he has no mushtarak, no peer, an obvious allusion to a series of Islamic terms denoting polytheism (shirk, sharīk, etc.). Any of these elements could appear in a non-Sufi love poem, but the density of polysemous terms is more sustained than any other poem in Ibn al-Kīzānī's corpus. It is the only poem in the collection with mystical and Islamic language used repeatedly and consistently throughout and could productively be compared with poems by patently Sufi poets such as Ibn al-Fāriḍ or Ibn ʿArabī. In conjunction with poem no. 2 from T-S AS 161.50, and Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī's report that Ibn al-Kīzānī studied with al-Jīlānī, it is fair to continue to describe Ibn al-Kīzānī as Sufi.
There are numerous stylistic similarities between the three Geniza poems and the Ḥusayn dīwān, but Ibn al-Kīzānī's use of rhyme and meter are worth highlighting. The three Geniza poems are in the meters of mujtathth, hazaj and mutaqārib. None of these are common meters, and they are not common in the Ḥusayn dīwān where there is one instance (out of 68) of mujtathth, two of mutaqārib and no example of hazaj. The rhymes are ḍ, ḥ and k. Again, none of these are extremely common rhymes (the most common rhymes in Arabic poetry tend to be b, l and m) and they are not common in the Ḥusayn dīwān where there are two instances each of ḍ and ḥ and five of k. Neither of these really represent statistical anomalies, because Ibn al-Kīzānī uses a large number of different rhymes and metrical schemes, as can be seen in the Appendix – 17 rhyme letters (out of 28 possible) and 12 meters (out of 16 total), and the corpus as it comes down to us is by no means complete.
Ibn al-Kīzānī has a marked preference for shorter meters. The longer meters in Arabic are ṭawīl (28 syllables is the ideal norm), kāmil (30 syllables), basīṭ (28 syllables) and wāfir (26 syllables). Mujtathth, hazaj and mutaqārib are 16, 16 and 22 syllables respectively. Ibn al-Kīzānī's favorite meter is kāmil, but 4 out of 13 instances are dimeter (20 instead of 30 syllables per line), while his next three favourites, accounting for 44.1% of all poems, are ramal, khafīf (both 24 syllables per line) and sarīʿ (22 syllables per line). In general, 22% of his meters are shortened versions, a very high number. In the numerous corpuses he has analyzed, Dmitry Frolov gives a range of 2–25% for short-form meters.Footnote 92
There are two significant upshots to all this. First of all, it might appear from Ibn al-Kīzānī's simple diction that he was not a particularly accomplished poet. This is evidently a voluntary affectation, for the range of rhymes and meters testify to a high degree of technical proficiency. Secondly, his preference for shorter meters likely indicates that his poetry was composed for sung performance, or that its primary genre, love poetry, is modelled on typically sung meters (in which case, they may not have been sung).
Ibn al-Kīzānī has typically been invoked in Arabic literary history, if at all, as an antecedent of the much more famous Egyptian Arabic Sufi poets that were to follow in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. Hofer, among others, has rightly attempted to distinguish more carefully between later ascetic practice and institutional Sufism. In the case of Ibn al-Kīzānī, our poet does in fact appear to be a Sufi, but that does not necessarily mean that he should be viewed merely as an antecedent to Ibn al-Fāriḍ. The appeal of Ibn al-Kīzānī's poetry in the Fatimid period seems to have lain in his unique synthesis of ascetic, gnomic, Sufi and love poetry. The three new poems from the Geniza in particular confirm that his gnomic and mystical works were probably more significant than ʿImād al-Dīn would have us believe based on what he transmitted. This unique generic synthesis was appreciated by literate elites, while the simple diction and short meters meant his poetry was more approachable for a wider audience, including non-Muslims.
