Special Feature (Research Note)／特集（研究ノート）

Slavery and Sufism

The Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’ of Abū Nu‘aym al-Iṣbahānī (d.
430/1038) as a Source on Slavery in Medieval Islamic
Civilization

Jonathan A.C. BROWN

Ⅰ. Introduction
Ⅱ. The Author of the Ḥilya
Ⅲ. Trivia on Slavery in Islamic
Civilization
Ⅳ. Slavery and Sufism in the Near
Eastern Tradition
Ⅴ. Slaves Saints in the Ḥilya
Ⅵ. Conclusion

奴隷とスーフィー
中世イスラーム文化における「奴隷であること」を見る
ための史料としてのアブー・ヌアイム（1038 年没）の
『聖者たちの飾り』

ジョナサン A.C. ブラウン

本稿は、「奴隷であること」が中世イスラーム文化においてどのように語られてきた
かを知るための史料として、著名なスーフィー人名録である『聖者たちの飾りと純粋な

29 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

人々の諸世代 Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’ wa Ṭabaqāt al-Aṣfiyā’ 』の持つ価値を探求する。
『聖者
たちの飾り』を編纂したアブー・ヌアイム・アル＝イスファハーニー（1038 年没）は、スー
フィズムとハディース学の分野で顕著な業績を残したイラン系の人物である。本稿は、
アブー・ヌアイムの学識に関して現在流布している学説を再検討し、いくつかの修正
を提案する。特に、アブー・ヌアイムがアシュアリー神学派を支持していたという説と、
ハーキム・アン＝ナイサーブーリー（1014 年没）のような、彼よりも上の世代の指導的
ハディース学者との関係に焦点を当てる。その上で、中東の一神教、哲学、神秘主義
の伝統において、
「奴隷であること」
のイディオマッティックな意味を論じる。この議論は、
「奴隷である」という表現が引き起こしたであろう神学的熱望を探求することで、新約
聖書の伝承をとおして古代からイスラーム文化に引き継がれた、人間たる信仰者を神
の奴隷とする観念を再検討することになる。そしてまた、「奴隷であること」を人間が
正しく本性と境遇に直面するための理想的状況とするストア哲学の観念が、古代後期
の中東の宗教思想に大きな影響を与えたことを明らかにする。

本稿は、『聖者たちの飾り』に記載された人々が、その同じ主題をイスラーム的な装
いの中でどのように反復し、強調しているかを示すことで、
『聖者たちの飾り』に例証
されるイスラームのスーフィーの伝承を、古代からの連続という文脈の中に位置づけ
る。そして最後に、「奴隷であること」の俗世的現実と精神的次元の双方が、アブー・
ヌアイムの生涯へと至る数世紀の中でどのように理解されていたかに関して、『聖者
たちの飾り』が提供する独自の情報を探求する。特に、
『聖者たちの飾り』の中で奴隷
の聖者に関する部分に光を当て、イスラームの最初の 500 年のイラクとイランにおいて、
奴隷と人種の交差がどのように理解されていたのかに言及する。

I. Introduction

[Abū al-Shaykh] ‘Abd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. Ja‘far narrated to us, saying: I

read in the book of Dāwūd [al-Iṣbahānī]: Abū Thawr narrated to me, saying:
al-Shāfi‘ī was among the most generous and open-handed of people. He once
bought a skilled female slave who cooked and baked sweets, and he gave her as
a condition that he would not approach her sexually, for he was ill and unable
to sleep with women at that time. Then he would come to us and say, “Desire
whatever you all would like, for I’ve purchased a slave woman who is able to
make whatever you want.” So some of our friends would say to her, “Make such

AJAMES no.36-2 2020 30

 and such.” And we would order what we wanted, and this made him happy. [Abū
Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 9, 133]

