SCHOLARS AND CHARLATANS ON THE BAGHDAD-KHURASAN

CIRCUIT FROM THE NINTH TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURIES

Jonathan A. C. Brown

Introduction

Sunnī Islam emerged as a sect that built its claims to legitimacy on the
primacy of revealed knowledge (ʿilm) and its preservation from the whims
of the masses, the vagaries of heresy and the temptations of power. A
convincing argument can be made, however, that the glowing success of
Sunnī Islam from the mid 800’s CE onwards has been due to its tremen-
dous popular appeal and the approval that its political quietism earned
from the state. Sunnī Muslim scholars envisioned their role as, and jus-
tified their authority by, being the guardians who educated the Muslim
masses and shielded them from misguidance. A chief threat to the masses
were the popular preachers who enthralled them in the mosques and
who, perhaps more acutely, presented an alluring alternative to the Sunnī
ʿulamāʾ as religious references. By the middle of the tenth century, the
institutional security that Sunnī Muslim scholars enjoyed enabled them to
become more active participants in the belle-lettrist cosmopolitanism of
the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Sunnī scholars continued to condemn
the marginal or heretical material purveyed by popular preachers, until,
by the time of the great Sunnī preacher, jurist, and historian Ibn al-Jawzī
(d. 1201) their antics had come to provide fodder for the burgeoning liter-
ary dimensions of Sunnī scholarly culture.

The Sunnī ʿUlamāʾ and the Masses

There is was no process of ordination in early Islam, nor did the Islamic
community of the first three hundred years erect any stable institutions
of learning that could conceivably produce graduates marked for reli-
gious distinction. Instead, the emergence of the Muslim scholarly class,
the ʿulamāʾ, took place through a communal valorization of sacred knowl-
edge, or ʿilm, a gradual consensus on major pious figures who transmitted
this knowledge, and the networks of the teacher/student relationships
86 jonathan a. c. brown

that radiated outward from those early scholars.1 The idea of a scholarly
class was thus a creation of that nascent class itself, which justified itself
as the guardians of true religion and the guides of the Muslim masses.
The conglomeration of the ʿulamāʾ class was also intimately tied to
popular appeal, as mass acclaim as a reference on matters of faith and
being a locus of blessing was a signature of a scholar’s piety and right guid-
ance. Although some early Muslim schools of thought, such as the Ḥanafī
school of law, became widely established through ʿAbbāsid sponsorship,2
the movement calling itself the “People of the Sunna and the Collective
(ahl al-sunna wa al-jamāʿa)” (the core of what would mature into Sunnī
Islam) owed much of its initial strength to popular appeal.3 This certainly
was the case for Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855), the quintessential Sunnī in retro-
spect, who made his reputation through refusing to align himself with
the ʿAbbāsid theological agenda during the Miḥna (833–48 CE).4 Al-Ḥārith
al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857), who feuded bitterly with Ibn Ḥanbal over the accept-
ability of engaging in speculative theology, remarked with contempt how
refusing to cave in to the demands of the state had garnered for ‘some
scholars’ great appeal among the masses.5
The Sunnī ʿulamāʾ defined their role as guides through a language of
pious selectivity. It was their duty to direct the people towards the proper
founts of knowledge as well as to exercise discretion in what knowledge
they shared with the gullible masses. The great ninth-century Muslim legal
scholar al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820) divided the Muslim community into two groups,
the Elect (khāṣṣa) and the Masses (ʿāmma). It was the duty of the Elect,

