I’d like to try out something a bit different in this space (and no, I have not forgotten about the Ahl al-Kahf- I still have material related to their place in the history of Islamic devotion on tap to translate and share!): a folio by folio examination of a single manuscript text, incorporating a visual examination of the manuscript pages themselves, a translation of the text (and its paratextual apparatus), and an analysis of the text, situating it in its historical context and discussing the ways in which the particular form of the manuscript shaped the semantic content. There are whole historical worlds contained within what can at first glance seem a simple array of page and ink; there is more that can be descried beyond what I will outline here, in fact. But I hope that my stab at an annotated digital edition of sorts here will provide an idea of how one might go about exploring a manuscript text like this, and the possible panoramas the now tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of digitized Islamicate manuscripts can open up with a little attention and contextualization.

The text that I’ve chosen for this treatment, Risāla fī ithbāt ruʾyat al-nabī yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, is one that I came across, as so often happens, serendipitously while browsing for some other topic (though to be honest I cannot tell you what my original search query was!); the title looked interesting, as did the catalog description, so I gave it a look, realized it was the perfect length for this project and concerned a topic of no small interest to me, and so I downloaded the digitized manuscript and transcribed it. The primary goal of this treatise is a defense of the belief that Muḥammad would appear to the pious during waking life- that is, not in the course of a dream-vision while asleep (something which was, and is, widely accepted across Islam). But at a deeper level its author sought to defend one of the primary sources of saintly authority, communication in waking life with the Prophet, against detractors who sought to denigrate such routes of transmission and authority in favor of more strictly textual and ‘rational’ means.

Several things stand out about the manuscript itself: it is a presentation copy, despite being a short risāla it is alone between the covers, never having been, as was the fate of many such treatises, disaggregated and rebound into a larger majmū’a. However, as we will see, it circulated outside of its original destination, the Sublime Porte’s library, passing through at least two other owners in the course of the nineteenth century, before being purchased by Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951) and eventually deposited in the National Library of Israel, where it is now held under the shelfmark Ms. Yah. Ar. 765 (for an excellent exploration of Yahuda and of the process of manuscript collection in the 20th century, see Garrett Davidson, ‘On the History of the Princeton University Library Collection of Islamic Manuscripts‘). We are fortunate in this case to be able to trace the maker and the owners quite accurately, though much more opaque is the actual process whereby this manuscript made its way, ultimately, to our screens. But I’m getting ahead of myself- let’s briefly consider the nature of this risāla‘s content, its author, and then turn to the folios themselves. For this first installment we’ll look at the title page and the opening of the text, with additional pages appearing in the weeks to come.

The short and often polemical risāla- ‘epistle,’ ‘treatise,’ or ‘pamphlet’- was a staple of early modern Ottoman life; the role of these short texts has been extensively explored by Nir Shafir, who has an entire book coming out summer of next year on the topic: The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire. These sorts of little treatises are wonderful windows into the social, cultural, and religious currents of the Ottoman world, as they were written quite explicitly in response to ‘live’ debates and questions, and circulated far and wide, helped by their brevity and condensed arguments and citations. They were written by a wide range of individuals: in the case of this treatise, the author, one Sayyid Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī, i.e. Gümülcinevī, (d. 1788), was a member of the Ottoman ‘ulāmā’, Turkish-speaking but like many of his peers choosing, in this case at least, to write in Arabic (he also wrote at least one treatise mostly in an albeit very Arabicizing register of Ottoman Turkish, Risaletü’t-ta‘rîf fî tercemeti’l-Mevlidi’ş-şerîf). Beyond the fact that he was evidently from Gümülcine- modern Komotini in Greece- that he had trained in and was presumably employed as part of the Ottoman ‘ilmiyye system of learning and instruction, and died in Constantinople (he is evidently buried in the cemetery of Emîr Buhârî Tekkesi), there is little information available on his life. Notably, our manuscript has on the final, otherwise blank page, a note in Arabic reading: ‘Kūmuljina is a town (qaṣaba) in the district of Edirne,’ suggesting it was not exactly a household place-name. In addition to this treatise and his work on the Mevlid, he wrote some fairly popular treatises on Maturidi theology, suggesting overall the profile of a scholarly broadly in favor of theological investigation, popular devotional activity, and, as we will see in the treatise in question, the authority and charisma of the Friends of God. In short, he was a man of his age, with his finger to the pulse of many of the major controversies of the time. 