This vignette is found in the entry on al-Shāfi ‘ ī (d. 204/820) in the famous
biographical dictionary of Sufi saints, the Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’, by Abū Nu‘aym al-Iṣbahānī
(d. 430/1038). This story contains a great deal of useful information. First, it is an
instance in which Sunni Hadith scholars admitted consulting a written source without
a living transmission from the author: it comes to Abū Nu‘aym via one of his main
sources for information across his oeuvre, a fellow giant of Isfahani Hadith scholarship,
Abū al-Shaykh (d. 369/978), who read the story in a book by Dāwūd al-Ẓāhirī (d.
270/884). He had in turn heard it from al-Shāfi‘ī’s student and a noted jurist in his own
right, Abū Thawr (d. 240/854). Second, the vignette provides alleged information about
al-Shāfi‘ī’s health, from one of his admirers, not a detractor. Third, it seems to suggest
that people could purchase female slaves with conditions placed in the sales contract
such as a guarantee not to seek sexual access to them. We learn in a report several pages
later that al-Shāfi‘ī had at least one other female slave, Dīnānīr, by whom he fathered a
son [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 9, 142].
The Ornament of Saints and Generations of the Pure (Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’ wa
Ṭ abaq ā t al-A ṣ fiy ā ’, henceforth the Ḥ ilya) frequently appears in the citations of
premodern Muslim ulama and modern Orientalists alike, and not because it contained
landmark arguments on the part of its author. In fact, given the book’s enormous size,
prose expressing the author’s own opinions or arguments is negligible. The Ḥilya is a
compilation of transmitted material from the world of Islam that Abū Nu‘aym looked
back on from his hometown of Isfahan in the twilight of the Buyid state. It constitutes
one of several important texts authored by major Sufis of the Iran-Iraq circuit at the
time, including Abū Nu ‘aym’s own teacher al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), which built a
history for the Sufi tradition and expressed how it envisioned itself and its relation to
the rest of Islamic scholarship through composing biographical dictionaries of figures
whom the authors felt had been noteworthy Sufis. The Ḥilya’s contents range from
Prophetic Hadiths (Ibn Ḥajar counted 4,408 Hadiths, ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Ghumārī counted
4,783), to opinions of the Companions and Successors on issues of law, theology, ethics,
and piety; from references to history and daily life, to texts of letters written by figures
like the caliph ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz (d. 101/720); from the saying of innumerable
later scholars, to Abū Nu‘aym’s own laconic opinions about the authenticity of various

31 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

transmitted reports.(1) Raif Georges Khoury [1977] has already discussed the value of
the Ḥilya as a storehouse for transmitted material from earlier Islamic history, but this
present study focuses specifically on the value of the Ḥilya in the study of slavery in
Islamic civilization.

II. The Author of the Ḥilya

Abū Nu ‘ aym Aḥmad b. ‘ Abd Allāh al-Iṣbahānī (336/948–430/1038) was a major

figure of the Baghdad-Khurasan scholarly circuit in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Like other accomplished Sunni scholars of his day, he was the son of a city and the
open road. Born into a family of scholars in Isfahan, both he and his father spent many
years of their lives traveling between the great scholarly centers of the region seeking
knowledge and collecting Hadiths. Abū Nu‘aym studied with leading scholars in his
native Isfahan (in particular the longevous immigrant from Palestine, Abū al-Qāsim
al-Ṭabarānī (d. 360/971), whose lessons Abū Nu ‘ aym attended at the age of only
twelve), Nishapur, Jurjān, Ahvaz, Damascus, Basra, Kūfa, Wāsiṭ, Ayla, Mecca and, of
course, Baghdad [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 8, 119]. He learned at the hands of major
figures in the Ahl al-Ḥadīth tradition, which was still gelling into its distinct Shāfi‘ī and
Ḥanbalī strains, among them al-Dāraquṭnī (d. 385/995) in Baghdad, Abū Bakr al-Ājurrī
(d. 360/970) in Mecca, Ibn ‘ Adī (d. 365/975–6) in Jurjān, Abū al-Shaykh and Ibn
Manda (d. 395/1005) in Isfahan, and al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī (d. 405/1014) in Nishapur.(2)
In the Sufi tradition, which had long been closely associate with the Ahl al-Ḥadīth
despite its critics, Abū Nu‘aym studied with the influential Nishapuri scholar al-Sulamī
and Ja‘far al-Khuldī (d. 348/959) in Baghdad.(3)
Although Abū Nu ‘ aym was claimed by the Shāfi ‘ ī school of law in later
biographical dictionaries of the school and does reserve exceptional praise for al-Shāfi‘ī,
championing that school does not seem to have been high on his agenda [al-Subkī 1992:
vol. 4, 18–25; Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 9, 109]. He seems to identify more closely with
the broader trend of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth, especially with its theology, than with its Shāfi‘ī
branch. Concerning an opinion attributed to al-Shāfi‘ī on the issue of seeing God on
the Day of Judgment, Abū Nu‘aym politely suggest that it would have been better for
al-Shāfi‘ī to have remained silent on the issue [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 9, 117]. He
does not state this (he does not need to), but such fideistic minimalism was the position