1 For an investigation of this process in the early Sunnī community, see Scott C. Lucas,
Constructive Critics, Ḥadīth Literature and the Articulation of Sunnī Islam (Leiden: Brill,
2004).
2 See Nurit Tsafrir, The History of an Islamic School of Law: the Spread of Early Hanafism
(Cambridge, MA: Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard University, 2004).
3 The earliest attestations I have found of ‘Sunnī’ scholars referring to themselves as ahl
al-sunna wa-al-jamāʿa come from the early and mid ninth century; see Abū ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī
(d. 892), Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī: kitāb al-zakāt, bāb mā jā’a fī faḍl al-ṣadaqa. In al-Shāfiʿī’s (d. 820)
works we find references to the ahl al-ḥadīth; see Muḥammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, Kitāb
al-Umm (Cairo: Dār al-Shaʿb, 1968–), 7: 256.
4 See Livnat Holtzman, “Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition. Ed.
Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
See also Ibn Qutayba, Ta⁠ʾwīl mukhtalif al-ḥadīth, ed. Muḥammad Zuhrī al-Najjār (Beirut:
Dār al-Jīl, 1973), 17.
5 Al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī is almost certainly referring to his great rival Ibn Ḥanbal when
he mentions how some scholars were acclaimed among the masses and scholars alike for
their refusal to have any dealings with the state; al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī, al-Makāsib, ed.
Muḥammad ʿUthmān al-Khishsha (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qurʾān, 1984), 113.
 scholars and charlatans on the baghdad-khurasan circuit 87

the scholars, to ponder and formulate the details of the proper Islamic
lifestyle for promulgation amongst their flock. As a variety of early Muslim
scholars such as Muḥammad ibn Sīrīn (d. 728) were quoted as warning,
“This knowledge is religion, so look from whom you take your religion.”6
Muslim scholars of this formative period believed in carefully regulat-
ing the masses’ diet of religious knowledge.7 Precedent for this cautious
practice was found in the Sunna of the Prophet himself. In their ḥadīth
collections, al-Bukhārī (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 875) both included a report
in which the Prophet instructs one of his Companions not to tell the peo-
ple that God would protect from Hellfire anyone who professed that there
is only one God and that Muḥammad is His prophet; the Prophet feared
that such a guarantee might encourage laxity in people’s practice.8 A pil-
lar of Sunnī Islam in Nīshābūr, Ibn Khuzayma (d. 923) explained that the
Prophet had told his wife ʿĀʾisha that he had not seen a vision of God
Himself during his miraculous ascension to Heaven (contrary to main-
stream Sunnī belief ) because he was speaking to her “according to her
mental capacity (ʿalā qadr ʿaqlihā).”9 The Successor Abū Qilāba (d. 722)
is reported to have said: “Do not tell ḥadīths to him who would not know
and accept them ( lā yaʿrifuhu), for indeed it will not benefit him and
harm him.”10 Early Sunnī scholars regularly quoted ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib as
saying, “Tell the people only what they can accept and leave aside what
they would reject; do you want God and His Prophet to be disbelieved?”11
The ʿulamāʾ’s relationship to the masses was conflicted, however, and
a cause of perpetual tension for scholars. On the one hand, they were the

6 Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: muqaddima, bāb fī anna al-isnād min al-dīn.

7 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī stated that refraining from telling people ḥadīths whose evi-
dent meaning strengthens heresy is “desired (maṭlūb)”; Ibn Ḥajar, Fatḥ al-bārī sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ
al-Bukhārī, ed. Ayman Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī and ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Bin Bāz (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub
al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 1: 300.
8 Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: kitāb al-ʿilm, bāb man khaṣṣa bi’l-ʿilm qawman dūn qawm karāhiyyatan
an lā yafahamū; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: kitāb al-īmān, bāb man laqiya Allāh bi’l-īmān.
9 Cited from Ibn Khuzayma’s Sunnī manifesto, the Kitāb al-Tawḥīd; Badr al-Dīn
al-Zarkashī, al-Ijāba li-īrād mā istadrakathu ʿĀʾisha ʿalā al-ṣaḥāba, ed. Zakariyyā ʿAlī Yūsuf
(Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-ʿĀṣima, [n.d.]), 47.
10 Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Kitāb al-Jāmiʿ li-akhlāq al-rāwī wa ādāb al-sāmiʿ, ed.
Muḥammad Ra⁠ʾfat Saʿīd (Mansoura, Egypt: Dār al-Wafāʾ, 2002), 1: 379.
11 . . . ḥaddithū al-nās bi-mā yaʿrifūn wa daʿū mā yunkirūn, a-tuḥibbūn an yukadhdhaba
Allāh wa rasūluhu?! Muḥammad bin Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: kitāb al-ʿilm, bāb
man khaṣṣa bi’l-ʿilm qawman dūn qawm karāhiyyatan an lā yafhamū. This is also attributed
to the Prophet, (umirnā an nukallima an-nās ʿalā qadr ʿuqūlihim); Badr al-Dīn al-Zarakshī,
al-Tadhkira fī al-aḥādīth al-mushtahira, ed. Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā (Beirut: Dār al-
Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1406/1986), 107.
88 jonathan a. c. brown

