Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520322332

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Moral Conduct and Authority

Sponsored by the JOINT COMMITTEE ON SOUTH ASIA of the SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL and the AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES

Moral Conduct and Authority THE PLACE OF ADAB IN SOUTH ASIAN ISLAM

EDITED BY

Barbara Daly Metcalf

U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A P R E S S Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1984 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Moral conduct and authority. Papers presented at a conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, June 7-9, 1979, sponsored by the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Islam—India—Congresses. 2. Religious life (Islam) —Congresses. I. Metcalf, Barbara Daly, 1941Q. Joint Committee on South Asia. BP63.I4M67 1984 297'.5 83-1361 ISBN 0-520-04660-9

Contents

Preface List of Contributors Note on Transliteration

vii xi xv

Introduction

1

B A R B A R A DALY M E T C A L F

PART ONE: CLASSICAL

ADAB

1. Late Antiquity and Islam: Parallels and Contrasts 2.

3.

23

PETER B R O W N

Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam

38

IRA M . L A P I D U S

The Adab Literature of Classical Sufism: An$ari's Code of Conduct GERHARD

62

BOWERING

PART T W O : ADAB AS ISLAMIC IDEAL 4. The Tuhfa i na$a'ih of Yusuf Gada: An Ethical Treatise in Verse from the Late-Fourteenth-Century Dehli Sultanate 5.

91

SIMON DIGBY

Adab al-Mufti: The Muslim Understanding of Values, Characteristics, and Role of a Mufti M . KHALID M A S U D

6. The 'Ulama' of Farangi Mahall and Their Adab

124 152

FRANCIS R O B I N S O N

7. Islamic Reform and Islamic Women: Maulana Thanawi's jewelry of Paradise 8.

184

B A R B A R A DALY M E T C A L F

Morality, Personhood, and the Exemplary Life: Popular Conceptions of Muslims in Paradise R I C H A R D KURIN

196

vi

CONTENTS

9.

Shrines, Succession, and Sources of Moral Authority DAVID GILMARTIN

10. A Note on Adab in the Murshid-Murid Relationship

221 241

MOHAMMAD AJMAL

PART T H R E E : ADAB AS C O S M O P O L I T A N C U L T U R E 11. 12.

Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers

255

J. F. RICHARDS

Prize-Winning Adab: A Study of Five Urdu Books Written in Response to the Allahabad Government Gazette Notification c . M. NAIM

13. The Adab of Musicians

290 315

BRIAN SILVER

PART F O U R : ALTERNATIVES T O 14. 15.

ADAB

The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid

333

RICHARD M. EATON

Malangs of the Punjab: Intoxication or Adab as the Path to God?

357

KATHERINE EWING

Glossary of Selected Terms Index

373 381

Preface

The papers in this volume, first presented at a conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, June 7-9, 1979, deal with issues related to the personal and moral qualities characteristic of authoritative figures in South Asian Islam. This is not to say that the corrupt and worldly have not here, as elsewhere, claimed authority; nor that authority based on descent, control of resources, and personal contacts has not been a constant. But behind all, and strikingly pervasive in the modern period, has been a concept of the well-constructed life, the harmonious life of a person who knows his relationship to God, to others, and to himself, and who, as a result, plays a special role among his or her fellows. The concept of moral discrimination and behavior embodied in the term adab (and its plural, adab) is a key to one central, recurrent vision of what the qualities of that life ought to be. One unusual aspect of our attention to this issue was that we students of the "peripheral Islamic lands" found ourselves taking up a classical concept of unquestioned importance that has been significantly neglected in studies of the Muslim heartland. There is singularly little writing on adab, and some of it, at least, reduces the richness of the term to a single dimension. It may be that for various historical reasons cultivation of adab has been particularly prominent in South Asia, notably in the modern period, when pervasive movements of religious reform have focused on the moral responsibility that adab fosters. South Asian Muslims are known for their identification with Islam and their personal cultivation of the norms of propriety and decorum. The topic, however, is not only significant in itself, but reflects the program of its primary sponsor, the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.1 The Committee has hoped through a series of projects to set aside the concepts of Western intellectual and aesthetic systems in order to seek out systems of meaning and organization from 1. These are described in "South and Southeast Asia: New Concerns of the Council," by David L. Szanton in Items, 30:2 (June 1976), pp. 1 3 - 1 7 , and in "The Study of South Asian Conceptual Systems," by Stanley J. Heginbotham, in Items, 31:3 (September 1977), pp. 3 4 - 3 6 .

viii

PREFACE

within South Asia's own cultural systems.2 Adab is not a concept easily related to any convenient comparative category. It encompasses sociologically distinguishable groups, multiple domains of social life and psychological experience, and periods of history that are often seen as discrete. The effort to use this system was not easy, but we believe its meaning was not wholly "lost in translation." We had approached the conference tentatively, conscious of the difficulty we faced in working on a concept so polymorphic and often, at its most important, only implicit. In our conversations, we moved steadily farther toward seeing the implications of the concept and the interrelations of our disparate topics. As our sessions concluded, there was a sense of something like wonder at having approached—however haltingly—the core of what has given the Islamic tradition its richness and resilience throughout times and places of such unceasing diversity. The excitement of that sense lies behind the decision to publish both the papers and an introductory summary of the themes of the discussion. We seek to share our work with people interested in Islam and in great traditional civilizations, with those interested in concepts and methods of personality formation, and with those seeking some background for comprehension of the important developments taking place in the Islamic world today. For all the participants, the three days spent together were days of deep, shared learning and exchange. The Muslims we study, as discussed below, know that one is what one knows, and that whatever one does "colors the soul." They are right. On this occasion there was an adab of civility and intellectual generosity worthy of the concept itself. Participants in the conference included not only those who gave papers (listed below) but many who contributed as chairmen and discussants. William Roff (Southeast Asian History, Columbia University) played a particularly important role by providing a coherent and insightful overview of what he saw to be the theories and assumptions in the papers as a whole. The other chairmen and discussants from the University of California included Hamid Algar (Islamic Studies), Talal Asad (Anthropology), Edmund C. Burke III (Middle Eastern History, UCSC), Mark Juergensmeyer (Religious Studies), Satti Khanna (Hindi Literature and Film), Thomas Metcalf (South Asian History), and Paul Rabinow (Middle Eastern Anthropology). Their contributions were unfailingly stimulating. The conference owed much to the generous help of many people. David Szanton of the Social Science Research Council not only pro2. The members of the Joint Committee at the time of the conference were Stanley J. Heginbotham, chairman, Marc Galanter, McKim Marriott, Michelle B. McAlpin, Barbara D. Metcalf, Wendy D. O'Flaherty, Karl H. Potter, and John Richards.

PREFACE

ix

vided practical administrative support, but in a planning meeting and in the conference itself took a lively interest in our substantive concerns as well. The same was true of Bruce R. Pray of the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies at Berkeley and of Mark Juergensmeyer of the Graduate Theological Union, who together provided us with an institutional base. Lee Bean and Hafeez Malik facilitated the support of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, thanks to which we were able to invite two Pakistani participants. Sandria Freitag, organizer, critic, and gourmet, handled the administrative arrangements for the conference and made a contribution that was uniquely hers. Warren Fusfeld and Peggy Sanner, both of the University of Pennsylvania, ably undertook the difficult task of standardizing the transliteration in the manuscript and seeing to its final preparation. Richard Adloff edited the manuscript with erudition and tact. Phyllis Killen anticipated and solved a variety of problems as she saw the manuscript through the stages of publication at the University of California Press. To them all: our adab and thanks. B.D.M. Philadelphia September 1980

Contributors

a Jungian psychologist, has served as Director of the National Institute of Psychology, Islamabad, Secretary of Education (Pakistan), Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Punjab, and Principal of Government College Lahore. He is currently Iqbal Professor at the University of Heidelberg. He has published widely on psychological theory and on psychological issues in relation to Islam and Pakistani culture.

MUHAMMAD AJMAL,

is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in sufism and Qur'anic exegesis. His publications include The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam (1980); The Dreams and Labors of a Central Asian Sufi (forthcoming); and a series of articles on the history of Islamic ideas in the Near East and South Asia.