AJAMES no.36-2 2020 32

 of Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), the paragon of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth whom Abū Nu ‘ aym
repeatedly honors as “Imām Aḥmad” [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 8, 174, 257].
There is a notion that Abū Nu‘aym adhered to the Ash‘arī school of theology.
This discourse in complex theological dialectic had been formalized in Nishapur and
Baghdad during Abū Nu‘aym’s own lifetime by figures like Ibn Fūrak (d. 406/1015),
Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāyīnī (d. 418/1027) and al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013), and was
increasingly associated with the Shāfi‘ī school of law. Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201), a later
Ḥanbalī critic of Ash‘arism, describes Abū Nu‘aym as “inclining” strongly towards the
school [Ibn al-Jawzī 1992: vol. 15, 268]. The only evidence that Ibn al-Jawzī produces
for this accusation (it seems to occur only his chronicle, the Muntaẓam), however, is
the opinion of one Ismā‘īl b. Muḥammad al-Qūmisī (or al-Qūmisānī) (d. 497/1103)
of Hamadan. He states that there are three Hadith masters (ḥuffāẓ) that he did not like
due to their chauvinistic attachments (ta‘aṣṣub), al-Ḥākim, al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d.
463/1071) and Abū Nu‘aym. The first, Ibn al-Jawzī explains, was accused of Shiism,
the second two were staunch Ash‘arīs. Although a Hadith scholar of good repute,
this Ismā ‘ īl al-Qūmisī was insignificant compared to the towering figures he was
criticizing here. And neither he nor any other source proffer substantive evidence of any
noteworthy Ash‘arism on the part of Abū Nu‘aym.(4)
Abū Nu‘aym is also listed as an Ash‘arī in Ibn ‘Asākir’s (d. 571/1176) [1984:
246–247] defense of the school. But there does not seem to be evidence for this
position, at least not anything resembling the high Ash‘arī school of al-Ghazālī (d.
505/1111) and al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), with its clear embrace of and deep engagement in
speculative theology. Abū Nu‘aym’s surviving works give the impression of someone
with no interest in the science of theological dialectic. Rather, he seems clearly within
the kalām-averse tradition of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth, though on its less conservative side.
In this sense he was like contemporaries like Abū Bakr al-Bayhaqī (d. 458/1066) and
earlier scholars like al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870). And by ‘less conservative’ here we should
understand Abū Nu‘aym’s theology as still within the strong Ahl al-Ḥadīth stream –
where theological texts like Abū Nu‘aym’s Description of Heaven (Ṣifat al-Janna)
and al-Bayhaqī’s Book on [God’s] Names and Attributes (Kitāb al-Asmā’ wa al-Ṣifāt)
consist of little more than long strings of Hadiths meant to convey a theological point
without any exegesis.
The attacks on Abū Nu‘aym for his Ash‘arism by “Ḥanbalīs,” reported by some
sources like Abū Ṭāhir al-Silafī (d. 576/1180), should not be understood as confirming