enlightened guides. In the above-mentioned warnings we see an expres-

sion of the paternalistic attitude of the ʿulamāʾ—do not tell the masses
what might be over their heads. But particularly in ʿAlī’s well-known
admonition, we also catch a glimpse of the ʿulamāʾ’s fear of the fickleness
of consumer choice—don’t tell the masses something that might make
them stop listening to you. Muslim scholars admitted the temptation and
mourned those who fell into it. Scholars could be tempted to pander to
the masses or to the rich, with the ninth-century Muslim scholar al-Dārimī
(d. 868) quoting an earlier authority as bemoaning how:
The People of Knowledge in the past used to protect their knowledge from
the worldly folk (ahl al-dunyā), and the worldly folk would incline towards
that knowledge and subordinate their worldly interests to [the scholars]; but
today the People of Knowledge subordinate their knowledge to the worldly
folk. . . .12
In once instance in the late 800’s, two Sunnī ḥadīth scholars stopped short
of correcting a preacher who was narrating false ḥadīths due to their fear
of the reaction of the mass audience.13
Despite such self-criticism, external threats always seem to evoke more
real concern than internal ones. In the eyes of the Sunnī scholarly class,
the more serious danger presented by the whims of the masses was the
creation of sources of authority outside the now-established domain of
ʿilm. Chief among these were popular storytellers, or quṣṣāṣ, who preached
on the streets and in the mosques of cities like Basra and Baghdad.14 The
ʿulamāʾ disapproved of storytellers ostensibly because of the misguided
and heretical material they purveyed, as we see in Ibn al-Waḍḍāḥ’s
(d. 899) strong condemnation of preachers in his early work on Hereti-
cal Innovations and their Prohibition (al-Bidaʿ wa-al-nahy ʿanhā).15 Their
stories were not reliably drawn from the body of knowledge considered
to be transmitted from or in accord with Muḥammad’s legacy, and the
resulting beliefs risked infecting the Muslim populace with heresies. In

12 Sunan al-Dārimī: introductory chapters, bāb fī iʿẓām al-ʿilm.

13 Mullā ʿAlī Qārī, al-Asrār al-marfūʿa fī al-aḥādīth al-mawḍūʿa, ed. Muḥammad Luṭfī
Ṣabbāgh (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islāmī, 1986), 85.
14 The tenth-century Shāfiʿī jurist of Bust, Ḥamd al-Khaṭṭābī (d. 999), offers and interest-
ing taxonomy of preachers: two acceptable kinds are the mudhakkir, who reminds people
of the blessings of heaven, and the wāʿiẓ, who instills in the audience a fear of hell. The
qāṣṣ (storyteller), however, is untrustworthy and uses unreliable stories; Ḥamd al-Khaṭṭābī,
Maʿālim al-Sunan (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-ʿIlmiyya, 1981), 4:188.
15 Muḥammad Ibn al-Waḍḍāḥ al-Qurṭubī, al-Bidaʿ wa-al-nahy ʿanhā, ed. Muḥammad
Aḥmad Dahmān (Cairo: Dār al-Ṣafā, 1990), 26–27.
 scholars and charlatans on the baghdad-khurasan circuit 89