GERHARD BOWERING

formerly Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of Modern History, Royal Holloway College, University of London, is now Professor of Classics and History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the American Association of the Arts and Sciences; Doctor of Theology, honoris causa, Fribourg en Suisse; and Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Chicago. His publications include Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967); Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972); The World of Late Antiquity (1972); The Making of Late Antiquity (1978); The Cult of Saints (1980); and Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982).

P E T E R BROWN,

has been a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, since 1969 and he is a member of the Oriental Faculty at the University of Oxford. He has been honorary Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London, since 1971. From 1973 to 1977 he served as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Eastern Art, the Ashmolean Museum. He is the author of a series of papers discussing aspects of $ufi organization and hegemony in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as of a monograph, War Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies (1971), and an extended chapter on the maritime trade of

S I M O N EVERARD D I G B Y

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

India (twelfth to fifteenth centuries A.D.) in the Cambridge Economic History of India. R I C H A R D M . EATON received his training in history at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin and obtained his Ph.D. from the latter in 1972. He is Associate Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His major research interest is the evolution of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. He is the author of Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India and has contributed papers to professional journals and symposia volumes. received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1980. Her dissertation, "The Pir or Sufi Saint in Pakistani Islam," was based on eighteen months of research in Pakistan. She has taught social sciences at the University of Chicago and is currently receiving training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago.

KATHERINE E W I N G

earned the doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley and has taught Indian and Islamic history at the Universities of Arizona, California at Berkeley, and Washington. He also directed the Berkeley Urdu Language Program in Pakistan. He has published articles on Punjab politics and on the creation of Pakistan. R I C H A R D K U R I N received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1981 for a dissertation entitled "Person, Family and Kin in Two Pakistani Communities." He is interested in the analysis of indigenous knowledge systems and has published articles on Pakistani social structure, religious behavior, and rural development. He has been a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and community development at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale since 1979.

DAVID GILMARTIN

M. L A P I D U S is Professor of History and Chairman of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages and many articles on social organization and religious values in Muslim societies.

IRA

formerly reader at the Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, is now a member of the Centre for Islamic Legal Studies at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. His main interest is Islamic law, history, philosophy, and sociology. He is the author of Islamic Legal Philosophy, Mutala'a Fikr-e-Iqbal (Urdu), Iqbal ka Tasawwui-e-Ijtihad (Urdu), and Deoband and Social Change.

M U H A M M A D KHALID M A S U D ,

D. M E T C A L F , a research associate at the center for South/ Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley, has

BARBARA

CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

taught history and South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (1982) as well as of articles on religious change in South Asian Islam. C . M . N A I M is Associate Professor of Urdu, University of Chicago, and editor and publisher of the Annual of Urdu Studies. He has written a number of articles on the Urdu language, Urdu literature, and the cultural history of Muslim South Asia. J.F. RICHARDS, Professor of History at Duke University, is a specialist in the history of Mughal India. His publications include Mughal Administration in Golconda-, an edited volume, Kingship and Authority in South Asia-, and many articles on Mughal India. He is now editing a volume devoted to the monetary history of Mughal India. FRANCIS ROBINSON, sometime Prize Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, is now Lecturer in History, the Royal Holloway College, University of London. His publications include Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces' Muslims 1860-1923 (1974), Twentieth Century World History: A Select Bibliography (1979), and Atlas of the Islamic World since 1500 (1982). His current work is on learned and holy men and the transmission of Islamic culture in South Asia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Senior Preceptor in Urdu at Harvard University, has studied sitar with Ustad Ghulamhusain Khan of the Indore Gharana, and has performed in concert, and on radio and television, in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Pakistan, and India.

BRIAN SILVER,

Note on Transliteration

The system of transliteration used in this volume is based on that used for the Arabic language as given in the Encyclopaedia Biitannica ("Arabic Language," volume 2 of the 1972 edition, pp. 182-184). Other letters have been added to represent the non-Arabic sounds of Persian and Urdu. The full set of consonants used, leaving out the alif, is as follows (in Urdu alphabetical order): b, p, t, t, th, j, ch, b, kh, d, d, dh, r, r, z, s, sh, S, d, t, Z, c , gh, f, q, k, g, 1, m, n, w, h, y, '

It should be noted that the symbols for non-Arabic sounds correspond relatively closely to the English sounds of the letters used for them, with the exception of the letters t, d, and r, which have been used to represent the retroflex sounds of Indie origin. These are used in place of the more usual t, d, and r so as to avoid confusion of Indie sounds and the "dark" sounds of Arabic. It should also be noted that the ta maibuta of Arabic words has been universally dropped, including those words that have, in Urdu, come to be written with a ta. This leaves us with, for example, sunna rather than either sunnah or sunnat. By this means, all words of identical Arabic origin will appear in the same form in transliteration despite differences in writing or pronunciation. As a further consequence of this method of transliteration, the case indicators of Arabic words have been dropped, and the vowel of the Arabic definite particle has been left as a. The assimilation of the lam of the definite particle has, however, been indicated, as in the title Tauba an-na$uh, or Munqidh min addalal. The only exception to this form of transliteration is that used for the term of address, hadiat, which should properly be rendered hadia, but would then be virtually unrecognizable to those familiar with the actual use of that form among the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent.

Introduction BARBARA DALY

METCALF1

The musical metaphor is . . . much more apt for Muslim psychotherapy than the scientific metaphors of biology, psychology, or information processing that govern contemporary Western psychotherapy. With his self as the musical instrument whose many strings have been tuned to the required pitch, when Baba plays the healing idga he is not practising a science but what Auden called "the intuitive art of wooing Nature." The success of the "wooing" depends . . . on the person of the healer. . . . In Baba's world-view, shared by his patients, a pii must develop certain essential qualities if he is to be a successful wooer of nature and a musician of healing. First, he must cultivate certain virtues of character—purity of mind and body, truthfulness, a definite detachment.2 Muslim societies have in certain historical settings formulated theories of the development of personal character and put great emphasis on the importance of its realization. Islam itself is a religion permeated by the importance of moral exemplification, above all, that presented by the lives of prophets and saints. The all-important, all-encompassing religious law of Islam is the codification of the practice of the Prophet, who realized in his life, more perfectly than other humans ever could, the revealed truths of the Qur'an. Islam holds, in fact, that there were a series 1. I a m grateful to Gerhard Bowering, Sandria Freitag, Warren Fusfeld, William Graham, Ira Lapidus, Gail Minault, and William Roff for careful reading of drafts of this introduction. 2. Sudhir Kakar, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), p. 38.

2

INTRODUCTION

of perfect revelations, culminating in that entrusted to the Prophet Muhammad, and that each revelation brought not only a book but a prophet who was its exemplification, so that its meaning would be intelligible and manifest. Later Muslims, remembered in pious anecdote and story, created a living tradition of prophetic realization by their approximation to the ideal. Moral fulfillment in this religious perspective, however, is not limited to great figures of the past but is expected of those in the present. Nor is it limited to those in inherited or appointed positions of power. In the quotation above, it is a humble and pious healer, ministering to the poor, who has sought and is understood to have achieved the character and characteristics that set him apart and that are the basis for the respect and authority he enjoys. It is his transformed being that permits him to be effective in what he seeks to do. At the basis of the valuation of moral character is the conviction that Islam alone defines what humans ought to be. Those who fulfill Islam are most fully human. The papers in this collection were conceived of as part of a project to examine the bases of authority in South Asian Islam. Of the many sources of authority, this one of exemplification of moral qualities seemed to us of considerable importance. It is potentially characteristic not only of religious leaders in formal positions but of leaders in all realms, great and small, of social and individual life. We approached this subject by singling out a word that is at once a concept, a literary genre, and a quality of personality. The term adab directed us toward consideration of codes of behavior and values as well as of methods of personal formation. By orienting our attention in this way, we were able to explore core values of Islam as well as what are often implicit theories of the way those values are apprehended and embodied. Three papers of the collection included here treat adab in its classical context. The others concern the Muslims of South Asia. Of necessity, they only sample this large subject. They describe adab as expressed in Persian, Urdu, and Panjabi; they focus primarily on the literate and elites; and they exclude many occupational groups, among them the military, merchants, artisans, physicians, and even kings. The topic invites further work, but certain themes are already plain. Adab in all its uses reflects a high valuation of the employment of the will in proper discrimination of correct order, behav-