33 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

his alleged Ash‘arism (read: embrace of theological speculation) but rather seen as
another in a series of vicious attacks on completely legitimate members of the Ahl
al-Ḥadīth, like al-Bukhārī, by what I earlier dubbed the über-Sunnis. This wing of the
Sunni/Ahl al-Ḥadīth movement was so extreme in its theological conservatism that
they insisted that even the sound of the Quran being recited or the ink of its writing on
the page were eternal and uncreated – an absurd position that no less a scholar than
al-Bukhārī had stressed that his own teacher Ibn Ḥanbal would not have accepted and
which had been rejected among mainstream Sunnis (Ahl al-Ḥadīth and proper Ash‘arīs
alike) by Abū Nu‘aym’s day [Brown 2007: 74–81, 138, 220]. As the later biographer
al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) observed when assessing reports about Abū Nu‘aym’s views,
the people attacking Abū Nu‘aym because he allegedly believed the sounds and written
material of the Quran were created were not “Ḥanbalis,” they were idiots [al-Dhahabī
1992–1998: vol. 17, 459–460]. Al-Dhahabī’s friend and peer intellectual historian Ibn
Taymīya (d. 728/1328) seems to have had access to now lost ‘offending’ works by Abū
Nu‘aym. He agrees that the controversy, as well as Abū Nu‘aym’s legendary personal
dispute with his rival Hadith master of Isfahan, Ibn Manda, was not one between an
Ash‘arī infected by the vice of speculative theology on the one hand and a rightly-
guided partisan of Hadith on the other, but rather one between the more liberal and more
conservative wings of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth movement (whose liberal wing also overlapped
with the conservative part of the Ash‘arī school) [Ibn Taymīya 1991: vol. 1, 268].(5)
Though Abū Nu‘aym at one time studied with Ibn Manda and refers to him with respect
even as he lists his errors, the rivalry between the two was so severe and by all estimates
meritless that it literally became the textbook example of the principle in the Islamic
sciences that the opinions of rival contemporaries of one another are not heeded (as
al-Dhahabī phrases it, kalām al-aqrān ba‘ḍuhum fī ba‘d lā yu‘ba’u bihi) [al-Dhahabī
1963–1964: vol. 1, 111].
Abū Nu ‘ aym turned out to be an influential figure in Islamic intellectual
history. He was a major source for his student al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī in the latter’s
famous History of Baghdad, and his opinions and practices in Hadith transmission,
collection and criticism would be frequently cited by figures from al-Khaṭīb to Ibn
al-Ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245). Most influential, however, has been the largest and most famous
of his numerous works: the Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’, a massive biographical dictionary of
personalities whom Sunnis widely viewed as paragons of the Sufi tradition. Published
in ten volumes in its most famous edition, the Ḥilya was greatly valued as soon as it

AJAMES no.36-2 2020 34

 was completed by its then octogenarian author in 422/1031. The book was brought
to Nishapur from Isfahan even during Abū Nu‘aym’s lifetime and there sold for four
hundred gold dinars [al-Dhahabī 1992–1998: vol. 17, 459]. Copies were sought after
with Muslim scholars’ customary zeal for authenticated transmission. One Bunjīr
b. ‘Abd al-Ghaffār of Hamadan copied the book from Abū Nu‘aym’s own copy and
received permission from him to transmit it. He gifted this copy to another scholar, who
was so grateful that he gave him all the money and property he had with him in return
[Abū Ṭāhir al-Silafī 1993: 279].

III. Trivia on Slavery in Islamic Civilization

Because the Ḥ ilya contains such a vast trove of textual material, and because the
society that produced that text was permeated by the institution of riqq (slavery in the
Sharia), the Ḥilya randomly contains many and invaluable insights into how slavery
functioned and was understood. We find numerous examples of how slaves were seen
as the lowest rung on the social ladder. One saintly scholar, Makhlad b. al-Ḥusayn
of Basra (d. 191/806–7), urges others to follow his example in treating others with
kindness (mudārāt). He states that he is so conscientious of this that he even respects
the rights of “that Ethiopian slave woman who is sifting out grain for my horse” [Abū
Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 8, 266]. A major Hadith scholar and, according to Abū Nu‘aym,
saint, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. Mahdī (d.198/814), makes the point of how vile a heresy the
Jahmīya (broadly, a rationalism advocated by figures like Bishr al-Marīsī (d. 219/834)
that conceived of a ‘ God of the philosophers ’ free of attributes and untrammeled
by knowledge of the particulars of the world) was by stressing that he would not
pray behind a Jahmī or even let one marry his slave woman [Abū Nu ‘ aym 1996:
vol. 9, 6]. On the other hand, the Ḥilya offers insights into the upward path open to
manumitted slaves as well as the phenomenon that the late Ali Mazrui called “ascending
miscegenation” for children born of masters and their slave concubines. The book
includes the story of a Christian slave woman whose master was a pious and ascetic
saint. Long suffering because her master kept giving all their food away, the slave
woman eventually witnessed so many miracles at his hands that she embraced Islam and
went on to become a teacher of the Quran, Hadith and Islamic law in a mosque in Homs
[Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 129].