the papyrus fragments of Wahb ibn Munabbih’s Story of David (Ḥadīth

Dāwūd) we find such pericopes as the scandal of David and Bathsheba,
which horrified Sunnī scholars like ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Dāwūdī (d. 1074–75)
with the unacceptable notion that prophets could lapse into repugnant
immorality.16 “No report of the story of David and Uriah has been estab-
lished [as authentic],” insisted al-Dāwūdī, “nor should it be thought of a
prophet that he could want to kill a believer.”17 The story of the Satanic
Verses, told on the streets of Baghdad, similarly alarmed Ibn al-Jawzī
(d. 1201) with the notion that Muḥammad could have erred in receiving
his revelation.18
It is difficult, however, to distinguish exactly what separated a storyteller
from a scholar based solely on matters of ideological content. For we find
the same contentious stories in the ḥadīth works of eminently respected
scholars of the same period, such as the Tafsīr of Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī
(d. 938) (both the Satanic Verses and David and Bathsheba), the Musnad
of al-Bazzār (d. 904), the Muʿjam al-kabīr of Abū al-Qāsim al-Ṭabarānī
(d. 971) of Iṣfahān and the Aḥādīth al-mukhtāra of Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn al-Maqdisī
(d. 1245) (for the story of the Satanic Verses).19 Not to suggest that ʿulamāʾ
like Ibn al-Jawzī had no concern for scrutinizing their surroundings for
heretical import, but what truly assured membership in the ʿulamāʾ was
not what one included in one’s books. Rather it was being integrated into
the network of acknowledged scholarly transmitters of ʿilm and knowing
which sources were kosher. The famous scholar Thābit al-Bunānī (d. circa
744) was known to other scholars as a storyteller. He was approved of as
a scholar himself, however, after he demonstrated to established scholars
that he understood well the science of the isnād, or chains of transmis-
sion for ʿilm.20
The ʿulamāʾ feared the storytellers for the sake of the masses, but their
palpable contempt for their flocks belied insecurity over their author-
ity. Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 1071) felt that the masses would believe
anything, or, more importantly, anyone. He explains that, “the cause for

16 Raif Georges Khouri, ed., Wahb b. Munabbih (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1972), 71ff.
17 Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ bin Mūsā, Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2002), 364–65.
18 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAlī Ibn al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-Quṣṣāṣ wa al-mudhakkirīn, ed. Merlin
Swartz (Beirut: Dar El-Machreq, 1986), 103.
19 For a full list of the locations of the Satanic Verses story, see Muḥammad Nāṣir
al-Dīn al-Albānī, Naṣb al-majānīq li-nasf qiṣṣat al-gharānīq (Damascus: al-Maktab al-Islāmī,
[1952].), 4–5. For the story of David and Bathsheba, see al-Albānī, Silsilat al-aḥādīth al-ḍaʿīfa,
2nd ed. (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Maʿārif al-Islāmiyya, 2000), 1: 485.
20 Ibn al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-Quṣṣāṣ, 153 of English translation.
90 jonathan a. c. brown

the storytellers telling fantastic tales is their awareness of the shortcom-

ings and ignorance of the masses. . . .”21 Ibn al-Jawzī bemoaned how igno-
rant scholars giving Friday sermons or Sufi preachers would wreak havoc
with the proper beliefs of the impressionable population of Baghdad,
“those ignorant masses who are effectively cattle ( fī ʿidād al-bahāʾim).
The people who hear these preachers accept their words blindly, saying
‘The scholar so-and-so said . . .,’ for the scholar in the eyes of the masses is
whoever ascends the pulpit.”22