INTRODUCTION

3

ior, and taste. 3 It implicitly or explicitly distinguishes cultivated behavior from that deemed vulgar, often defined as pre-Islamic custom. Moral character is thus the fruit of deliberation and effort. Adab means discipline and training. It denotes as well the good breeding and refinement that results from training, so that a person who behaves badly is "without adab" (be adab). Adab is the respect or deference one properly formed and trained shows to those who deserve it. Thus the term is first encountered by the Western visitor to South Asia in its form as a greeting: "Adab\"—"my respects." In other contexts this form, the plural, generally defines rules or codes of behavior. In many modern Muslim languages, adab has come to be used exclusively for literature—a derivation, presumably, from some original sense that literature conveys proper knowledge for the cultivated. We found this ideal of adab to be strikingly pervasive. The articles that constitute the second section of this book stress the dimension of the ideal that calls for personal and psychological transformation toward an Islamic standard of values and behavior. It finds its richest development in sufism. Inscribed on the conference program was the following couplet, cited approvingly by a late-nineteenth-century $ufi: turuq al-ishq kulluha adab addib an-nafs ayyuha al-a§hab All the paths of love are adab O discipline the will, Companions!4 Here true adab in the idiom of mysticism are nothing less than the way to the Divine. The person most fully realized is the person closest to God. The term in this usage is difficult for us to grasp because, although adab seems to refer to external behavior, it in fact encompasses inner qualities as well. Muslims argue that one can start with any Islamic tenet or body of religious literature or ritual practice and be led unerringly to the same fundamental teachings of Islam. This cohesion and replication is one dimension of the unity that is the fundamental symbol of Islam. We were somewhat surprised to find 3. For a general introduction to the term and bibliography of classical sources, see F. Gabrielli, "Adab," EI\ 4. Muhammad Ashraf *Ali Thanawi, Adab i zmdagi (Delhi, n.d.), p. 100.

4

INTRODUCTION

that even such a concept as adab, often used so narrowly by Western scholars, offered us this same range and richness. Expressed in $ufi writings, implied in the practices of scholars and saints, embedded in the widely varied literatures of the adab of kings and courtiers, the adab of judges and muftis, the literature of everyday pleasurable instruction, and manuals of religious and moral advice for ordinary people, the concept of adab proves to be a key to central religious concepts of South Asian Islam. Two themes seemed to us particularly noteworthy about these Islamic notions of moral conduct. The first was the radical comprehensiveness of the concept. It is comprehensive in the sense that its rules address all domains of life; it is also comprehensive in its relentless desire to bring all society and all sorts and conditions of humans into consonance with a common core of values underlying all social roles. A second important theme was the pervasiveness of theories of the person and of psychology evident in the concept and literatures of adab, a reflection of the fundamental point that ethical norms in this perspective are defined as the development of personal character. The comprehensive application of adab is evident in the categories of works of this genre. Books of adab, if not written for Muslims in general, are addressed to particular social groups. Thus there are works on adab or adab for princes, courtiers, legal scholars and judges, physicians, musicians, housewives, and, above all, ?ufi saints. The rubric has thus the value of encompassing groups of people who are often studied separately. It encourages one to suspend judgment on the commonly held assumption that there is a great gap between elite and popular Islam. Indeed, we assume on this point the opposite, that there is a general adab shared widely in Muslim society that underlies the norms and activities of all other roles. As evident in the example of Baba above, there is no notion that moral exemplification, as in the Christian monastic tradition, comes only from religious specialists set apart from the faithful. In fact, Islam cherishes the notion that the most perfectly realized person of the age may be anyone—an artisan; a wandering, unkempt faqh) a woman. The theory of adab at least assumes all Muslims capable of spiritual discipline and realization. The importance of the all-encompassing scope of adab was particularly illuminated in the paper of Peter Brown, which compared Islamic adab with Graeco-Roman and early Christian

INTRODUCTION

5

paideia. Both were comprehensive in the detailed domains of life they addressed: "Far from being an exclusively intellectual grooming, Graeco-Roman paideia was expected to show itself immediately in body-posture, in the inflexion of the voice, in the restriction of gestures, and even in the control of breathing." Yet the striking difference, Brown argued, was that Islamic adab was rooted in religious sanctions, as paideia was not, so that adab not only required the internalization of norms from all spheres of human activities but involved the inner and the spiritual life in its fulfillment. In further contrast to later Christian notions of personal transformation, Islam never opted for ascetic withdrawal and abstention from aspects of worldly life, but rather saw spiritual development as possible only through full experience of everyday life. Such comprehensiveness of scope and application may, Brown tentatively ventured, in fact account for the continued momentum and possibilities for growth and adjustment evident in Islam. Brown also speculated that the distinctiveness of Islamic adab may perhaps be the result of the historical experience of Muslims as a dominant ruling minority throughout the world. In such a situation, the comprehensiveness and depth of the culture that defined the ruling elites would be of particularly great importance. This theory is suggestive for the history of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. If adab evolved in part as the culture of rulers over plural societies, that situation long continued in India. Moreover, in the modern period, when Muslims have lived in the presence of not one but two alternative cultural traditions—the Hindu and the British—concern with adab has become assertive and pervasive. As is well known, the loss of political power for Muslims in India was particularly early and complete, and subsequent efforts at cultural renewal and selfconsciousness were many and diverse. Concern with issues of personal embodiment of cultural ideals is a major strand in many modern Indo-Muslim movements. Though further comparative work would of course be required to demonstrate it, our impression is that a particularly strong cultivation of adab and valuation of those embodying it is a hallmark of South Asian Islam. The theme of adab appears at an early period in the study presented here by Simon Digby of the Tuhfa i na$a'ih of Yusuf Gada. Although written in the late fourteenth century to set out ethi-

6

INTRODUCTION

cal principles for the children of the ruling elites, it appears to have had its greatest currency in the Deccan. There one can imagine the need for such a text because of the shallower roots of the Muslim cultural traditions and because of the great political instability of the times. The author, Yusuf Gada, was a disciple of the great Chishti saint, Na$ir ad-din Mahmud. His work, however, exemplifying Brown's point about the inclusiveness of adab, reflects the piety and religious values expected even of a man of the world. The treatise opens and closes with vivid eschatological descriptions in order to give a high seriousness to all the teachings it imparts. In between, with seemingly a "single level of meritoriousness," are linked injunctions on religious observances, including $ufi disciplines, on attitudes and values, on worldly success, and on manners. A typical teaching partakes of all. For example, with the adab of eating are coupled what we can distinguish as medical advice ("if you eat when you are sated, that food eats your heart and liver"), social propriety ("don't stretch out your hand in front of others"), and piety ("eat food with reverence, speak the name of God over each mouthful"). This is a work that envisions an active and prosperous worldly life. Yet one is to measure every action, to seek religious knowledge, and to live humbly: "He who performs service becomes a lord with a crown on his head." In a period of political fragmentation and geographic mobility, the measure of one's life was ultimately what in oneself one was. The importance of shared norms of personal cultivation is evident throughout the papers here. A group for whom these norms were especially important was that of the mufti or legal advisor, discussed in a paper by Khalid Masud. Examination of the adab of the mufti is striking because of the revisionist argument put forth here that the authority of the mufti in fact rested wholly on his personal qualities. Most historians have assumed the mufti to have been an appointed official of the Mughal court, whereas in fact, Khalid Masud argued, his authority rested precisely on his knowledge and his character. This persistent error may be a reading back of British practice to an earlier time; it may also be an inability to see the potential authority that moral attainments alone command. Respect for the mufti derived from respect for the Law which he knew and, most explicitly in the modern period, was expected to embody. The ideal mufti was to discriminate proper hierarchy in all its forms: to know his own