35 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

 In a version of a debate between al-Shāfi‘ī and the Ḥanafī master Muḥammad
b. Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189/805) that appears in other sources in a shorter form, we
find added material involving slavery. This report explicates the disagreement between
al-Shāfi‘ī and al-Shaybānī about the liability for wrongly appropriated materials. In
the Ḥanafī school, if a person wrongly appropriated a wooden plank, which he then
used in building a house, if this was discovered, he could either return the plank (thus
wrecking his house) or compensate the person he took it from through other means.
Ḥanafīs reasoned that this avoided harm. For al-Shāfi‘ī, the man had to return the plank
even if it meant ruining the house built on it. Al-Shāfi‘ī asks al-Shaybānī what he would
do if a man misappropriated another man’s female slave, had ten sons by her, “all of
whom learned the Quran, gave sermons on the pulpit and served as judges among the
Muslims.” How would al-Shaybānī rule? Al-Shaybānī replies that he would declare that
the slave woman belonged to her original, actual owner, and that these sons were his
slaves as well (since all schools of law agreed that the children of a free husband and
a slave woman belonged to the mother’s owner). But what was more harmful, retorted
al-Shāfi‘ī rhetorically, declaring all these sons slaves (who cannot be judges, etc.) or
removing the plank from the building [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 9, 76]? Here we have
a fascinating insight into how a scholar might assume that harm would be measured
in the society around him, and also into what legal rules were seen as unnegotiable.
Al-Shāfi‘ī’s rhetorical question assumes that his audience would immediately grasp the
immense harm of the Muslim community losing ten pious judges. But neither he nor his
opponent could fathom abandoning two rules they saw as fixed – that slaves could not
be judges and that the children of a slave woman must be the property of her owner.
The Ḥilya contains countless other gems of a more mundane variety. As one of
the Hadiths narrated by a saint, Abū Nu‘aym includes one report in which the Prophet
supposedly teaches “Do not beat your slaves over broken pots, for pots have appointed
life spans just like people do” [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 26; al-Albānī 2000–2005:
vol. 2, 343–344 (#938) ].

IV. Slavery and Sufism in the Near Eastern Tradition

It is not at all surprising to find unusually frequent mentions of slavery in a text from
the Sufi tradition. Slavery was and continued to be a powerful image and idiom in

AJAMES no.36-2 2020 36

 Islamic mysticism, asceticism and piety, as it had been in the Near East prior to Islam.
Of course, slavery and worship had long been idiomatically blended in Near Eastern
monotheism. The relational pairing of man as the slave and The One God as his master
goes back to at least third-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, with the relationship of
subject to ruler folded in as well [Westbook 1995: 1634; Verderame 2018: 19–20]. It
is not clear which meaning preceded which, to be a slave or to worship, from the Old
Semitic roots ‘-b-d and ‘-m-t and their semantic field of ‘to be subordinate to.’ In pre-
Islamic South Arabia, the Sabean language used the coupling of ‘master’ (here m-r-’,
b-‘-l) and ‘slave’ (‘-b-d) both for the social relationship of slave and master and the
theological relationship of man and God [Robin 2003: 119]. In the Levant, the New
Testament often refers to the faithful as the ‘slaves’ (doulos) of the Lord God, though
this is often euphemistically rendered as ‘servants’ in English translations [Spicq 1978:
204–206]. This could even trigger theological tension, as a monotheistic system could
be stressed by the blurring of earthly and transcendent when the worshipper/God binary
overlapped with that of a human slave/human master. Hence the Prophet’s warning in
a famous Hadith that masters should not call their slaves “my slave (‘abdī)” but rather
“my boy” or “my girl,” slaves should not call their owners “master (rabb)… for indeed
you are all slaves (mamlūkūn) and the lord (rabb) is God most high.”(6) The devoted
believer could thus aspire to the image of the perfect and obedient slave of God, as when
Jesus is described in the New Testament as having come to mankind “in the form of a
slave” (Philippians 2: 5–8).
The prominence of the idiom of slavery in Near Eastern conceptions of piety and
right orientation towards divine reality was enhanced as the Christian tradition absorbed
Stoic philosophy. In Stoicism, slavery provided a clear case for expressing the central
teaching that happiness is not brought about by material circumstances but rather when
a person understands how to live within nature, that one can only really control one’s
reactions to the vagaries of the material world. For Stoics, true slavery is thus not to be
in the legal or economic condition of a slave, since even a slave could be fulfilled and
at peace when they realized that happiness came with orienting themselves correctly
toward nature in that condition. True slavery was to be controlled by one’s desires,
greed or to be enslaved to the material world around oneself. “No man is free who is not
master of himself,” wrote Epictetus (d. 135 CE), a leading Stoic master and a former
slave himself. As the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo (d. 50 CE) titled one of his
books, under strong Stoic influence, Every Happy Man is Free [Epictetus 2004: 32;

