Review of Sufi hermeneutics: the Qur'an

commentary of Rashīd al-Dīn Maybudī,

Author: James Winston Morris

Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/2510

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Published in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 130, no. 4, pp. 644-646, 2010

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644 Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.4 (2010)

Sufi Hermeneutics: The Qurʾan Commentary of Rashīd al-Dīn Maybudī. By Annabel Keeler.
Qurʾanic Studies Series, vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Insti-
tute of Ismaili Studies, 2006. Pp. xxviii + 378. $125.

The starting point of this dense and richly rewarding study is the immense early Persian Qurʾan
commentary begun by al-Maybudī in 520/1126, whose still widely popular ten-volume published
version is commonly attributed in Iran to the famous earlier Khurāsānī Sufi, ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī
(d. 1088)—the inspirational saintly figure whose distinctive spiritual teachings are frequently quoted
throughout Maybudī̄ ’s work. Maybudī’s only fully surviving book is, like most Qurʾan commentaries,
a masterful, yet highly personalized compendium of earlier Qurʾanic commentaries and translations.
More importantly, as the main title of this study suggests, Maybudī’s voluminous work also constitutes
a richly complex and lastingly influential creative literary reworking of a diverse range of antecedent
“Sufi” literary traditions—especially the abundant hagiographies and classical manuals on spiritual
practice, teaching, apologetics, and homiletics—in both Arabic and early New Persian from the two
preceding centuries.
In many respects, Maybudī’s compendium represents the culminating Persian synthesis and most
visible literary landmark of what would eventually turn out to be key developments in the much wider
shaping of later Islamic (not just Persian-language or “Sufi”) religious tradition. Reflecting that com-
plex historical situation, the focus of Keeler’s analysis throughout this magisterial study is always
twofold. On the one hand, she provides an abundantly illustrated account of characteristic aspects of
Maybudī’s distinctive rhetoric and literary style, hermeneutics, and his central spiritual themes and
teachings. Simultaneously, each step of that dense “doctrinal” and rhetorical exposition of Maybudī’s
own writing is carefully interwoven with a constantly ongoing diachronic analysis of his literary and
saintly predecessors and inspirations (and also, but in less detail, his more famous contemporaries and
successors) from the converging domains of Qurʾan commentary, hagiography, sectarian polemics,
uṣūl, spiritual practice, Persian literature, and the gradual institutionalization of nascent “Sufism.” In
that respect, Keeler’s study offers such a detailed window into several decades of related scholarly
research in Iran and the West (with a special emphasis on the contributions of G. Böwering, who
provided the foreword to this volume, and N. Pourjavady) that it often reads as a kind of focused ency-
clopedia or scholarly Handbuch on each of those multiple traditions—a feature visibly reflected in its
almost 150 accompanying pages of intricate footnotes, bibliography, and indices.
While the few specialists in each of those intertwined historical fields are already relatively familiar
with Maybudī and Anṣārī, it is fortunate that a far wider international circle of readers interested in
Islamic thought and spirituality are much more likely to have read translations and related studies of
such contemporary or slightly later Persian authors as Aḥmad al-Ghazālī (d. ca. 1126), ʿAyn al-Quḍāt
al-Hamadhānī (d. 1131), Rūzbihān al-Baqlī (d. 1209), or the even more celebrated line of Persian spiri-
tual poets linking Sanāʾī (d. 1131), ʿAṭṭār (d. 1220), Rūmī (d. 1273), Saʿdī (d. 1292), ʿIrāqī (d. 1289),
Ḥāfiẓ (d. 1389), and Jāmī (d. 1492). For the most fascinating feature of Maybudī’s “commentary,” as
of Keeler’s thorough summary of its key features, is the fact that even the uninitiated reader of any one
of those more famous (and widely translated) later poets and prose writers who encounters this volume
will immediately recognize virtually all the typical features of the vast domain of literary-interpretive
techniques, symbolic fields, spiritual practices, and intellectual theories (cosmology, metaphysics, hagi-
ology, and so on) that are largely taken for granted by those classical Persian authors and apparently
assumed to be familiar to their original audiences. Indeed, the same constantly repeated experience of
immediate recognition of familiar religious and spiritual themes is likely to be shared by readers from
those much wider regions of the contemporary Muslim world where the historical transmission and
assimilation of Islam in general were largely effected through creative adaptations of originally Persian-
ate writers, artists, and social and cultural institutions.
Thus, the first unifying dimension of Maybudī’s commentary that Keeler analyzes in detail (chapters
2–3) is his characteristic focus on the communication of the key features of the “spiritual hermeneutics”
of the Qurʾan in light of each reader’s necessarily personal, lifelong experience of inspiration, illumina-
tion, and interactive integration of those insights with the corresponding unique “Signs” of their own
 Reviews of Books 645