The Sunnī ʿulamāʾ and Adab in the ʿAbbāsid Period

The Sunnī ʿulamāʾ were religious leaders, but during the tenth and elev-
enth centuries they increasingly became participants in the cosmopoli-
tan and fully-rounded intellectual elite of the ʿAbbāsid literary world.
The Muslim religious worldview early on required the subordination of
poetry to the Qurʾān and proper belief, featuring examples like the great
Pre-Islamic poet Labīd, who resigned never to compose poetry again after
hearing the dulcet meter of the Qurʾān.23 In the early and middle ʿAbbāsid
periods the notion of adab, or belle-lettres, was heavily cultivated by gov-
ernment bureaucrats and litterateurs like al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868) and al-Ṣāhib
Ibn al-ʿAbbād (d. 995), who often identified with strains of Muslim ration-
alism (in this case, Muʿtazilism) opposed to Sunnī Islam.
Yet the Sunnī ʿulamāʾ in cities such as Baghdad or Nīshābūr gradually
increased their participation in these literary activities as well, particularly
after the ninth century. Even the most conservative Sunnī ʿulamāʾ pep-
pered their religious works with verses of poetry of all colors, and many
penned works specifically devoted to poets and poetry. They recalled the
Prophetic ḥadīth that “Indeed in poetry there is wisdom.”24 Ibn Qutayba
(d. 889) devoted his Ta⁠ʾwīl mukhtalif al-ḥadīth to defending the ahl
al-ḥadīth and their textualist inclinations against their Muʿtazilite foes, but
he also composed a biographical work on great poets and their composi-
tions. Our earliest surviving biographical dictionary of poets comes from

21 Al-Khaṭīb, al-Jāmiʿ, 2: 199.

22 Ibn al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-Quṣṣāṣ, 109.
23 C. Brockelmann, “Labīd b. Rabīʿ,” EI2.
24 Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: kitāb al-ādāb, bāb mā yajūzu min al-shiʿr.
 scholars and charlatans on the baghdad-khurasan circuit 91

the Baṣran ḥadīth scholar Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī (d. 845–6)—a teacher of
the two Sunnī pillars Ibn Ḥanbal and Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn (d. 848).25
Of course, the ʿulamāʾ demanded that the religious sciences and the
place of the religious scholar remain paramount. When the famous Sunnī
ḥadīth scholar al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī (d. 1014) heard that the equally
famous litterateur Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 1008) had arrived in
Nīshāpūr to a crowd of admirers and belittled the memorization of ḥadīths,
al-Ḥākim acted decisively. He approached Badīʿ al-Zamān and asked him
to memorize a fascicule of ḥadīths. When he returned a week later to test
al-Hamadhānī, the litterateur could not remember the specifics of the
chains of transmission. Al-Ḥākim scolded him for mocking something
more difficult to memorize than poetry and told him, “Know your place.”26

Charlatans and Heresy as Entertainment

Like earlier belle-lettrists such as Cicero, Juvenal, or Lucian of Samosata,

the Sunnī ʿulamāʾ developed an appreciation for humorous and satirical
samplings. However much they might object to this claim, they followed
in the footsteps of ‘libertins’ like al-Jāḥiẓ and Badīʿ al-Zamān in composing
books designed to entertain while educating, or to educate while enter-
taining. One notices the polyvalence of humor and religious knowledge in
figures like the legendary persona of the Medinese jester Ashʿab (d. circa
771), whose clowning and witticisms multiplied in popular transmission
but whose use of language also appeared as proof texts in serious schol-
arly works on grammar.27 Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s History of Baghdad is
first and foremost a work of Sunnī triumphalism, but the author inter-
sperses the work with entertaining vignettes that are sometimes tinged
with heresy. He recounts how the ʿAbbāsid courtier Abū al-ʿAtāhiya
(d. 826) once challenged the Muʿtazilite scholar Thumāma ibn Ashras
(fl. 820’s) to a theological debate on the issue of whether people’s actions
are created by God (the Sunnī stance) or by humans themselves (the