37 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

Westermann 1955: 156].
This idea was adopted wholly by Christians thinkers like Augustine (d. 430 CE)
and Isidore of Seville (d. 636 CE), who used it both to explain the existence of slavery
in this earthly world and also to dismiss its significance for a true believer. The status of
slavery in the world was the result of original sin or individual sin, but it was ultimately
meaningless. The only true form of enslavement was being a slave to one’s passions
or sins. The faithful were all truly free in Christ [Augustine: book 19, chapter xv;
Bonnassie 1991: 26; Westermann 1955: 156].
Continuing the two streams of slavery as the idiom for worship and the key to
contentment, Sufi writings abounded with references to slavery, before and after Abū
Nu‘aym. It appears constantly both as the idealized relationship between the pious
believer and God and as the model of achieving true freedom in this world through
enslavement to God. One verse of poetry is attributed to several Sufi authors, among
them Bunān al-Ḥammāl (d. 316/928):

The free man is a slave as long as he desires, and the slave is free as long as he is
content (al-ḥurr ‘abd mā ṭami‘ wa al-‘abd ḥurr mā qani‘). [‘Umar al-Suhrawardī
2005: 300; al-Abshīhī 2008: vol. 1, 124]

This notion can be found farther afield in Islamicate high culture, in widely
consumed works like the Gulistān of Sa‘dī (d. 691/1292) [2008: 73] and the Mustaṭraf
of al-Abshīhī (d. 852/1448).
And this theme appears over and over in the Ḥilya. One saint praises God who
“Makes slaves kings if they obey Him and makes kings slaves if they defy Him (ja‘ala
al-‘abīd bi-ṭā‘atihi mulūkan wa ja‘ala al-mulūk bi-ma‘ṣiyatihi ‘abīdan)” [Abū Nu‘aym
1996: vol. 8, 210]. It is enslavement to other than God that holds true suffering. The
Hadith scholar Abū Bakr b. ‘Ayyāsh (d. 193/809) warns “Free your neck as much as
you can in this world from enslavement in the afterlife, for the captive of the afterlife is
never freed (khalliṣ raqbataka mā istaṭa‘ta fī al-dunyā min riqq al-ākhira fa-inna asīr
al-ākhira ghayr mafkūk abadan)” [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 8, 304].
The idiom of slavery can also be invoked in moving and evocative Sufi poetry.
Abū Nu‘aym quotes the poem of the Sufi Aḥmad b. Rawḥ (d. circa 300/910):

When hardship comes, I cry out to a lord,

AJAMES no.36-2 2020 38

 By whom all hardship is repulsed, all harm stripped away.
I hope for a master who fails not his slave,
Holder of majesty and blessings, creation and command.
[Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 166]

The image of slavery even appears in the specialized jargon of Sufi practices.
Abū Nu ‘ aym quotes the Sufi ‘ Abd Allāh al-Ḥaddād (d. 353/964) saying “Outward
slavery but inner freedom is part of the ethics of the noble (al-‘ubūdiyya ẓāhiran wa
al-ḥurriyya bāṭinan min akhlāq al-kirām)” [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 345].