life and spiritual challenges and discoveries—together with a host of propaedeutic and precaution-
ary teachings likewise assembled from related spiritual disciplines and fields of Islamic learning. The
following chapters (4–7), which are the scholarly heart of this entire work, highlight Maybudī’s dis-
tinctive integration and rhetorical expression of virtually all the characteristic spiritual themes (meta-
physical, theological, practical, pedagogical, and prophetological/hagiographic) of earlier Sufi authors
and teachers within the pervasive context of divine and human “Love” (ʿishq). This comprehensive
literary, symbolic, and rhetorical complex centered on God as Love—so omnipresent in the work of
most of the later Persian classical authors already mentioned—has traditionally been portrayed as the
special focus and achievement of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī, especially in his Sawāniḥ. But as Keeler points
out, in reference to the historical research of a number of recent Iranian scholars, the pervasiveness and
complex interweaving of that distinctive focus throughout Maybudī’s work—and quite possibly in the
underlying Persian teachings of Anṣārī himself—opens up profound and as yet unresolved questions
about the wider, largely undocumented creative popular movements of Persianate preaching, teaching,
practice (especially in greater Khurāsān) which may have long preceded their more enduringly visible
expression and complex “doctrinal” synthesis in Maybudī’s commentary. Finally, both the earlier rhe-
torical and pedagogical dimensions of Keeler’s analysis are beautifully woven together in three con-
cluding chapters (8–10) that outline in detail the intricate archetypal typologies of spiritual growth and
development elaborated in Maybudī’s treatment of the widely scattered Qurʾanic passages concerning
Abraham, Moses, and Joseph. Because this last section is necessarily embedded in particular portions
of Maybudī’s exposition, these final chapters bring most readers of this study as close as they are able
to come, in this volume, to some more living sense of the evocative and poetic “musical” qualities of
the original Persian text.
For students of Islamic religion and culture, at any level, Keeler’s study provides an indispens-
able, thoroughly documented background for four key interrelated historical developments that were
to become inseparable from the subsequent creative unfolding of post-Mongol Islam as a truly world
religion—although the primary focus of this volume on strictly literary and philological dimensions
of that process means that readers must fill in the necessary hypotheses about the underlying wider
popular dimensions of this process of religious acculturation and transformation, beyond the tiny writ-
ing circle of urban literati. These four ultimately world-historical developments include the complexly
interactive and creative “Persianization” of earlier Arabic learned disciplines and practical spiritual
disciplines, which eventually resulted, over only a few centuries, in the near-universal popular assimi-
lation of a related complex of religious and spiritual ideas, stories, spiritual exemplars, and operative
understandings of Islamic heritage taken for granted by later classical authors. Intricately involved in
both those developments, throughout this period, was a mysterious process of creative experimentation
and gradual establishment of new popular (as well as more specialized) socio-religious institutions
and spiritual paths, eventually resulting—to take only one almost universally visible example—in the
omnipresence of the complex of rituals, spiritual practices, hagiological assumptions, affiliations, expe-
riences, and social institutions surrounding the practice of ziyāra (‘visitation’). And lastly, as already
mentioned, there is in Persian writing the remarkably sudden emergence and later predominance of
the characteristic ornate rhetorical mix of prose and poetry, with its equally characteristic personalized
focus on the religion and spirituality of Love and on ethico-spiritual exposition through richly evoca-
tive storytelling. All four of these wider processes were, of course, thoroughly and creatively repeated,
in new local cultures, vernacular languages, and locally adapted institutions, throughout many regions
of the rapidly expanding Islamic world throughout the post-Mongol era—just as we can see happening
so visibly on a global scale today.
Finally, given the historical importance (and contemporary readability and popularity) of Maybudī’s
original work, and the scholarly depth and comprehensiveness of Keeler’s far-reaching study, one
cannot but note the poignant irony—still unfortunately all too common in Islamic scholarship—that
the actual subject of this study is still inaccessible beyond its original Persian. This pioneering study
appears as vol. 3 in the rapidly expanding, ambitious, and admirably ecumenical “Qurʾanic Studies
Series” sponsored by the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. The provision of a full companion
volume of carefully selected representative passages translated from Maybudī, whether at the hand
646 Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.4 (2010)

