This concise book on Ibn ʿAsakir (d. 571/1176), the foremost scholar of hadith in medieval Syria, is the result, as the author Suleiman Mourad states, of thirty years of engagement with the world and the work of its biographee. The author's primary concern is to demonstrate the centrality of Ibn ʿAsakir and his heirs to the revival of Sunni scholarship in 6th-/12th-century Damascus. Mourad's opening chapter paints a picture of a depressed Damascus, “a grim reality” as he states (p. 3). In addition to the political instability under the Seljuks (468/1076–498/1104) and Burids (498/1104–549/1154), religious scholarship institutions and networks had substantially declined. In Mourad's view, the poverty of Syrian scholarship was best exemplified by the establishment's reception of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 463/1071), Nasr b. Ibrahim al-Maqdisi (d. 490/1097), and al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111). Yet, one could argue that their residence in Damascus was equally a reflection of their appreciation of the local scholarly tradition.
For Mourad, this political and scholarly decline meant that Damascene Sunni scholars were hungering for a reviver, especially in light of the recent history of Shiʿi political hegemony over Damascus and Crusader occupation of large parts of Syria. Ibn ʿAsakir mirrored Nur al-Din Zanki's salvific role for Damascus. Set against this background, the portrait that emerges is of a self-aware scholar who amassed “certificates” at home and abroad and harnessed Nur al-Din's patronage to realize the dreams and hopes of his teachers to transform their city. Ibn ʿAsakir's monumental and unprecedented Tarikh Madinat Dimashq should be seen in this context. It encapsulates his fight against the enemies within and without: Shiʿa, Hanbalis, and Crusaders.
Although the book's thrust is to demonstrate Ibn ʿAsakir's centrality to the revival of Sunnism in Damascus and Syria, Mourad also attends to several side issues. He rightly addresses the prevailing tendency among some modern historians to think of Ibn ʿAsakir as primarily a historian, thus obscuring his identity as a hadith scholar; his identity as a muḥaddith and the methodologies that permeate and shape his hadith collections; his Tarikh; and his treatise in defense of the theological school of al-Ashʿari (d. 324/936). Mourad also emphasizes the role that Ibn ʿAsakir's family played in Damascus and in the preservation and dissemination of his legacy. To do so, he details the efforts of Ibn ʿAsakir's son al-Qasim to compile and shape the Tarikh and devotes a chapter to listing the scions of the Ibn ʿAsakir clan and their involvement in hadith studies. One of the features of Mourad's book is his engagement with the manuscript evidence, which he uses to reconstruct a history of the writing and compilation of the Tarikh. He is able to clarify the confusion over the division of the Tarikh, first into 570 fascicles and then into 800 fascicles, attributing the dissemination of the latter to his son. He also provides an exhaustive list of the reading sessions of the book held during the author's lifetime and by his son after his death.
This book is a much-needed contribution about a scholar who has not received the attention he deserves outside specialized circles. Although the author and James Lindsay have published an edited volume on Ibn ʿAsakir and an edition and translation of Ibn ʿAsakir's al-Arbaʿun fi-l-Hathth ʿala al-Jihad, this work introduces Ibn ʿAsakir and the specifics of his Damascene context to a broader audience. It provides an accessible and easily digestible overview of Seljuk, Burid, and Zengid Damascus; Ibn ʿAsakir's relationship with Nur al-Din; jihad ideology; and of the work of a hadith scholar operating in the post-canonical era.
This last aspect brings me to my quibbles with the author, who, I assume due to the nature of the intended audience for this series, had to simplify and make translation choices regarding the terminology of hadith and manuscript studies. One of these simplifications touches on a critical aspect of hadith scholarship of the period, namely, the terminology and documentation of different modes of hadith transmission. The terminology of concern here is one dealing with the differentiation between receiving hadith and hadith collections through either a written or oral permission from a transmitter called ijāza, which Mourad explains in his glossary, and an oral/aural transmission process called samāʿ. Like scholars of his age, Ibn ʿAsakir amassed and gained authority over an overwhelmingly large corpus of hadith through these two methods, and carefully recorded and detailed how he obtained his sources in his Muʿjam al-Shuyukh.
However, Mourad concentrates on the ijāza, which he glosses with the term “certificate,” and throughout his description of Ibn ʿAsakir's training he alternates between stating that the scholar “learned a book” and “received a certificate,” without providing a clear explanation of the differences at play. This unfortunately effaces a distinction that, although seemingly esoteric, is absolutely fundamental in this highly technical field. The reader is at loss to discern whether he uses such terminology arbitrarily to vary the style of his own prose, or if the terms were chosen to reflect a difference in the modality of Ibn ʿAsakir's reception of a text, where “learned a book” would presumably stand in for samāʿ and “received a certificate” for ijāza.