Ibn al-Kīzānī's Jewish reception
Jewish readerly response to Arabo-Islamic texts varied depending on genre, region (particularly the self-conscious distinction between Spain and the East) and over time, beginning in the tenth century ce, Jewish literary texts in both Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic tend to disavow Arabic models and reinterpret features adopted from the Arabic tradition as the restoration of Biblical Hebrew antecedents.Footnote 93 All of these factors mean that reconstructing literary contacts between Arabic and Hebrew must proceed with a certain indirection and speculative method.Footnote 94 Ibn al-Kīzānī's readership is almost certainly localized in Egypt (although, of course, the Geniza community cultivated contacts around the Mediterranean and Near East and much non-Egyptian material is to be found in the Geniza collections) and necessarily dated to the twelfth century ce or later. As such, the Geniza community's readers of Ibn al-Kīzānī were not only native Arabic speakers, but their reading was preceded and informed by at least three hundred years of the domestication of Arabo-Islamic theological and belletristic (poetry and prose adab) literary models within a Jewish framework. The most striking feature of their historical moment, however, was the emergence of a mystical “pietism” parallel to institutional Sufism in Egypt.
Medieval Hebrew poetry and belletristic prose emerged following the tenth-century ce Karaite engagement with Muʿtazilism as Karaite theologians (and rabbinic figures, primarily the figure Saadia Gaon (b. 882, Egypt–d. 942, Iraq), who disputed with them) drew on Arabic models.Footnote 95 The Karaites followed a quasi-rationalist doctrine that, on the surface, parallels Muʿtazilism; just as the rationalist Muʿtazilites, in theory, subordinated the status of ḥadīth in favor of allegorical exegesis of the Qur'an, so the Karaites prioritized rationalist-oriented Bible commentary over the Talmud (ultimately, both groups composed Bible commentary, but with differing hermeneutics). Jewish, but particularly Karaite, interest in Muʿtazilism or its methods dates to around the mid-fourth/tenth century, and was not limited to specialists, but extended outside of professional theological circles to lay Jews.Footnote 96 The Geniza community were avid readers of Muʿtazilī texts, several of which have been preserved only in the Geniza.Footnote 97
It was through Karaite channels that contacts with Sufism and Islamic asceticism more broadly were established, as evidenced by Karaite scribes’ and scholars’ copies of Islamic texts in the Geniza materials.Footnote 98 In this process, Islamic materials were domesticated for Jewish theological purposes. Early Karaite Bible commentators, such as Yefet ben ʿEli, were sharply critical of Muʿtazilī methodology at the same time as they made use of it. Yefet evidently “believed that his philosophical information derived solely from Jewish sources”.Footnote 99 The Kitāb al-Niʿma of his son, Levi ben Yefet, is the first Karaite compendium of Muʿtazilism,Footnote 100 but even here his presentation of Muʿtazilī thought is dependent on Biblical citations as proofs of rationalism, “even in those sections of his theology that in Muʿtazilī theory should be based solely on reason since they furnish the foundation for the proof of the validity of prophetic revelation”.Footnote 101 Yūsuf al-Baṣīr/Joseph ha-Rōʾeh (fifth/eleventh century) produced what amounted to Jewish adaptations of Muʿtazilī theology (kalām). He more openly admired his Muslim sources, and perhaps even wrote with a Muslim audience in mind.Footnote 102
The same ambivalence is visible with regard to belles lettres, even within a single individual such as Judah ha-Levi (d. 1141), who both composed Hebrew poetry in Arabic meters, and even composed a short treatise on using Arabic prosody in Hebrew, yet also included a critique of the influence of Arabic literature on Hebrew in his Kuzari.Footnote 103 The anonymous author of Mishlei ʿArav (“Proverbs of Arabia”) must have understood this feeling. In his introduction he describes the admiration he felt for Arabic literature as a young man, mixed with sadness that Arabs should possess such fine literature in the first place.