Let us turn to the title page of the work, which follows a well-crafted if plain cover with closing flap and a few blank pages:

We can immediately identify three features, common to perhaps the majority of Islamicate manuscripts, especially from this period (as in anything, conventions changed over time, and had regional variation). First, the title block itself, Risāla fī ruʾyat al-nabī ṣalā Allāh ta’alā ‘alīhi wa salam yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, neatly identifying the work, though not including the author’s name (probably because this was his own copy). Of rather more interest to us however are the three impressions of seals and the two ownership statements in the margins. Two of the three seals indicate prior possession by Ottoman sultans- Sultan Mustafa III (r. 1757 to 1774) at the top, and his successor Abdul Hamid I (r. 1774 to 1789). The third, smaller seal, dated 1805, is that of a later owner, Qārṣīzāda Muḥammad Jamālī (d. 1845).

Seals were a common feature in early modern Islamic manuscripts, and had a range of functions, not just indication of ownership or placement in a waqf (endowed foundation). Many, such as Sultan Mustafa III’s above, contained pious phrases, and might well have had a talismanic or prophylactic function (which other, ‘devotional’ seals lacking any ownership information certainly did). Ottoman sultanic seals are particularly striking visually and symbolically, dominated as they are by the intricate calligraphic personal emblem of the sultan, the tuǧra. For more on the question of seals in manuscripts, see Boris Liebrenz, ‘What’s in a Seal? Identification and Interpretation of ʿAbd al-Bāqī Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 971/1564) Seal and Its Function.’

Often appearing alongside or in conjunction with seals, ownership statements- the wording of which varied from place to place, over time, and from one collection to another- are also very common for this period, and this manuscript is no exception. Not unlike our own time, they tend to appear at the front of the book, usually on the title page (which presumably reduces the chances of their removal by someone uninterested in legal niceties). Along with an ownership statement by Qārṣīzāda Muḥammad Jamālī there is a second one by Aḥmad Najīb b. Aḥmad Ṭāhir, who would sell the manuscript to A. S. Yahuda, though little else is known of his life beyond his proclivities for collecting and dealing manuscripts.

Finally, while post-dating the ‘manuscript age,’ we should also take note of the penciled-in shelfmark and the stamp of the National Library of Israel, the latter an indication of ownership, while the former is a good reminder of the ontological transformation manuscripts like this one undertook from the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ceasing to be ‘books’ or ‘texts’ in the everyday sense and instead becoming ‘manuscripts,’ objects that are of primary historical interest and are treated, organized, and physically stored and accessed as artefacts, as objects of special attention and care not usually accorded typographically printed books. Entrance into an institutional library- be it of a nation-state or of a university- is effectively the end of the line for the physical manuscript itself in terms of continued modification and quotidian usage (though digitization introduces new dynamics of its own).

Let us now turn to the opening page of our treatise, beginning with an overview of the entire page, then a translation of the ‘reason for writing,’ followed by a discussion of the social context of this text’s production, and concluding with a look at some particular features visible on the page:

In the name of God, the gracious, the merciful. Praise be to God for His gifts, and peace and blessings be upon our master Muḥammad and his house. And after: the poor one, the servant, the utterly insignificant one, al-Sayyīd Muḥammad al-Kūmuljinawī, God act beneficiently towards him interiorily and exteriorily: I encountered a man from the community [of Islam] in the majlis of one of the elite, and he mentioned a ḥadīth from among the aḥādīth of al-Jāmi’ al-ṣaghīr of al-Jalāl al-Suyūṭī. Then I said that he [al-Ṣuyūṭī] was from among those who saw the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, while he was awake, providing [al-Suyūṭī] oral confirmation of the ḥadīth in question. But the man denied the validity of waking vision of [Muḥammad], upon him be blessing and peace. Out of politeness in the presence of one of the elite I was silent, but after the majlis zeal took hold of me and I wrote, for blessing, this treatise establishing the waking vision [of Muḥammad] for those whom God chooses from among His pious servants.