This distinction is important enough in my reckoning to warrant an explanation in the body of the book and inclusion in the glossary alongside the listed ijāza, musāwa, and abdāl, especially given Mourad's extensive description of the reading sessions Ibn ʿAsakir attended and held. Such an explanation would put the poignant episode of Ibn ʿAsakir's agony over the loss of his books in the aftermath of his trip to the eastern Islamic centers of hadith in a different light. The loss of his books would not necessarily entail the irremediable loss of “the valuable knowledge he had learned in the east” (p. 26). Rather, Ibn ʿAsakir feared the loss of the samāʿāt he recorded while in the east, the evidence for the assiduous reading sessions that Mourad effectively describes. By losing these records, he would have lost his ability to transmit these works, but most importantly he would have lost the claim to being linked to a short and rare chain of transmission that distinguished him from a run-of-the-mill hadith transmitter. These chains were prized possessions that Ibn ʿAsakir displayed in every one of his books. When his companion al-Muradi arrived from Baghdad in 540/1145, Mourad tells us Ibn ʿAsakir spent several weeks “copying them” (p. 26). He was likely copying the notices for the auditions (samāʿāt) that he attended with al-Muradi. By Ibn ʿAsakir's time, recording samāʿ sessions and collecting ijāzas had become a feature of post-canonical hadith scholarship. Indeed, it became part and parcel of the Sunnism that Mourad sees as central to Ibn ʿAsakir's oeuvre.
Another unaddressed aspect of hadith scholarship in which Ibn ʿAsakir excelled and surpassed many of his compatriots through his early and extensive introduction to the discipline was his amassment of extraordinarily short chains of transmission. Ibn ʿAsakir was rightly proud of this achievement and displayed it in a dizzying array of hadith collections. Hence, in many of these collections, Ibn ʿAsakir followed the standard of his field and selected hadiths based on this criterion, ʿuluww (shortness or elevation of the chain of transmission). Contrary to what Mourad states, Ibn ʿAsakir did not purposefully ignore his “teachers” in Damascus to showcase his importance; rather, the scholar would have selected the hadith for which he possessed the best chains of transmission based on whether they were uninterrupted (muṭṭaṣil), elevated (ʿālī), etc. In this environment, hadith culture prized and centered the importance of the social and spiritual capital accumulated through the conspicuous collection of isnāds, these chains linking them to the Prophet. Through them, Ibn ʿAsakir became a nexus of the hadith tradition in Damascus and a fount of baraka (blessing).
Finally, the use of contemporary English terminology to translate some Arabic terms—such as college for madrasa, seminar for majlis, and colophon for tabaqat samāʿ—are laudatory insofar as it aims to demystify aspects of hadith education and transmission, but it poses risks, too, because such terminology also obscures some of its peculiarities and may mislead naive readers into making false equivalencies. A case in point is the use of the term colophon to describe the numerous audition notices (samāʿāt) typically recorded throughout a manuscript (including on the title page, in the margins, and at the end) to record the date, place, and names of a reader and auditors of a book. Mourad's use of the term colophon for this scholarly phenomenon is confusing and not current among modern scholars who study it. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Another example is how the author translates the title al-Arabaʿun al-Abdal al-ʿAwala as The Forty Hadiths from the First Substitutes, and defines these substitutes in the glossary as “a collective reference to a group of seventy early Muslim individuals.” By doing so, Mourad has conflated two separate phenomena: the abdāl, who are the friends of God revered by the pious, and the abdāl, which are a species of hadith possessing short alternate chains of transmission. In these transmissions, the hadith scholar shows his ability to provide a variant and shorter chain that intersects with the sheikh of one of the authors of the canonical Sunni books of hadith. In his al-Arabaʿun al-Abdal, Ibn ʿAsakir provided some of the same hadiths as the 9th-century hadith giants Muslim and Bukhari in their Sahihs with alternate, but equally short, chains of transmission.
Overall, this book is an important step in presenting Ibn ʿAsakir and Damascus at the time of the Crusaders to a wider audience. The author effectively presents the political and religious role Ibn ʿAsakir played in a 12th-century Syrian Sunni renaissance. Now, one awaits a study that contextualizes the scholar and his sprawling oeuvre within the broader world of post-canonical hadith culture and examines his magnum opus, the Tarikh, and his choices therein.