INTRODUCTION

7

place in relation to God, to knowledge itself, to great teachers of the past, and to the petitioner. He was to value his own role, for authority and respect were owed to him as they were to the Law. The mufti was therefore enjoined to assert himself symbolically over against all worldly powers, never giving them precedence nor accepting office from them. The same ideal of realization of Islamic qualities is evident in material related to saints and princes, even though in both cases, of course, personal distinctions were also inherited or transferred and status was derived from institutional position. But embodiment of the human ideal obviously was expected, particularly in the case of the religious leadership, for Islam holds in contempt the person who claims to have intellectual knowledge but does not realize it in his own life. Despite the division of function between the religious and the political leader, however, the ruler was often expected also to manifest Islamic qualities in himself. A bad king is a bad Muslim. A good king is ascribed saintly qualities. The relation is closer than metaphor, for the ideal is that of the Prophet himself, leader in all aspects of life. The ideal is approximated in Islamic movements that are led by warriors or revolutionaries who embody the religious ideal. The collection includes no papers on princes, but in our discussion we noted that the idiom of personal realization is often used by rulers themselves and by those who wrote about them. A tyrant, wrote Maulànà Ismàcìl Shahìd, is a ruler in whom the nafs, the self that incites to evil, is preeminent.5 In contrast, the sovereigns of the Delhi Sultanate were described by their chroniclers as men of moral perfection. Babà Farid, as Eaton's paper notes, bestowed turbans, the sign of spiritual perfection and succession, on two of the TUghluq rulers. The writers {Afif and Barani each depicted Firoz Shah as the qutb of his age.6 In Mughal India the spiritual perfections of the monarch appear to have been an important theme. John Richards's presentation on the emperor Bàbur stimulated a lively discussion of the renunciation of wine upon his entry into Hindustan.7 Whatever value 5. Quoted in Muhammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London, 1967), pp. 3 9 1 - 9 2 . 6. Peter Hardy, Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical Writing (London, 1960). 7. John Richards has not included his paper, which he presented for discussion, in this collection. The memoirs are available in translation as Zahir ad-din

8

INTRODUCTION

wine-drinking might have in some contexts, it was not fit for a great king; and the Mughal renunciation of wine became an inseparable element of imperial succession. The later Mughals sought even more clearly some kind of religious role. Akbar's claims are best known. Initially he acted in a caliphal role, mediating among the c ulama' and leading the prayer. Later he drew more on the $ufi tradition and the tradition of the immanence of the Prophet's light; his chief publicist described him as a $ufi pir, a qufb, hinting even that he might be the mahdl who would restore mankind at the end of time.8 Using the theory of moral perfection described below, Abu al-Fadl wrote of Akbar: "He puts the rein of desire into the hands of reason. He sits on the eminence of propriety."9 The king himself was thus a moral exemplar. Princes and saints share a stock of metaphors. If the prince is described as a saint, the saint in turn is also a prince. The great shaikhs were entitled shah-, their hospices were known as dargah) they were understood to exercise authority over a territorial area, a wilaya. Holy men, like rulers, formed a hierarchic order, but at their peak stood the qutb, the axis around whom the universe revolved. Indeed, part of the respect accorded $ufis came from the very fact that they were seen as an alternative to a temporal power that could press very heavily on all the king's subjects. They always had, moreover, the potential of taking on a political role, as exemplified by the eighteenth-century successor of Baba Farid noted by Richard Eaton. This is not to say, as Eaton's paper makes clear, that the ideal was always central, but it was at least in the background. Not only for king and saint, but for teacher, master craftsman, and family head alike there were common moral expectations. This is evident for those in authoritative positions within the family, as suggested in the paper on the Bihishti zewar, as well as for those in authority in teaching crafts and arts, as illustrated in the paper on musicians. This indeed is one aspect of what we Muhammad Bàbur Pàdshàh Ghàzì, Bàbui-Nàma, translated from the original "Rirki text by Annette Susannah Beveridge (New Delhi, 1970), reprint of 1922 edition, two volumes in one. 8. See Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: History and Conscience in a World Civilization (Chicago, 1974), 3:67-80. 9. Abu al-Fadl, the À'in i akbari, trans. H. Blochmann and H. Jarrett (Calcutta, 1948-49), 5:3, 173.

INTRODUCTION

9

assume to be common expectations for leadership and common modes of establishing authoritative relationships in all domains of life. In all cases, leaders establish relationships with followers through gifts, provision of food, bestowal of turbans, and taking of oaths. At a symbolic level, authority at every level is one. What were the moral expectations that were articulated for all Muslims and, above all, for those in positions of authority? How were they to be achieved? Reflection on these two questions provided a second major theme of our discussions. Both in the teachings of Islam conveyed in adab and in the method of their realization we found unity, again, to be our central theme, both coherence of all domains which are taught and coherence in the intellectual, emotional, and physical experience of what is learned. The teachings of Islam are one. Thus there is no parallel to (what is said to be) the theory in Hinduism that one can reach salvation through different paths—of action, of knowledge, of devotion. Here one can define three domains, shari'a (the Law), tariqa (the way of the ju/is), and adab, that are analytically distinguishable, that have their respective specialists, that can be seen in tension with each other. Yet since all emerge, at core, as attempts to codify and embody the practice of the Prophet, they are ultimately the same in mainstream Islam. As Khalid Masud argued, they share a common idiom and systematization. All three use the terminology—u$ul, furuc, ijtihad, ijmac—developed in the central system, that of shari'a. Adab became the vehicle for transmission of training in sufism, and as adab i din, a way of reaching toward greater completeness in Law by elaborating the sunna beyond what is legally required. Adab itself is based on the teachings of the other two domains. Further aspects of unity in these teachings were evident in our discussions of how this training is attained. Whether one begins with the Law, the Path, or Manners, each of necessity includes the others. As Ira Lapidus argued in his paper, although major classical thinkers of Islam may analytically distinguish among an outer emphasis on the Law, an inner ethical disposition, and the spiritual vision of God, it is clear that none is possible without the others. Knowledge, they hold, is not true knowledge unless it is realized, for there is no concept of the detached intellectual. Nor can one's inner self be untouched by what one knows and hence by what one does. Consequently, adab may "mean"

10

INTRODUCTION

correct outer behavior, but it is understood as both cause of and then, reciprocally, fruit of one's inner self. Knowing, doing, and being are inescapably one. The relation between the physical and spiritual self is closer than one might expect. Several of the papers describe a theory that humans possess two important faculties: 'aql, the faculty of moral discrimination shared with the angels, on the one hand, and nafs, the self in the sense of the will or, more typically, willful principle, on the other. Both, generally speaking, are expected to coexist. Man's realization comes through cultivation of caql and the consequent disciplining of the nafs. One seeks to refine, not destroy, the nafs. It is the very tension, the process of discrimination, the fact that there are choices to be made and control to be exercised, that gives man's life its value. It is this, not holy war, that is the "greater" jihad: unceasing effort to discriminate the boundaries set forth in the Qur'an and relentless self-control in eschewing excess and living within them. Thus Nadhir Ahmad (the late-nineteenth-century novelist discussed by C. M. Nairn) echoed the widespread interpretation that the Qur'anic "trust" given to man alone in all creation is precisely the exercise of caql. Training in this discrimination presupposes a subtle relationship between the outer act and inward self. The central metaphor for personal development is that of habit or malaka through which outer action transforms or colors the soul. Actions reflect true knowledge and actions create that truth. Divinely revealed ritual actions, above all the attestation of faith, prayer, fast, alms, and pilgrimage, act on man in ways beyond his comprehension, exactly, notes al-Ghazzali, as do magic charts and the position of the stars.10 Obedience to legal injunctions generally is both a good in itself and the means to self-transformation, for moral choices create a pattern that ultimately, if repeated often enough, ideally makes it possible to act correctly without even the process of reflection. Even feigned emotions serve a legitimate end, for the Prophet himself taught that one should pretend to weep if one did not do so naturally, in order to cultivate the appropriate emotion. These theories recur in South Asian Islamic texts. Shah Wall 10. W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali (Lahore, 1963 reprint), pp. 7 9 - 8 0 .

INTRODUCTION

11

Allah, the great intellectual of eighteenth-century Delhi, wrote that it is the Law that is the remedy for the nafs: The human species combines two opposing faculties, the angelic and the bestial. . . happiness lies in strengthening the former. . . . the creation of man is such that his self readily accepts the impressions of his actions done with full deliberation. These very impressions cling to his mind, constitute a part of it, continue with it even after his death, and become part of his reward and punishment. Contrary is the case of the animals. Whatever they do, the effect produced therefrom does not cling to their minds."