25 See Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī, Ṭabaqāt fuḥūl al-shuʿarāʾ, ed. Maḥmūd Shākir (Cairo: Dār
al-Maʿārif, 1952).
26 Al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ and Muḥammad ʿAraqsūsī
(Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1998), 17: 173.
27 See Hilary Kilpatrick, “The ‘genuine’ Ashʿab. The relativity of fact and fiction in early
adab texts,” in Story-Telling in the framework of non-fictional Arabic Literature, ed. Stefan
Leder (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 94–117. See al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Tārīkh Baghdād,
ed. Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 7: 42 ff.
92 jonathan a. c. brown

Muʿtazilite stance) in the presence of Muʿtazilite caliph al-Ma⁠ʾmūn. When

Abū al-ʿAtāhiya began wiggling his hand and asked Thumāma “Who is
moving this?”, Thumāma responded “One whose mother is a fornicator.”
When the exasperated Abū al-ʿAtāhiya objected to the caliph, the ruler
simply replied that Thumāma had answered the question fairly.28
There is no better example of the overlap between ʿilm and adab than
the prolific Ḥanbalī scholar, preacher and Sufi of Baghdad Ibn al-Jawzī. In
his voluminous history of the central Islamic lands, (al-Muntaẓam), Ibn
al-Jawzī occasionally revels in subversive stories. He tells that in Bagh-
dad in 1107 a blind girl appeared who could tell the “secrets of people.”
She could, for example, tell the shape and color of hidden rings and jew-
elry and the contents of boxes of all sorts. The populace was fascinated
and befuddled by her. Neither the ʿulamāʾ nor the people managed to
discover her methods. The plot of this vignette culminates when one
man comes to her with “his hand on his penis and asked her ‘what is in
his hand?’ ”29
Ibn al-Jawzī also devoted a stern, book-length diatribe to popular story-
tellers and their vile influence on society. Yet even in this serious work
Ibn al-Jawzī includes a whole chapter that can only be described as comic
relief. Here the charlatan preachers are appreciated as humorous literary
figures rather than real threats to orthodoxy. One preacher, Sayfawayh
(Sayfūyā) is cast repeatedly as a jester figure. In one story he is riding a
donkey near a graveyard and the donkey balks at a grave. Sayfawayh con-
cludes, “It must be that the occupant of that grave was a veterinarian!”30
Another storyteller, Abū Kaʿb al-Qāṣṣ, is said to have remarked once while
teaching, “The name of the wolf that ate Joseph was such and such.” When

28 Al-Khaṭīb, Tārīkh Baghdād, 7: 157. It is interesting that in his attack on al-Khaṭīb

al-Baghdādī for including anti-Ḥanafī reports in his Tārīkh, the 20th-century scholar
Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1952) compares al-Khaṭīb to the licentious ʿAbbāsid-era
poet Abū Nuwās due to his unseemly selections; Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī, Ta⁠ʾnīb
al-Khaṭīb ʿalā mā sāqahu fī tarjamat Abī Ḥanīfa min akādhīb (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Azhar,
1998), 23.
29 Ibn al-Jawzī says it is clear by tawātur that her father only gave her the questions,
and the Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn ʿAqīl assures readers that this does not mean that she knew
“inner truths (al-bawāṭin)” but only that God had given her this special faculty, just as
plants and stones have special features; Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam fī tārīkh al-mulūk wa-
al-umam, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā and Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā (Beirut: Dār
al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1992), 17: 109–10.
30 Ibn al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-Quṣṣāṣ, 111.
 scholars and charlatans on the baghdad-khurasan circuit 93

