SHI'I FORGING OF SUNNI
LITERATURE AND SCHOLARS
Q: Please tell me more on what Abdul-Rahmaan Jami writes
about the battle of Siffeen and about Ali (RA) is true in his
Shawahid un Nubuwwah 'I testify there is no God but Allah. I
testify that Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah, and I
testify that Ali is the Wasi of the Prophet Muhammad'. Is
Abdul-Rahman Jami a reliable author or scholar of the Sunni.
A: My response to the incident allegedly quoted by Mawlana
Jami follows:
Mawlana 'Abd ar-Rahman ibn Ahmad al-Jami was a great
scholar and Sufi who died in 898 AH. He excelled in various
fields, such as grammar, philosophy, logic, theology and
jurisprudence, in which field he followed the Hanafi school.
In addition he was a refined poet of the Persian language.
Amongst the various writings ascribed to him is a book in
Persian called "Shawahid an-Nubuwwah". However, there are a
number of things to keep in mind when discussing the contents
of books such as this. One of these is a general idea of
historiography; and the other is an overview of an unusual
biographical and literary phenomenon that appeared in Iran
during the 11th and 12th centuries, which I will term, for
lack of existing nomenclature, "the Safavid Rehabilitation".
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The mere mention of an alleged incident in a book does not
guarantee its authenticity. It is for this reason that Muslims
have, since the earliest days of Islam, developed the system
of "isnad" in terms of which the narrator or the documenting
author had to state each and every successive source through
whom the report had been handed down to him, on the basis of
which its authenticity could then be determined.
No author, howsoever eminent and learned, confers the
benefit of authenticity upon the material he includes into his
book merely by virtue of his personality. This is true even of
the great Imams al-Bukhari and Muslim. The authenticity of the
ahadith in their respective collections is not due to their
personalities, but rather to the fact that the material which
they included into their collections complied with the rigid
criteria of authenticity.
Therefore, even a historian like Ibn Jarir at-Tabari, whose
history is meticulously recorded with complete chains of
narration, makes no claim of authenticity for the material
documented in his book, and declares in the very opening of
his book that the material in it is only as authentic as the
chains of narration through which it was handed down to him.
("Tarikh at-Tabari" vol. 1 p. 24)
In the case of this particular report from the book "Shawahid
an-Nubuwwah", one is immediately struck by two things: one,
the complete lack of sources; and two, the yawning
chronological gap of almost a thousand years which separate
the author, Jami (if it is indeed him) from the time of
alleged ocurrence. With a time lapse such as that, it is
absolutely inconceivable that the information could be
first-hand; there had to have been a source.
This of course leads to the logical question: What was the
source? Inability to answer this question leaves us in a
cul-de-sac inasmuch as concerns the historicity of the
incident.
What further robs this anecdote of the last bit of
respectability it might have laid claim to is the fact that
nowhere else in the reliable, or even unreliable annals of
history, has any incident of this nature been reported.
However, there is another angles that begs investigation.
That angle poses the following question: No matter whether the
incident is true or not, why would a person like Mawlana Jami
quote it? I hope that the discussion under the next heading
will produce an answer to this question.
THE SAFAVID REHABILITATION
Jami lived in Persia (Iran) shortly before the Safavid
conquest which commenced in 905 AH /1500 CE. It is for all
practical purposes a matter of consensus amongst historians
that the people of Iran were overwhelmingly of the Ahl as-Sunnah
before the Safavid takeover. Conversion to Shi'ism was a
relentlessly enforced policy of the Safavid state, and it had
several spinoffs, one of which was a rehabilitation of the
great intellectual figures of Iran's immediate and distant
past. Persons such as Imam al-Ghazali, Hafiz Abu Nu'aym of
Isfahan, the poet Sa'di of Shiraz, the muhaddith Jamal ad-Din
of Herat, and the theologian-philosopher Jalal ad-Din ad-Dawwani,
were rehabilitated to appear as either open or crypto-Shi'is.
Al-Ghazali's monumental "Ihya" was rewritten by Mulla
Muhsin Fayd al-Kashani (who died in 1091 AD, and who enjoyed
the patronage of Safavid state) along Shifi lines, and
entitled "al-Mahajjah al-Bayda". This new recension of the "Ihya",
its author claimed was necessitated by the fact that its
author, towards the end of his life, converted to Shi'ism, but
did not live long enough thereafter to rewrite his magnum
opus. (See "al-Mahajjah al-Bayda" vol. 1 p.)