Then his heart said to him that if he read the book carefully, he would find that all the moral content in the Arabic work is actually stolen from the Bible, which gladdened him … he decided to translate the work into Hebrew in order to reveal the theft and show that wisdom was given to God's chosen people alone.Footnote 104
Just as Levi ben Yefet had done, the author avoids confronting a potential sense of cultural inferiority by reinterpreting the other's cultural products as versions of his own.Footnote 105
This strategy was risky.Footnote 106 At times, Arabo-Islamic culture could prove too compelling for a Jewish reader: Samawʾal al-Maghribī, who eventually converted to Islam, describes how as a youth he read his gateway drug – the folk romances such as ʿAntar, Dhū al-Himma, and Iskandar dhū al-Qarnayn.Footnote 107 One hundred and fourteen pages of Sīrat ʿAntar, in Arabic, have in fact been found in the Cairo Geniza,Footnote 108 which in general contains a very large amount of belletristic texts.Footnote 109 Sometimes the documents in the Geniza seem to testify to a certain synthetic identity construction, or a kind of agonistic appropriation of Islamic source texts. Unique poems by the famous pre-Islamic Jewish poet al-Samawʾal, a heroic figure known only from Arabic sources, are extant in the Geniza.Footnote 110 This seems to testify to Jewish readers making use of the Arabo-Islamic tradition to construct and valorize their identity using the resources of the dominant culture.Footnote 111
Ibn al-Kīzānī's poems are best contextualized, however, by the Sufi texts found in the Geniza, the extent of which is astonishing, with specimens of al-Ghazālī, al-Suhrawardī, al-Ḥallāj and Ibn ʿArabī, among others, all represented.Footnote 112 The reaction to these texts are likewise ambivalent and Jewish readers had competing attitudes towards the texts in their possession. Hirschfeld mentions a marginal note in a Geniza document containing a prose piece attributed to Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj. The note reads, “discussion of the ways of the Ṣūfīs. When I had done with studies, I turned my mind to the ways of the Ṣūfīs; but I am too weak to understand, much less to answer it.”Footnote 113 Such comments clearly show that a Jewish reader, as we would expect, could copy out an Islamic text as part of an agonistic reading practice; Jewish texts are naturally prioritized above Islamic ones. This attitude, however, can be contrasted with one evinced by a note in Hebrew characters on the title page of a collection of al-Ghazālī's works reading, “Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī: may the memory of the righteous be a blessing (z.ṣ.l)”.Footnote 114 The copyist has included an honorific normally reserved for rabbis or other prominent Jewish scholars.
Many of the readers of Sufi material in the Geniza were members of the Ḥasidim, or pietists. While these figures did not, as a rule, concede that they were adopting Sufi doctrines, the influence gradually becomes quite clear. Discernible doctrinal parallels begin to emerge under the Spanish Baḥya b. Paqūda (d. c. 1080) but were most fully articulated in Egypt under Abraham (d. 1237) and Obadiah (d. 1265), respectively the son and grandson of Maimonides.Footnote 115 Like Sufis, the pietists followed a “way” (ṭarīq/derekh), led by a master (shaykh), and marked by various states or stations (maqāmāt). Jews could follow this path, as Muslims did Sufism, in addition to and somewhat in isolation from the necessary ritual obligations of their religion. Specific terminology for practices such as secluded prayer (khalwa) and the recitation of the divine names (dhikr) is taken directly from Sufism.Footnote 116 Jewish critiques of the pietistic movement were quick to point out that Jews were imitating “gentile practice” (ḥuqqōt ha-goyīm), but the advocates of the pietistic program were careful to justify their apparent innovations as the restoration of ancient Biblical practice, with the explicit goal of returning to the ancient spirit of prophecy to Israel in preparation for the eschaton.Footnote 117
It seems quite likely that Ibn al-Kīzānī's texts were read in this pietistic milieu. The majority of manuscripts related to Sufism date to the thirteenth century ce, which is probably the case of T-S AS 161.50. In this context, it is even possible that the poems from T-S AS 161.50 were chanted or sung as part of pietistic practice. One document of Judaeo-Arabic poetry from the Firkovitch collection does contain musical annotation, and there is one reference (in the form of a legal denial) to Jewish participation in “zuhdī” dances.Footnote 118 In this context the short meters preferred in T-S AS 161.50, and by Ibn al-Kīzānī in general, is quite striking.