an audience member objected that Joseph was not eaten by a wolf, he

replied, “Then it is the name of the wolf that did not eat Joseph.”31
Several of Ibn al-Jawzī’s works resemble the sophistic works of Lucian
of Samosata and al-Jāḥiẓ more than the production of a devout ʿālim.
In his Akhbār al-adhkiyāʾ (Stories of Cunning People), a book in which
reports are narrated by formally impressive but highly unreliable (and
also highly unnecessary) chains of transmission, Ibn al-Jawzī reports that
the great Abū Ḥanīfa was told by one of his students that the family of the
women he hoped to marry was coming to ask Abū Ḥanīfa’s opinion about
their prospective son-in-law. Abū Ḥanīfa instructed the student to, when
he came to see him with the family, hold his penis in his hand (presum-
ably under his robe!), so that when the woman’s family asked Abū Ḥanīfa
about the student’s financial status he could say, “I saw that he has in his
hands what’s worth 10,000 dirhams.”32
In another of Ibn al-Jawzī’s adab works, Reports of Idiots and Heed-
less Folk (Akhbār al-ḥamqā wa-al-mughaffalīn), he includes numerous
amusing examples of ḥadīth scholars misspeaking during their dictation
sessions and accidentally perverting the meaning of ḥadīths. More sur-
prisingly, misrepresenting the Prophet, normally the gravest of sins, here
becomes a source of entertainment. In one story, Ibn al-Jawzī tells how
one unreliable ḥadīth transmitter was asked, “Is it true that you heard
from your father, from your grandfather, from the Prophet that Noah’s
ark circumambulated the Kaʿba seven times and then prayed two prayer
cycles behind the station of Abraham?” The man replies, “Yes” to this
amusingly ridiculous ḥadīth, which Ibn al-Jawzī had otherwise used as
text book example of heretically lying about the Prophet in his very seri-
ous work The Book of Forged Ḥadīths (Kitāb al-Mawḍūʿāt).33
Ibn al-Jawzī’s Stories of Cunning People and his Reports on Idiots invert
the scholar/charlatan relationship and the duties of the ʿulamāʾ. The books
feature detailed, full-length chains of transmission from Ibn al-Jawzī back
to the Prophet and to innumerable titans of the Sunnī past. But instead
of fulfilling their original purpose of authenticating ḥadīths, legal opinions
or anecdotes, these chains only serve to give the work an air of scholarly
cosmopolitanism. The stories and ḥadīths they communicate are either

31 Ibn al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-Quṣṣāṣ, 112.

32 Ibn al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-Adhkiyāʾ (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Tijārī, [1966]), 76.
33 Ibn al-Jawzī, Akhbār al-ḥamqā wa al-mughaffalīn, ed. Muḥammad ʿAlī Abū al-ʿAbbās
(Cairo: Maktabat Ibn Sīnā, 1990), 72; idem, Kitāb al-Mawḍūʿāt, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
Muḥammad ʿUthmān (Medina: al-Maktaba al-Salafiyya, 1966–68), 1: 100.
94 jonathan a. c. brown

comical, forgeries or unintended errors. Instead of being threats to ortho-

doxy or the authority of the ʿulamāʾ, however, they serve as entertainment
for that scholarly class.

Conclusion

In the absence of early clerical institutions, scholarly authority could

either come from state endorsement or popular support. Part of the his-
torical success of Sunnī Islam no doubt comes from its having secured
both. The relationship between the Sunnī ʿulamāʾ and the state has always
been complicated and has been well-studied. The relationship between
the Sunnī Muslim ʿulamāʾ and the masses has been equally complex. The
Sunnī ʿulamāʾ justified their existence by claiming to be the guides of the
masses, but they also served at the masses’ pleasure. Few threats loomed
as large in the eyes of the ʿulamāʾ as the popular preachers and storytellers
who might supplant them—hence the great energies that Sunnī schol-
ars devoted to designating and condemning such figures. It is interesting
that it was only after the institutional establishment of Sunnism in the
eleventh century, with its guild-like schools of law and state sponsored
madrasas, that the ʿulamāʾ could turn to popular preachers as material for
entertainment within their secure scholarly elite.

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