In the case Hafiz Abu Nu'aym we find Mulla Muhammad Baqir
al-Majlisi (probably the greatest clerical figure in Safavid
Iran, who died in 1111 AH) "discovering" the fact that Abu
Nu'aym was a crypto-Shi'i a full seven centuries after his
death in 413 AH. Al-Majlisi goes as far as to claim descent
from Hafiz Abu Nu'aym, but conveniently ignores the fact that
his claims are reduced to ridicule in the face of Abu Nu'aym's
own works such as "Kitab al-Imamah" and "Fadafil al-Khulafa
al-Arbafah". (See Majlisi's claims in Khwansari's "Rawdat al-Jannat"
vol. 1 p. 273)
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ibn Asfad ad-Dawwani (died 928 AH)
was a theologian-philospher from Shiraz who stood heir to the
intellectual tradition of as-Sayyid ash-Sharif al-Jurjani and
Safd ad-Din at-Taftazani. He was also a Shafi'i jurist. He
lived his last years in Shiraz at the time that Shah Isma'il
Safavi was conquering various parts of Iran, and was strongly
averse to the Safavids. Yet, it was not long before his
personality too, was rehabilitated into that of a devout Shi'i,
and he was credited with authorship of a purely Shi'i work in
Persian entitled "Nur al-Hidayah". (See the editor's not on
page 34 of volume 2 of "al-Anwar an-Nu’maniyyah".)
Sayyid Jamal ad-Din of Herat is best known for the devotion
with which he and his family taught and commented upon the
famous hadith collection "Mishkat al-Masabih". He died in 926
AH. Strangely enough (or should one start replacing
"strangely" with "as can be expected") he is listed as a Shifi
both by Qadi Nifmatullah Shustari in "Majalis al-Mu'minin" and
Mulla Muhammad Baqir al-Khwansari in "Rawdat al-Jannat" (vol.
1 p. 449). More interestingly, his own book "Rawdat al-Ahbab"
was subjected to interpolation, as a result of which it came
to exhibit strong Shifi tendencies.
Mawlana Jami was a contemporary of both Jalal ad-Din ad-Dawwani
and Sayyid Jamal ad-Din, and as a scholar and man of letters
he enjoyed a reputation by no means less than theirs. Like
them he was a devout Sunni. In Tasawwuf he was an initiate of
the Naqshbandi tariqah as a direct disciple of the great
Khwajah 'Ubaydullah Ahrar of Samarqand. The extreme acrimony
which existed between the Naqshbandis and the Shi'ah can be
seen from the fact that the first Sufi tariqah to be
exterminated from Safavid Iran was the Naqshbandi tariqah.
Mawlana Jami's credentials as a Sunni is further underlined by
his authorship of a polemical tract against the Shi'ah
entitled "Silsilat adh-Dhahab". As a last nail in this
particular coffin, one might mention the fact that the
deplorable Safavid habit of desecrating the graves of Sunni
men of learning induced Mawlana Jami’s son to remove his
mortal remains from his grave when the Safavid armies marched
upon Jam. When the Safavids found his grave empty, they burned
the wood around it. (See Ibn al-'Imad, "Shadharat adh-Dhahab"
vol. 9 p. 543)
Finally, in the light of the above -Jami's pronounced
Sunnism, and the aforementioned Safavid "rehabilitation" of
eminent men of learning of the pre-Safavid era- it seems an
inescapable conclusion that the works of Jami had been
tampered with in the same way as those of his contemporaries,
Sayyid Jamal ad-Din and Jalal ad-Din ad-Dawwani.
Like his two contemporaries, Mawlana Jami too, eventually
came to be labeled as a Shi'i. Mulla Muhammad Baqir Khwansari
has included Mawlana Jami in his book of Shi’i biographies, "Rawdat
al-Jannat" (pp. 437-438). For what reason could this be, other
than the fact that his works, or works that were eventually
ascribed to him were posthumously filled with material of a
markedly Shi’i flavour?
And Allah knows best
Shaykh Taha Karaan
DARUL ULOOM AL-ARABIYYA AL-ISLAAMIYYA, Western Cape (SA)
Last modified:
July 19, 2007
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