The vocabulary of the three poems, however, is what most clearly indicates a readership in the pietistic milieu. In the first place, there is essentially no Islamic content to the poems, other than a subtle Qur'anic allusion. There is no reference to Muḥammad or his prophecy, or to Ibn al-Kīzānī's kalām, the unorthodoxy of which we hear about from other sources. These are purely negative criteria, but they seem to indicate a pool of common Near Eastern pious idioms available to readers of any monotheistic religion in Egypt in this period.
In a more affirmative sense, however, Ibn al-Kīzānī uses many terms which in other contexts have a Sufi purport, and which were also adopted into Jewish pietistic vocabulary. The Sufi handbook by Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya, is a good benchmark for this vocabulary, both because of its popularity amongst Muslim Sufis, but also because copies of it have been found in the Geniza and Firkovitch collections, so we know that it was also read by Jews.Footnote 119 The Risāla consists of two parts, a list of Sufi masters, and a lexicon of Sufi technical terms.
Two terms that Ibn al-Kīzānī alludes to in his Geniza poems, and which are also defined by al-Qushayrī, are “contentment” (al-qanāʿa), which appears in poems 1 and 3, and freedom (al-ḥurriya), which appears, although not verbatim, in poem 3, through reference to “selling the soul”. Ibn al-Kīzānī's statement that “I found contentment with little to be the greatest wealth” is essentially a paraphrase of a prophetic ḥadīth quoted by al-Qushayrī, “Contentment is treasure that never decreases” (al-qanāʿa kanz lā yafnā).Footnote 120 Like Ibn al-Kīzānī, al-Qushayrī connects freedom to contentment, beginning his discussion with the ḥadīth, “whatever one's soul is content with will suffice a person; he will come to his grave; all things come to their end.”Footnote 121 Like Ibn al-Kīzānī, al-Qushayrī plays with the paradox that “true freedom likes in utterly abject servitude [to God]”. He then goes on to quote the famous Sufi al-Junayd, “the mukātab is a slave so long as a dirham is outstanding”. This refers to the Islamic legal procedure of a slave making a contract with his owner to buy his own freedom. When the speaker in his poem states that “I thus lived wealthy, although possessing not a single dirham”, the economics of his poem follows the logic of al-Qushayrī's entry on ḥurriyya.
Here, we are within a certain Islamicate readerly horizon that was accessible to the Jewish readers of medieval Fusṭāṭ/Cairo via the versions of the Risāla Qushayriyya that they had access to. Moreover, numerous Sufi terms were in the process of being naturalized into Jewish pietistic thought. Several of these also appear in Ibn al-Kīzānī's dīwān, a version of which the Geniza readers presumably could consult. We have already seen two instances in Ibn al-Kīzānī's oeuvre of the term dhikr, and these could be multiplied.Footnote 122 Dhikr, here meaning repetition or invocation (of the divine names or other scriptural formulae), was practiced by both Sufis and Jewish pietists, although beyond the fact that it took place among Jews, very little is known regarding performance details.Footnote 123 Likewise, Ibn al-Kīzānī refers to kitmān (the concealment of a secret), a practice alluded to also by Obadiah Maimonides.Footnote 124 Obadiah means the necessity of the pietist to tactfully conceal his beliefs, presumably to avoid controversy. Ibn al-Kīzānī refers to kitmān in two senses; in the scenario of love poetry in which the chaste lover must conceal his passion, and in a more gnomic context. In this vein he writes that “the happiest of people is the one who conceals his secret” (asʿadu l-nāsi man yukātim sirrah).Footnote 125 Egyptian Jewish pietists would have interpreted such generic conventions within their own hermeneutic framework.