And Richard Kurin, analyzing popular contemporary views of heaven in Karachi and rural Panjab said, in discussion, much the same: If life in heaven illustrates anything, it is that actions make for new people, and new people make for new actions. . . . In this light the distinction between internal and external, or inward and outward, is obfuscated. The practice of good habits or proper action in this world which stamp the soul and transform the person reaches apotheosis in the next world.

Whether one is learning a craft, or poetry and language, or music, or moral and spiritual qualities, the process of outer practice, the creation of habit, and finally a realization of that process in one's being is precisely the same. In paper after paper, the central strategy for achieving this discipline was seen as the relationship to a worthy teacher. The relation of $ufi master and disciple is the model for the relation of teacher and student in everything else: in crafts, in music, and in religious scholarship. The relationship was most fully discussed in the paper by Dr. Mohammad Ajmal, the psychologist, who argued the importance of discipleship for the focusing of oneself through the elimination of distraction and conflict. Detailed adab define the closeness and reciprocity of the relationship, as Gerhard Bowering commented, "to the point that the ideal of the master as a perfect man is internalized . . . and becomes something like an inner guide." Dr. Ajmal analyzed the classic relationship of the poet RumI and his beloved Shams i Tabriz in these terms, explaining that Shams i Tabriz had been a potentiality within Rumi, externalized then later drawn back into him11. From the Altaf al-quds, quoted in G. N. Jalbani, The Teachings of Shah Waliyullah (Lahore, 1967).

12

INTRODUCTION

self, at which point he needed Shams i Tabriz no longer. The goal of the training is not merely unity with one's shaikh, but unity between God and theomorphic man: tauhid, Gerhard Bowering suggested, on the level of experience. The shaikh is only one of a company of great holy men who have lived before and who still present a living reality for those who share in this tradition. We were disabused of the assumption that the Muslims we study share our view of the past. For them, like medieval Christian thinkers, the past "differed from the present only by being better."11 The eulama of Farangi Mahall, as described by Francis Robinson, live in the company of their forebears. The followers of Baba Farid, described by Richard Eaton, knew him still to be present: Ibn Battutah "met him" long after his death. The Tuhfa i na$a'ih was attributed to Gesu Daraz (and not to the disciple who wrote it). By belonging to the company of living saints, Peter Brown noted, men otherwise enmeshed in the complex ties of patronage and hierarchy basically belonged to no one. It was in fact this psychological freedom, offered by disciplined training, to which we circled back again and again in our final discussion on the papers of Dr. Ajmal and the musician Brian Silver, for there we saw music as analogous to mysticism. Specific codes of conduct, of discipline, of grammar and rules, far from being repressive, were seen to permit one to transcend one's self, to lose one's self in favor of creativity and true freedom. It is that transcendence, that freedom from confusion, conflict, and conscious deliberation, that is understood by one's audience as the very basis and source of moral authority. The perfected individual represents not only the embodiment of the received tradition, but by interpretation and choice of elements within its repertoire confirms its current relevance and immediacy as well. In our papers and discussions we thus focused primarily on that style of adab that represents an Islamic ideal. Three papers included in this volume (those of Richards, Nairn, and Silver) remind us, however, that in many settings the content of adab is cosmopolitan and shared by non-Muslims as well. It is this dimension of adab that in fact is best known. This cosmopolitan adab defines the proper discrimination of social order, behavior, 12. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1974 reprint), p. 185.

INTRODUCTION

13

and taste; it espouses principles of breeding and nurture; and it is sustained by deference toward those who embody its norms. Its norms may at times be unself-consciously assimilated into a Muslim religious style. Indeed, Muslims may sanction the same codes by Islamic norms that others sanction by Hindu or other norms. A dab typically includes strands that can be identified as un-Islamic and that are at times condemned as contradictory to the Islamic ideal. From Mughal times on, India has been particularly distinguished by its association of Muslim and non-Muslim ruling elites in a common Persianate or Indo-Muslim cultural style. The Persianate theory of kingship has been especially problematic in Islamic religious thought. Its glorification of the ruler can be seen as an affront to the humility and deference that are described above as quintessential to the moral perfections of Islam. At times this contradiction has been ignored, and at other times thinkers have sought resolutions. Barani, the fourteenth-century courtier, argued that the salvation of the king was in fact in peril precisely because he had to wield absolute power. His only hope was to use his powers for the purposes of Islam. Bichitr, the artist, portrayed a solution to this tension, one might argue, by showing Jahangir gazing transfixed at the successor of Khwaja Mu c in ad-Din Chishtl, to whom he is handing a book, while the cherubs bearing instruments of war flee and worldly monarchs stand humbly by: the inner Jahangir is absorbed in the lift of the darwesh. 13 In Barani, non-Islamic behavior is used to good ends; in Bichitr, the royal and the spiritual are compartmentalized. A third and pervasive solution is simply to subject the non-Islamic to relentless Islamicization, as John Richards illustrated by his examination of the Suluk al-muluk, a text for princes written in the unstable world of sixteenth-century central Asia.14 In one manuscript the work is tellingly subtitled Adab al-qadi, for it is largely directed to educating the king to provide a framework for Islamic justice. The shared court ethic of the elite is illustrated in John Rich13. Richard Ettinghausen, "The Emperor's Choice," in De Artibus Opuscula (XL), Essays in Honor of Irwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (New York, 1961), 1:98-120. 14. The work is available in English translation: Muhammad Aslam, Muslim Conduct of State, based upon the Suluk al-muluk of Fadi Allah ibn Ruzbihan Isfahan!, Islamabad, 1974.

14

INTRODUCTION

ards's paper on the Hindu Rajput man$abdar Bhimsen. Bhimsen valued certain qualities of honor, pride, deference, and loyalty that he held in common with his fellow Muslim courtiers. He attributed a divine, albeit not Islamic, sanction to this system of values and to the existing political system. Rajput and Persian norms overlapped and were legitimized by all in some transcendent system. The same Aurangzeb was an Islamic exemplar to Muslims and a noble Rajput to Bhimsen. However legitimized, shared customary norms united the ruling class. The adab of musicians discussed by Brian Silver seems much the same in its comprehension of values that could be shared by Muslim and non-Muslim and yet could be infused by religious values and norms. The ideal personal qualities, the relationship of the teacher and pupil, the particular rituals that mark instruction are part of a shared musical culture. Some of its aspects are potentially problematic. As in the culture of courtiers and elites generally, the adab of musicians can be characterized by the pride and hauteur of the noble sharif, an element in conflict with religious norms of humility but susceptible to rationalization in this milieu as in the princely. Some customs, like the thread-tying of initiation and other rituals, can be seen in conflict with Islamic norms. Some lyrics could no doubt be judged unacceptable. The adab of musicians illustrates particularly well the diverse strands characteristic of any form of adab that can coexist despite potential tension. As a whole the system can unite a group while at the same time having somewhat different meaning for its various members. Tensions do at times prevail as is evident from the discussion of the late-nineteenth-century novels of Deputy Nadhir Ahmad by C. M. Nairn. The Tauba an-na$uh in particular rejects the shared cultural values of the Persianized Hindu-Muslim elites as exemplified in the life of the ne'er-do-well Kalim. His poetry and games and pigeons, each the product of cultivation and refinement of a particular sort, are deemed as outmoded as the princely state where Kalim meets his end. In part, Nadhir Ahmad seems to hold out in contrast the adab of the Islamic ideal in which the goal is a disciplined life of religious obligation and ritual to define relationships to Cod and to other humans. But his is adab with a difference. In contrast to other contemporary thinkers like Ashraf cAli Thanawl, he values elements of British culture. This does not mean only, however, that the cosmopoli-

