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The Sāda in History: A critical essay on Ḥaḍramī historiography*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2009

Alexander Knysh
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Extract

In attempting to write a religious and political history of Ḥaḍramawt in the Middle Ages one inevitably encounters a number of methodological and historiographical problems some of which will be addressed in the present article. The first arises from the overall scarcity of historical documentation on the period in question. More importantly, the sources that are available are riddled with underlying agendas and biases, which often hinge on considerations of genealogy and clannish honour. These genealogical or clannish agendas and biases are evident in the sources dealing with practically every aspect of Ḥaḍrami history. However, they are especially conspicuous in the historical texts which describe the spread of the Shāfi'ī school of law in Ḥaḍramawt, the cult of local saints and the origins of local religious and educational institutions. In my recent study of Ḥaḍramī shrines and seasonal pilgrimages, I have brought out the genealogical underpinnings of the theological polemic around the cult of local holy men and women - a polemic that grew especially intense in the first decades of our century and flared up with a vengeance during the recent civil war between the Northern and Southern parts of unified Yemen. In this paper I will demonstrate how these hidden agendas have manifested themselves in the historical accounts of Ḥaḍramī Islam with special reference to the rise of the Shāfi'ī madhhab and the dissemination of Ṣūfism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , July 1999 , pp. 215 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1999

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Footnotes

*

An abridged version of this article was presented to the international colloquium I Discendenti del Profeta (Sadat/Ashraf) e il loro ruolo nella storia e nella cultura dell'Islam, Rome, 2-4 March 1998. The author would like to express his sincere gratitude to the colloquium's organizers, especially to Professor B. Scarcia Amoretti.

References

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2 For his biography see Bakr al-Shilli, Muḥammad b. Abū, Al-Mashra' al-rawī fī manāqib al-sāda al-kirām Āl Abī 'Alaun (Cairo, 1319 A.M.), ii, pp. 2–11Google Scholar; cf. al-'Alawī, Ṣāliḥ al-Ḥāmid, Ta'rīkh Ḥadramawt (Jeddah, 1968), ii, pp. 709–40.Google Scholar

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5 See note 2.

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8 See, e.g., Peters, Emrys, The Bedouin of Cirenaica (Cambridge, 1990), p. 2.Google Scholar

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12 For details see my article “The cult of saints and the rise of reformist discourse in twentieth century Hadramawt,” forthcoming in vol. iv of The New Arabian Studies, 1997.Google Scholar

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26 On him see Balfaqīh, , Min a'qāb, p. 98.Google Scholar

27 Al-Shillī, , Al-Mashra', ii, p. 3.Google Scholar

28 See. e.g. al-Ḥāmid, Ṣāliḥ, Ta'rīkh, ii, pp. 466, 744–5, 750–1, 763Google Scholar; cf. Balfaqīh, , Min a'qāb, pp. 16, 52, 70, 84, 107–8, 116–7, 119Google Scholar. etc.

29 al-Ḥāmid, Ṣāliḥ, Ta'rīkh, i, pp. 305–6Google Scholar; cf. Balfaqīh, , Min a'qāb, pp. 134–5.Google Scholar

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31 See note 28.

32 See al-Ḥāmid, Ṣāliḥ, Ta'rīkh, ii, pp. 757–66.Google Scholar

33 Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. Thompson, John B., trans. Raymond, Gino and Adamson, Matthew (Oxford, 1991), p. 170Google Scholar et passim.

34 Cf. Peters, , The Bedouin, p. 1.Google Scholar

35 See, e.g., Serjeant, R. B., “Ḥaram and ḥawṭa, the sacred enclave in Arabia,” Mélanges Ṭaha Ḥusein (Cairo, 1962), pp. 41–58.Google Scholar