of Annabel Keeler or of other collaborators, would vastly extend the readership and relevance of this
impressively authoritative scholarly reference work, both in classrooms and among that younger gen-
eration of Muslims everywhere whose new educational and cultural circumstances are increasingly
remote from the once-prevalent spiritual approaches and interpretive assumptions so beautifully illus-
trated throughout Maybudī’s work, as well as the more celebrated masterpieces of his heirs in Persian
and many other classical Islamicate literary traditions.

James W. Morris
Boston College

Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe. By Marc David Baer.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x + 332. $55.

In Ottoman historiography the seventeenth century has often been represented merely as a transi-
tional period between the “classical” sixteenth century and the period of so-called decline beginning
conventionally in the eighteenth century. As such the century has lacked an independent narrative of
its own. All the more remarkable, then, that we have Baer’s book put front and center the drama of
Ottoman politics, organized around the career of Mehmed IV (r. 1648–87).
The central concept, as the title indicates, is the process of religious conversion, but with two
important qualifications. First, religious conversion is considered from only one perspective, that of the
mediator of conversion, not that of the converted person. As such, the study focuses on the mindset
and strategy of the converters, in this case members of the Ottoman imperial family and their retinue,
as agents of religious transformation. This inter-religious conversion is closely linked with, and in this
story preceded by, the intra-religious conversion of Muslims themselves, namely, the intensification
of their own piety. Second, Baer broadens the scope of religious conversion to include not only the
process by which the imperial household facilitated the conversion of non-Muslim persons, who in the
Arabic phrase were “honored by the glory of Islam,” but also the ways in which they transformed non-
Muslim space (churches, residential quarters, etc.) into Muslim space.
The book is divided into eleven chapters, with a separate introduction, conclusion, and postscript.
While the chapters follow a roughly chronological order, there is a fair amount of overlap in the treat-
ment of events, personalities, arguments, and themes. Chapters one and two set the stage by establish-
ing the conditions of crisis to which the intra-religious conversion, which Baer calls the “conversion
of self,” was a natural response. The first chapter, entitled “Inauspicious Enthronement,” describes in
vivid terms the tumultuous accession of Mehmed IV, and the second chapter, entitled “A Decade of
Crisis,” narrates the first decade of Mehmed’s rule, during which the empire was confronted with a set
of interrelated challenges: the recurring and violent power struggles between palace factions, growing
financial deficits, a continuing pattern of rebellion in the provinces, and a prolonged and debilitating
war with Venice. In these chapters as with others, Baer is concerned less with establishing an objec-
tive reality of crisis than with its perception, as he draws primarily on the narrative accounts of elite
observers, who, as he writes, draw a direct link between the turbulence they witness and the erosion of
their social and political status.
Though not organized as a formal division in the book, chapters three through six make up a natural
grouping, as they trace the various processes of conversion as defined by the author, but at an early
stage in the reign of Mehmed IV. Chapter three concisely traces the history of the Muslim reformist
Kadızadeli movement until the 1650s, drawing attention to historiographical debates over the relative
weight of social versus religious factors in the movement’s development. The Kadızadelis would pro-
duce Vani Mehmed Efendi, the religious scholar who played a central role in the turn of the imperial
household to piety. Chapter four, entitled “Islamizing Istanbul,” shifts to the geographical dimension
by charting the inter-religious conversion of non-Muslim to Muslim space after the Great Fire of 1660.
The destruction by fire of many non-Muslim homes, businesses, and places of worship created an