INTRODUCTION

15

tan non-Islamic element in adab has shifted from Persian to British. Instead, by incipient suggestions that all religions are of equal value—translate Tauba into Panjabi and change a few words to make it suitable for Sikhs—he steps outside the traditional valuation of Islam toward a more relative or pluralistic one. And secondly, by attempting, as Nairn describes, compartmentalization of domains in his books—ethics in one, practical wisdom in another, religion in a third—he hints at the contraction of religious principles to a separate domain that has been a major theme in the history of the Christian West. Here is indeed a cosmopolitan adab. If adab is shaped from above by a superregional, cosmopolitan culture, it is also shaped from below by the local and regional. This, as C. M. Nairn noted, is often "one's past." Even if legitimized in part as customary law [cada or curf) or by other rationalization, local practices carry with them the ambiguity that the phrase implies. For South Asia this would be particularly true of what is seen as Hindu or regional in origin. Richard Kurin made the striking suggestion that the contrast is sometimes seen as similar to that of caql and nafs, with the regional culture seen as the more impulsive, more childlike, more in possession of nafs than of caql. His insight finds echoes in the poetry of the thirteenth-century mystic Jalal ad-Din RumI, as presented in the recent study of Annemarie Schimmel where one symbol of the nafs is the Hindu.15 The Hindu, Professor Schimmel explains, just like the nafs, can be useful. On other occasions RumI calls the other world Turkestan, site of the green spring migration, and the world of clay and water is dark Hindustan. Regional and ethnic values are at times seen as a source of tension for Islamic values and their exclusion is a major theme in the modern period. Adab not only comprises various strands within itself but is also potentially challenged by other Islamic religious styles. Within Islam itself there is a repertoire of paradigms or styles of which adab, in the sense of embodiment of ethical norms through intellectual knowledge, spiritual cultivation, and correct behavior, is only one. In other social and temporal milieus, there have been emphases that do not give priority to moral conduct. Of these, two are significant. One, of great cultural import s . Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal laloddin

Rumi (London, 1978), pp. 1 9 3 - 9 5 .

Sun: A Study of the Works of fa-

16

INTRODUCTION

tance, is the mediational. This stresses direct access to divine power and guidance through the blessing inherent in sufi saints who intervene on behalf of the spiritual and material needs of those who trust in them. A second emphasis, discussed but not taken up in any of the papers, is that of metaphysical speculation which focuses on intellectual understanding of cosmological realities on the part of the elite. None of these three modes is exclusive but Muslims on some occasions have made one or the other central. Richard Eaton's paper on the shrine of Baba Farid well illustrated sources of authority outside that of personal realization. The shrine itself acquired importance because of its role in incorporating recently sedentarized tribes into a larger social and political framework, legitimizing central political authority, and being patronized and validated in return. The shrine served as a focus of a religion of saintly intercession and not of moral exemplification. Yet even a shrine like this one, it is clear, continued to represent the qualities conveyed by the training of adab. Pilgrims, whatever their material goal, knew and valued the moral qualities of the original saint. They aspired to those qualities through the very process of a liminal discarding of worldly bonds and identities in pilgrimage. The image of the saint persisted over time. The shrine and its shaikhs, moreover, always had the potential of reasserting the qualities of moral conduct. To illustrate this, David Gilmartin's paper covered the recent history of the very same shrine when legal succession disputes indicated increased expectations that the worthy heir embody exemplary personal qualities. The most explicit and dramatic alternative to adab within Islam is that posed by the malangs, the sufis who ignore the limits of the Law, who were discussed in a paper by Katherine Ewing. They flout all conventional behavior and all involvement in the ordinary institutions of social life. They deny the existence of the body and believe they eliminate the nafs. They hope thus to be passive recipients of direct communications from God. Yet even they, Ewing argued, in a sense have an adab of their own. They live in a close brotherhood regulated by hierarchic codes of ritualized etiquette, thus sharing in the general style of authoritative relationships. Moreover they are, in a sense,

INTRODUCTION

17

regarded by other Muslims as exemplars of values they themselves hold. The malangs epitomize the detachment that all desire. They think of themselves as women married to God, yet mainstream sufis, as well, foster that same relationship, symbolized in the c urs, the "marriage with God" which is death. The malangs carry shared values to their extremes. As a result, some believe that among them are the true saints, the hidden abdal, of every age. They are accorded space at festivals of shrines of mainstream pirs. Ordinary Muslims, above all childless women, beseech them for intercession. Much the same pattern of unconventional sufism was evident in a paper on the qalandais of fourteenth-century Delhi presented by Simon Digby on the day preceding the conference. We were struck by evident similarities in both cases and by the fact that the presence of those who explicitly reversed the conventions of adab is most evident in periods when adab is most elaborated. One of the major themes of our discussion—one of particular interest to the historian—was to ask when it is that the image of the morally realized individual is explicit and self-conscious. As our discussions progressed we began to see that societies and individuals hold at any given time a repertoire of elements which, as social realities change, explicitly or implicitly are reworked and shifted. Most of the time, perhaps, individuals live without self-conscious attention to the integrity and coherence of their values, but in times of crises and change, lines are drawn and values explored. The very existence of the rules and directives of adab suggests a multiplicity of potential systems of values associated with social and occupational roles; ethnic and regional values; aesthetic, cosmopolitan, and scientific modes of thought; and even alternate ways of being religious. One period when moral codes were important was that of the post-Abbasid period discussed by Digby and Bowering. Gerhard Bowering reminds us, for example, that "The roots of sufism in religious practice and conduct enabled sufism to persist as a unifying bond and a force of renewal within Islamic society from the 6th/12th to the 8th/14th century when the traditional order of Islamic society was in a state of fragmentation." Although the foundation was laid earlier it was in these decades that the detailed distinguishing adab of the various orders were formulated.

18

INTRODUCTION

Most of our examples of this emphasis, however, came from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Indian political system was in crisis and the foundations of the culture were called into question. Francis Robinson's paper on the 'ulama' of Farangi Mahall, my own on the Bihishti zewar as a text of right conduct for women, and David Gilmartin's on the succession at the shrine of Baba Farid all pointed to this theme. It is even possible that the conceptions of paradise of humble Pakistanis, presented by Richard Kurin, also derive from a new widespread emphasis on these norms. The 'ulama' of Deoband and Farangi Mahall and the pirs of Taunsa Sharif represent in varying ways the concern of the religious leadership for guarding the tradition at a time without overarching temporal Muslim institutions and, particularly in the former case, a concern not only with embodying moral standards themselves but also with disseminating them as the basis of a Muslim identity. An emphasis on personal transformation is, of course, as noted above, part of the larger trend toward self-conscious, scripturally based reform characteristic not only of South Asian Muslims but of Muslims in general in modern times. Although this is not the place to explore this development at length, a number of very suggestive points were made about why movements toward reformist Islam have been so pervasive in South Asia. The situation of the religious elites was particularly stressed. Edmund Burke, in his comments, pointed to the importance of the framework set for religious leaders by the British colonial state, which at once brought forth a response from the 'ulama' to defend their faith (and interests) and simultaneously, by its communal and high culture idiom in issues of education, justice, and politics, created conditions in which a religious leadership could flourish. Moreover, the traditional landed and educated elites, far from being undermined, often prospered. This presented a dramatic contrast, Burke suggested, to the situation of the Ottoman religious leadership, who were tainted by their cooptation by the political system. It differed as well from the Moroccan case, where the domain of religious leadership was progressively restricted and controlled by the French authorities. This religious elite, moreover, sought to define moral standards for increasingly large segments of the population. David Gilmartin, in discussion, pointed to a fundamental structural reason for this change:

INTRODUCTION

19

The reformers in the modern period . . . are less concerned with elites because it is not just the elites who provide the cultural basis for the political system; rather there are larger groups of people who are now involved. This becomes particularly important in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the political system itself, as the British are devising it, becomes more and more democratic. Sovereignty no longer resides only in a sovereign who himself is the protector of a cultural system, but resides in the people themselves. The people must conform, in the reformist view, to Islamic standards.