Al-Kūmuljinawī, as befits a short polemical treatise, makes do with brief preliminaries, getting right to the point of why he wrote this work. Now, as is often the case, it is highly likely that he had other more general concerns in mind, most importantly the general atmosphere of skepticism in some quarters towards the miracles and special sources of knowledge claimed by the saints, but that does not mean we should discount his story of the specific trigger. A majlis in the sense used here might be translated as ‘salon,’ a convivial session hosted, usually, by a man of means, in which a diverse range of individuals might be present but in careful hierarchical arrangement, engaging in polite conversation, debate, and displays of literary prowess. Participants would build off of the allusions and references of others, in the process demonstrating their command of canonical bodies of knowledge and of the rules of the majlis game as it were (for more on this important social context, see Helen Pfeifer’s recent work, Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands). When the anonymous man mentions in the course of conversation a specific ḥadīth, al-Kūmuljinawī follows up with an anecdote- chosen for reasons obscure to us but probably intentional on his part!- about the life of the compiler, the famous late medieval polymath scholar al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505), namely that he was reputed to have enjoyed waking visions of Muḥammad, during one of which he received a line of direct transmission from the lips of the Prophet himself. 

However, acceptance of the validity of such forms of transmission, or even of waking visions of Muḥammad, were not universally accepted in the early modern world, and the man takes issue with al-Kūmuljinawī’s statement, denying that such a thing could even happen. Had this majlis taken place in a less rarefied setting, we get the sense, our author might have taken up the polemical challenge and sparred with his interlocutor then and there. But, alas, he felt that such a rhetorical fight would not have been appropriate in this particular majlis, so he held his tongue- and instead took up his pen! We will explore just what is meant by ‘waking vision of Muḥammad’ in future installments, and why this question was such a ‘live’ one in the eighteenth century, but suffice to say it was not simply one of theoretical interest, but had to do with the epistemic and political foundations of religious and social life.

Finally, there are a few paratextual elements that ought to be pointed out, as they help us to understand how authors and scribes of this period sought to direct the work of reading on the part of their audiences; early modern manuscripts broadly are marked by a greatly elaborated and diverse range of paratextual possibilities which enabled readers to navigate texts short and long with greater ease than had been the case in the middle ages. The frontispiece is the most obvious visual feature on the page, and indeed it serves the crucial function of indicating the beginning of the text, the basmala nestled into the lower register of the illumination, as was normal. The details and color palette are typical of the eighteenth century, and act as an indication that this copy was meant for a more elite audience.

Somewhat more subtle are the bursts of color within the text itself: rubrication and the colored round ‘punctuation’ marks. Two words on this page are rubricated (that is, written in red ink), the wa-ba’d, indicating the end of the conventionalized preliminaries and the commencement of the text ‘proper,’ then the i‘lam– ‘let [you] know [that],’ which moves from the reason for writing introductory section to the main portion of the treatise. Marking transitions within the introductory section are red overlines, a feature that appears in some manuscripts and not in others, functioning very much like capital letters in Latin script languages; similarly, while classical Arabic lacks punctuation in the strict sense, the colored roundels very evident here and in many other manuscripts function as de facto punctuation, sometimes acting as the equivalents of periods, other times like commas (and sometimes in less clear fashion). The inclusion of these elements should probably be interpreted in two ways: one, as enhancing the aesthetic appeal of the page, a salient concern for a presentation copy dispatched to the sultanic library; and two, as aids for readers whose Arabic might not have been the most robust. It’s also worth noting that the script- generically described as ‘Ottoman naskh’- is, as befits a presentation copy, very legible and I think at least quite lovely; there is little out of the ordinary beyond the quite common use of ‘unauthorized’ connections between alif and lām in (some of) the definite articles (that usage is dependent on the ligatures and layout of the word in relation to the baseline). 

In future installments we’ll add to the paratextual complexity of this manuscript- it contains a manageable but still interesting marginal comment apparatus added by the author, which, along with in-text citations lets us reconstruct the library of texts and authorities lying behind al-Kūmuljinawī’s thought and arguments. We’ll also take a deeper dive into the epistemic, theological, and political background of this work, and how our author leveraged the manuscript format to construct his own intervention into the debate.

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