V. Slaves Saints in the Ḥilya

Perhaps the most remarkable contribution of the Ḥilya to our understanding of slavery
in medieval Islamic civilization in general and in Sufism in particular comes in a
fascinating section towards the end of the work. Although it is not set apart by any
chapter division (at least not in the printed edition of the book), Abū Nu‘aym devotes
a section to slave saints. He introduces it by explaining, “And among servants [i.e.,
slaves] there are saints whose truth God has hidden from the eyes, and whose names
and ancestries He has wiped away from fame and memory.” In doing this, Abū Nu‘aym
continues, God had “made them a protection for the inhabitants of the realms, and by
their calling upon Him ruin is warded off.” Abū Nu‘aym ends the section with: “We
have mentioned some about those whom the Truth [i.e., God] has hidden from the
people and singled them out for closeness to Him and did not erect standards for them
to be followed” [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 171, 189]. This wording highlights an
interesting thread in the Sufi tradition that would only become salient in the centuries
just after Abū Nu‘aym’s career. It was coming together in the 1000s CE but would
later prove central to how Muslim scholars and even Muslim rulers understood the
governance of the earth and the cosmos. This was the idea of an “inner” (b āṭ in)
caliphate, the axis on which the world turned. It was the perennial, hidden counterpart
of the visible but less profound authority of the “outer” (ẓāhir) caliphate. And it was
this inner caliphate that was the true repository of power. At the center of this spiritual
hierarchy was the Axis of the Age (quṭb al-zamān), the person around whom creation
spins. Around this Axis, dispersed anonymously throughout the world, were a group of

39 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

saints called the abdāl (substitutes). Abu Nu‘aym’s description of how this anonymous
and cosmic radial spreads out in the world among the most materially disempowered,
including many slaves, is a compelling expression of this theme from a major figure in
the systematization of Sufi history [al-Ghumārī n.d.: 63; Yılmaz 2018: 146–149; Moin
2012: 184, 198].
This section of the Ḥilya is not strictly limited to saints who were slaves. Many of
the reports in it tell of anonymous, often lower-class, hidden saints working miracles or
exhibiting exemplary piety. There is the story of an unnamed woman who only speaks
in phrases from the Quran and the recollection of one man when he was a captive in
Byzantium. One story is told by one Sarī b. Jābir, who recalls his voyage to “the land
of the East Africans (zanj),” where he encounters a woman grinding rice and singing
enchanting verses in her native language. When he asks a man to translate, it turns out
she is reciting poetry praising God. A dozen or so reports recount the spiritual exploits
or experiences of Dhū al-Nūn al-Miṣrī (d. 246/861), an influential Egyptian Sufi who
was from Nubia and had lived part of his life as a slave (indeed, he recounts this in one
of the reports in the Ḥilya) [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 179, 181–183]. That a well-
known feature of Dhū al-Nūn’s persona was not that he had been a slave but that he was
black (i.e., phenotypically Sub-Saharan African) brings up one of the most prominent
features of the material in the section of the Ḥilya: free or slave, many of the saints
described here are black.
The longest report in this section is traced back in a chain of transmission to
Mālik b. Dīnār (d. circa 130/748), a famous preacher and early ascetic of Basra. When
the city was afflicted by a terrible drought, Mālik b. Dīnār and other leading scholars
all offered their supplications for rain (ṣalāt al-istisqā’), with no effect. But then the
scholars saw an unknown black slave bring down torrents of rain after invoking God
quietly and alone in a small mosque. They immediately realized he was a saint beloved
by God. Mālik b. Dīnār and another well-known scholar followed the man home and
discovered that he was a slave living in the home of a slave merchant. They negotiated
to buy the man from the merchant, who wondered why they wanted him, since he did
nothing but sleep by day and weep in prayer by night. Mālik b. Dīnār and his companion
purchased the slave, who also asked why they wanted him, since, he explained, he was
no good as “serving creatures (makhlūqīn).” The scholars replied that they had bought
him so that they could serve him.
Blackness was not uniformly coterminous with slavery in this section, however.

AJAMES no.36-2 2020 40

 Abū Nu ‘ aym includes a report from the early Medinan scholar Muḥammad b.
al-Munkadir (d. 131/749) on how he witnessed a man perform a miracle very similar
to that done by the black slave Mālik b. Dīnār had seen, and, as in the previous story,
Ibn al-Munkadir follows the man home from the mosque. But in this case the man is
Persian, not African [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 172].