Katherine Ewing carried this point into the contemporary period in Pakistan by noting that the government's Auqaf Department has attempted to take over the shrines itself and relegate the current pirs to the position of caretakers. Authority is said to reside in the government on the one hand and in the people as a voting population on the other. There should be no intermediary between the government and the individual nor between the people and God. The corollary to this, she suggested, is the current attempt to legislate Islamic values. This concern with values is furthered by the association of adab with respectability, so that cultivation of Islamic norms becomes a central element in social mobility. Among those now to be educated are Muslim women, a concern evident in the paper on the Bihishti zewar of the Deobandi Ashraf cAli Thanawi. Through exactly the same kind of teachings on the nature of the self and its means of training that were characteristic of the classical tradition, women were enjoined to exercise reasoned control so as properly to play their social and religious role, fulfilling their carefully calibrated reciprocal obligations to other people and fulfilling their responsibility to God. They then are accorded the respect owed to all who show disciplined control. The importance of this seemed the greater given conventional notions expressed, as Simon Digby reminded us, throughout the traditional ethical and poetic literature, of women's being less guided by reason and likely to distract men from reasonable behavior too. William Roff noted that the nafs (as hawa nafsu) in Indonesia is identified with women as, indeed, it appears in similes in the poetry of Rumi. But simultaneous with attention to Islamic norms is of course the diffusion of aspects of Western culture. How successful, how resilient, is the system of transmission of Islamic values in that context? The case of the novelist Nadhlr Ahmad, noted above,

20

INTRODUCTION

suggestively raised this issue. But more work needs to be done on "the adab of contemporary Muslims, whether in India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, who are living in a modern economic and technical environment yet seek to behave as Muslims." 1 6 Despite the reminder of the contemporary currents that may obviate the continuance of this conception of adab, our emphasis throughout was on its persistence and in particular on the personal and social integrity it engendered. The importance of this for Muslim societies is that change can take place within the context of a classical civilization which continues through a diversity of times, places, and situations. Our interest in these discussions focused primarily on the personal and psychological dimension of what it meant to be formed in this tradition. In discussing the meaning of Islamic adab, we were impressed with its self-conscious deliberateness, its demanding standards, and the satisfaction that is derived from its mastery; the resultant freedom derived from elimination of conflict; the sense of living strength from perceived continuity with the past; the sense of wholeness that comes from embracing all knowledge and all experience within a single paradigm of meaning. Muslims have made moral exemplification a cornerstone of cultural continuity, particularly, it appears, in periods of perceived social and political dislocation. To study the importance, elaboration, and audience of this religious perspective in various settings is clearly a key to significant dimensions of both the inner and outer life of Muslim peoples, and in particular to the profound capacities within Islam to respond to and to generate change. The papers included here make a contribution to understanding these fundamentally important Islamic themes. 16. In a personal communication from Peter Hardy.

1 Late Antiquity and Islam: Parallels and Contrasts PETER

BROWN

Not long after the Second World War, under the influence of events that he, like so many of his European contemporaries had witnessed at first hand, and under which he had himself suffered, that master of the cultural history of late antiquity, Henri Irenee Marrou, wrote a concluding chapter to the survey of Hellenistic education in his History of Education in Antiquity. Placed as it is in the middle of the book, it is a justification of the contemporary relevance of his enterprise: There needs to be a pause for consideration. Hellenistic education is not simply something that has passed away, it has been—it has had being—and we cannot consider ourselves to have finished with it until we have made some attempt to ponder its essence and understand its value.1 What follows is a deeply felt evocation of the aims of a whole system of education and a confrontation of its aims with the romantic cult of originality and with the obsession with progress in the technical sciences that form the paradigm of modern European educational ideals, a paradigm against which all other 1. H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), p. 217.

trans. George Lamb

24

CLASSICAL

ADAB

forms of culture—that of the Hellenistic age included—tend to be set and judged wanting. The confrontation is all the more convincing as Marrou, writing immediately before the war, had tended to dismiss the cultural ideals of the Hellenistic age and their direct late antique continuation, as irremediably "decadent"—as traditionalist, précieux, bookish, and profoundly antiscientific. 2 What he now presented is the essence of a great traditional culture as it existed along the shores of the Mediterranean for over eight hundred years. It is a mistake to say, as is often said by its detractors, that it was "born with its head back to front," looking back to the past. It is not autumnal, tormented with nostalgic regrets for a vanished spring. On the contrary, it looks upon itself as firmly established in an unchanging present, in the full blaze of a hot summer sun. It knows what mighty reserves it possesses, what past masters it has had. The fact that these appeared at certain moments of time, under the influence of certain historical forces, is unimportant; what matters is that they exist and can be rediscovered in the same way, again and again, by each successive generation.3

Such massive traditionalism was the precondition of the amazing cohesion of Graeco-Roman civilization: For in the last resort classical humanism was based on tradition, something imparted by one's teachers and handed on unquestioningly . . . it meant that all the minds of one generation, and indeed of a whole historical period, had a fundamental homogeneity which made communication and genuine communion easier.4

Above all, this was a culture that aimed at realizing a single human ideal from which all valid human achievements were held to radiate, and without which they were of no value: "this is the true humanism—this emphasis on the social aspect of culture, on the danger of any activity that tends to be self-enclosed and aloof from the ordinary intercourse of daily life." 5 Twenty years later, a similar disquiet and a sense of the limited applicability of our own Western paradigms have led 2. H. I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris: de Boccard, 1937); Retractatio (Paris: deBouccard, 1949). 3. Marrou, History of Education, p. 161. 4. Ibid., p. 224. 5. Ibid., p. 223.

LATE ANTIQUITY AND

ISLAM

25

scholars to look with far greater sympathy than previously, no longer, as Marrou once did, at the alien past of Europe itself, but, now, outside Europe, at the alien present of the intellectual elites of the Third World. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Islam. It is therefore from this perspective—a limited one, given the superabundance of the work made available at this seminar, but, I trust, not a totally misplaced one—that I wish to comment on some of the papers that I have had the time to think over. First, because as a historian of the culture of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, I have long been concerned with the societies that would abut the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, and with the earlier forms of those traditions that would contribute to the new Islamic synthesis. Second, because the dominant theme of so many of the papers is one which had long preoccupied late antique and, in different terms, medieval people—as Barbara Metcalf calls it, "the creation of a kind of person." Third, quite frankly, as a non-Islamicist but a layman, I am concerned not simply to garner a rich crop of acceptable interdisciplinary insights and erudition: the fate of contemporary Islam and the nature of European estimates of the cultural and spiritual resources of contemporary Islamic societies do concern me deeply. After all, the question "Whither late antiquity?" has been answered for the last thousand years, but the question "Whither Islam?" has not yet been answered. In the first place, historians of late-antique culture have come increasingly to realize the seriousness of the Greek ideal of paideia as this was operative among the elites of the Hellenistic and Roman world. Far from being a mere intellectual decoration, it has been revealed to carry with it many of the assumptions of the classical Muslim concept of adab as this has been set out by Ira Lapidus, and it was brought to bear in analogous situations. A few decades ago, it was sufficient to speak of the literary culture of late antiquity less in terms of its intrinsic merits or aims than in terms of its function: it preserved the cohesion of the educated elites; it added cultural weight to social distance; it facilitated the recruitment and expansion of elites, by offering a common badge of status that could be easily appropriated; and, as a result, it eased the relations between the traditional upper classes and their succession of new masters. My World of Late

26

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Antiquity contains an elegant condensation, in only four pages (with illustrations), of this view,6 which is basically insufficient. It is insufficient because it assumes that, throughout, there was a "machine of government" whose actions were camouflaged or facilitated by a décor of literary culture, a common paideia to which all the educated governing class paid lip service. In fact, what this view overlooks is that, in late antiquity—and, indeed, in most of the ancient and medieval world—there was no such thing as a "machine of government"; there was only a network of interpersonal relations that was government.7 Plainly, in such a situation, the "creation of a kind of person" by means of a traditional culture was a serious matter. The relations between governed and governors, from relations with an imperial court to the treatment of slaves, depended on the claim of traditional paideia to mould the raw human nature of the educated elites.8 Young noblemen should not toss professors in a blanket, said Li6. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), pp. 2 9 - 3 3 , in which I followed, especially, A. Alfôldi, A Conflict of Ideas in the Late Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 9 6 - 1 2 4 , and Ramsay MacMullen, "Roman Bureaucratese," Traditio 18 (1962): 3 6 4 - 7 8 . See also J. F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court: A.D. 364-425 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 6 9 - 8 7 ; Fritz S. Pedersen, "On Professional Qualifications for Public Posts in Late Antiquity," Classica et Medievalia 31 (1975): 161-213; Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Government's Response to Crisis: AD 235-337 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 4 8 - 5 3 ; D. Nellen, Viri Litterati. Gebildetes Beamtentum und spàtrômischer Reich im Westen zwischen 284 und 395 n. Chr. (Bochum: N. Brockmeyer, 1977); J. J. O'Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 3 3 - 1 0 2 . Late-antique parallels for the recruitment and culture of the administrative elites of the medieval Islamic world have only recently been exploited: D. O. Morgan, "Cassiodorus and Rashid al-Din on Barbarian Rule in Italy and Persia," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 40(1977): 3 0 2 - 2 0 . 7. P. Veyne, Le Pain et le cirque (Paris: Le Seuil, 1976), p. 638: "Les options politiques de l'Antiquité n'étaient pas où nous les chercherions, dans les programmes rivaux de politique constitutionnelle ou bien sociale, et elles étaient où nous ne les chercherions pas, dans les options administratives ou encore dans la modalité d'obéissance, dans le style de commandement." Neglect of this caution accounts for mounting bibliography and small progress in the political history of the Roman Empire. Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (London: Duckworth, 1977), pp. 203-72, is an impressive marshaling of the evidence for the intensely personal nature of the exercise of imperial power. 8. Compare Hsiao-T\ing Fei, Chinese Gentry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 36: "Such men did not try to control political power in their own interest but endeavored rather to put forward a set of ethical principles which should restrict the force of political power."