This last example demonstrates the extent to which these common Arabic lexemes were liable to multiple senses in varying contexts. There is no way to determine whether Jewish readers were reading Ibn al-Kīzānī “mystically”, but there is ample evidence that the same Arabic Sufi lexicon was employed in their circles. Likewise, we have seen several examples that indicate Ibn al-Kīzānī was composing at least some of his poetry for an intended audience of readers employing a Sufi analytic framework. Evidently, he was successful enough in this that both Jewish and Muslim readers found his form of mystic asceticism appealing.
Conclusion
When the Shiite pilgrim al-Harawī (d. 611/1215) visited the Qarāfa cemetery sometime between 570/1174 and 572/1177, he took note of the tombs of al-Shāfiʿī and Ibn al-Kīzānī (whom he calls Abū ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Kīrānī).Footnote 126 There were many other members of ahl al-Bayt for him to visit in the area, so his text is far from conclusive evidence that Shiites visited the tombs of al-Shāfiʿī and his followers, but it seems reasonable to assume that the tomb received a religiously diverse group of visitors. Muslims, Christians and Jews visiting the same tombs during this period in Syria is well-attested.Footnote 127 As in so many of the features of Egyptian religious life touched on thus far – eastern scholars, institutionalized Sufism, state endowment of madrasas – tomb-visitation in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods merely continued practices already in evidence during the Fatimid period.
ʿImād al-Dīn and al-Khabūshānī's accusations against Ibn al-Kīzānī of bidʿa, tashbīh and the like, then, only in part represent a break with earlier practice, some Sunni reaction to the Fatimid milieu. ʿImād al-Dīn's master, Saladin, had been a Fatimid vizier and al-Khabūshānī benefited from his endowed madrasa-building in Egypt that had, in fact, already begun under the Fatimids. What they were in fact doing is diverting popular piety as it existed to their own ends. Al-Khabūshānī no doubt continued to envisage al-Shāfiʿī's tomb as a site of pilgrimage after the Ṣalāḥiyya madrasa was built, but it would serve as the exclusive object of veneration. In the literary realm, ʿImād al-Dīn preserved the works of Ibn al-Kīzānī, but as a fine stylist and composer of love ditties. It would seem that his gnomic, ascetic and Sufi-inflected verse had much popular appeal, but this did not find its way into the Kharīda.
If we can imagine al-Khabūshānī dismayed by the reverent pilgrims coming to visit the dusty complex of mausolea containing Ibn al-Kīzānī's grave beside al-Shāfiʿī's, it is now possible to imagine some Jewish visitors in the crowd. This image may be a phantom: the tantalizing materiality of the Geniza documents often tempts scholars to fit them into a pre-existing narrative. Nevertheless, there are numerous cogent reasons to add Ibn al-Kīzānī's oeuvre to the growing list of Sufi works that Paul Fenton has uncovered amongst the Geniza pietists. It is easy to imagine his Jewish readers because Ibn al-Kīzānī was not dogmatically Muslim enough. It is a curious fact that, in his project of normalized, Sunni-friendly adab, ʿImād al-Dīn objected to Ibn al-Kīzānī's theology and pious maxims, but not his love poetry. In the era that Saladin inaugurated, ʿImād al-Dīn and al-Khabūshānī were continuing several trends in Egypt that pre-dated the Ayyubids or were imported from elsewhere, but it is difficult, in their relegation of Ibn al-Kīzānī to a heretical artefact, not to see some hardening of Sunni attitudes – not towards non-Muslims, but towards each other.
Appendix: Ibn al-Kīzānī's poems by meter, rhyme, genre, and source
IDI=ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī
Rhyme II: X=any consonant, 3=any short vowel, 2=ū or ī
See Kathrin Müller, Kritische Untersuchungen zum Diwan des Kumait b. Zaid (Freiburg Breisgau: Schwarz, n.d.).
Meter II: see W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 2:358–68.
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