VI. Conclusion

As with many pre-modern societies, slavery permeated Islamicate civilization. As a

voluminous source of high-lettered material that sampled scholarly, pietistic and general
urban culture in the Nile-Oxus region, the Ḥilya yields fascinating instances of slavery
in the Islamicate context. On particular display in the work is the distinctive role that
slavery played as a key idiom for conceptualizing worship and the relationship between
God and man, a role that the Islamic spiritual tradition inherited from the pre-Islamic
Near-Eastern religious heritage. The logic of this idiom is carried further in the Ḥilya,
prefiguring the important Sufi schema of the ‘true’ spiritual sovereignty around which
creation coheres. If the truest worshipper is the slave who debases himself before the
true Lord, then, as the Ḥilya describes, the truest saints may well be found among the
temporally disempowered ranks of earthly slaves.

Notes

(1) The Hadiths in the Ḥilya have been indexed at least twice, first in a joint work begun by Nūr al-Dīn
al-Haythamī (d. 807/1405) and completed by no less than Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 852/1449),
and second by the late Moroccan traditionalist ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Ghumārī (d. 1998 CE). Thanks to
Mohammad Elokda for counting these.
(2) Pace Madelung, who feels Abū Nu‘aym did not meet al-Ḥākim, the former states explicitly that
he heard Hadiths from him in Nishapur; [Abū Nu‘aym 1996: vol. 10, 281]. For evidence of his
having studied with al-Dāraquṭnī, see [al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī 2003: vol. 1, 91; Abū Nu‘aym 1996:
vol. 8, 250]. See [Madelung: 354–355]; an updated version is available online at http://www.
iranicaonline.org/articles/abu-noaym-al-esfahani-al-hafez-ahmad-b (accessed on 31 January 2014).
(3) See [Melchert 2001]. An acknowledgement of criticism of Sufis along with a defense of the best
of them as the best Muslims that still needs to be studied can be found in Abū Nu‘aym’s teacher,

41 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

 al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī’s Mustadrak [al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī 1997: vol. 3, 19–22].
(4) See [Ibn al-Jawzī 1992: vol. 17, 87]. Ibn al-Jawzī’s student, the famous Hadith scholar and historian
of Baghdad Ibn al-Najjār (d. 643/1245) mentions this opinion several times in his Rebuttal of
al-Khaṭib al-Baghdādī, noting once that it appears in Muḥammad b. Ṭāhir al-Maqdisī’s (d.
507/1113) al-Manthūr min al-Ḥikāyāt wa al-Su’ālāt, a short book which seems mostly dedicated
to passing on embarrassing or critical reports about these three scholars. See [al-Maqdisī 2009: 47].
Ibn al-Najjār produces this material via an isnād from his teacher Ibn al-Jawzī, from his teacher
Abū Zur‘a Ṭāhir b. Muḥammad al-Maqdisī (d. 566/1170), from his father. See [Ibn al-Najjār 1997:
vol. 22, 113].
(5) For more on Abū Nu‘aym, Ibn Manda and this theological dispute, see [Pavlovitch 2018: 647–648;
al-Darwīsh 2018: 48–49].
(6) Sunan of Abū Dāwūd: kitāb al-adab, bāb lā yaqūlu al-mamlūk rabbī wa rabbatī. Cf. Ephesians
6:9.

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43 Slavery and Sufism（Brown）

ABSTRACT
Jonathan A.C. BROWN
Slavery and Sufism: The Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’ of Abū Nu‘aym al-Iṣbahānī (d. 430/1038) as a
Source on Slavery in Medieval Islamic Civilization

This article explores the value of a voluminous and important biographical dictionary of Sufism, the
Ornament of Saints and the Generations of the Pure (Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’ wa Ṭabaqāt al-Aṣfiyā’), by
the famous Persian Sufi and Hadith scholar Abū Nu‘aym al-Iṣbahānī (d. 430/1038), as a source for
information about slavery in medieval Islamic civilization. The article reviews prevalent theories about
Abū Nu‘aym’s scholarly leanings and offers some correctives, then discusses the place of the idiom of
slavery in the Near Eastern tradition of monotheism, philosophy and mysticism. It places the Islamic Sufi
tradition, exemplified by the Ḥilya, in this context. Finally, the article explores the unique information
provided in the Ḥilya on how both the mundane realities of slavery and its spiritual dimensions were
understood in the centuries leading up to Abū Nu‘aym’s career.

Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, USA.

ジョージタウン大学外交政策大学院教授

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