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banius of Antioch, the great fourth-century teacher, nor should they brutalize artisans and shopkeepers: "it is unworthy of those being formed by education."9 The cultural achievements of late Roman governors played an increasing role in honorary inscriptions; for common exposure to the sweetening influence of the Muses and the restraints of an upper-class deportment were, in fact, the only guidelines for the exercise of power.10 Hence the genuine disquiet with which late Roman men, when divided by political interest or religion, eyed each other for those tell-tale symptoms of a failing of grooming. The Emperor Julian sincerely believed that, from studying the Christian scriptures, "no man could attain to excellence or even to ordinary goodness."11 Repaying him in his own coin, Gregory Nazianzen recalls how, watching the young Julian as a student in Athens, he could know that here was a man on whom the benign immunization of paideia would not "take": those restless eyes, that heavy breathing in the nose, the shuffling gait, the bursts of uncontrolled laughter—these were symptoms of behavior that would erupt disastrously, in Julian the Emperor, in the form of shouting in the judgment hall, kicks and buffets for petitioners, cheeks disgustingly distended to blow on the sacrificial fires12—all explosions of anomalous actions in a man who had not been groomed to restrain his feelings, like an awesome, polished statue, through the rigors of a correct deportment common to an emperor and his educated subjects.13 Thus, to use Ira Lapidus's telling phrases, for a late-antique gentleman quite as much as for the Muslim follower of adab, "life itself is a work of art" and "life is ceremony." Far from being 9. Libanius, Oratio 58: 4 - 5 , ed. R. Forster (Leipzig: Teubner), 4:183. 10. L. Robert, "Épigrammes du Bas-Empire," Hellenica 4 (1948): 35-110; I. Sevcenko, "A Late Antique Epigram," Synthronon: art et archéologie de la fin de l'Antiquité et du Moyen âge. Recueil d'études pai André Grabar et un groupe de ses disciples (Paris: Klincksicck, 1968), pp. 29-41; P. J. Parsons, "The Grammarian's Complaint," Collectanea Papyrologica. Texts Published in Honor of H. C. Youtie (Bonn: Habelt, 1976), p. 420: a small-town grammarian approaches the emperor because of "your fellowship with the Muses (for Education sits beside you on the throne)." 11. Julian, Against the Galilaeans, 229 DE, trans. W. C. Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, Loeb Classical Library (New York: Putnam, 1953), 3:385. 12. Gregory Nazianzenus, Oratio 5: in Julianum 23, ed. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus complétas. Series graeca 35:692B. 13. M. P. Charlesworth, "Imperial Deportment," Journal of Roman Studies 37 (1947): 34-38.

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an exclusively intellectual grooming, Graeco-Roman paideia was expected to show itself immediately in body posture, in the inflection of the voice, in the restriction of gestures, and even in the control of breathing.14 As in Lapidus's definition of the aim of adab, "All human actions have to be channelled into correct forms of behavior which eliminates undirected, idiosyncratic, irrational, private expressions of feeling."15 Its restraints were intimate, all-embracing, and, on occasion, crushing: Metrocles, the disciple of Theophrastus, wanted to die when once he farted in a public lecture.16 These considerations would lead me to pay far more attention than I have done so far to those figures in late-antique society whose moral authority stemmed from the belief that they had fully internalized and made their own the exacting disciplines of paideia. These were the "saints of culture." Up to now I had concentrated largely on the ascetic holy man who, as a hermit, took up his stance as mediator and arbitrator outside society.17 But the late-antique philosopher, also, enjoyed an influence far out of proportion to his highly technical and inward-looking profession precisely because he summed up in his person the dearly wished-for effectiveness of norms of deportment current inside society. He stood at the "core" of late-antique upper-class culture. He summed up in his person ideals that his fellows, through neglect and through the bitter compromises of public life, had realized only incompletely. He was the alter ego of the educated elite.18 If we look at the grave figures of the Muses, of scholars, of bare-chested philosophers, of solemn children surrounded by ancient mentors on the Roman sarcophagi of the third century, we gain some idea of the strain that such a belief 14. A. J. Festugière, Antioche paienne et chrétienne (Paris: de Boccard, 1959), pp. 2 1 7 - 2 4 , is a brilliant characterization by a past master of Creek religion and culture. 15. Ira Lapidus, in chapter 2 of this book. 16. Diogenes Laertius, De claioium philosophorum vitis, 6.94, ed. C. G. Cobet (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878), p. 155; Festugière, Antioche, p. 220. 17. Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man," Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80-101: now in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 103-52; and The Making of Late Antiquity {Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 8 1 - 1 0 1 . 18. Peter Brown, "The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity," Colloquia of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies 36 (Berkeley, Graduate Theological Union, 1979) and Philosophers and Monks: Renunciation, Culture and Society in Late Antiquity (forthcoming).

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imposed." For these are the tombs of men who had remained caught up in public life until their death. One of the most impressive encloses a young aristocrat who had served in the army of the Emperor Gallienus.20 These silent figures are the ghosts of what each dead man might have been. The deeper we enter into the common ground between lateantique paideia and Islamic adab, the more sympathy we gain for the refusal of men in great classical civilizations to put their faith in any safeguard other than the patient and intimate grooming of the behavior of their elites, and for the faith that such grooming can happen, can be seen to happen, and can be repeated in every generation. Yet, no sooner have we entered with sympathy into this common concern than the difference between Islam and the Graeco-Roman world springs to the eye. Though often brought to bear on men of deep religious belief, Hellenistic and late-antique paideia contained no religious code and imposed no religious sanction whatsoever. The sanctions imposed were those brought to bear by purely human significant others in the society. Ultimately, a man was brought to heel by the sense of shame, by reminders of the antithesis of aischron and kalon, and by the revulsion felt by the refined soul for those unrefined elements of raw human nature that betrayed themselves in breaches of decorum, aschèmosynè.11 "My lord, you forget yourself"—aschèmoneis hègêmôn—is the ultimate putdown placed in the mouth of a Christian martyr confronting an ill-tempered Roman governor.22 Late antique paideia only brings us half the way to the Islamic product of adab, as adab is defined by Georges Anawati: "un vrai code de savoir-vivre où se mêlent les exigences d'un homme 'bien elévé' mais en même temps soucieux de bien se comporter 'en presence de Dieu.'" 23 The last quality was absent in this basically secular system of grooming and in the motivations to which it appealed. Hence the growing sense of insufficiency of Greek paideia 19. H. I. Marrou, Mousikos Anêr: Étude sur les scènes de la vie figurant sur les monuments funéraires romains (Grenoble: Didier, 1938). 20. Ibid., p. 216. 21. Festugière, Antioche, p. 218. 22. The Martyrdom of Conon, 5.6, ed. and trans. H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 190. 23. Georges A. Anawati, "Homo Islamicus," Images of Man in Ancient and Medieval Thought. Studia G. Verbeke ab amicis et collegis dicata, Symbolae 1 (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1976), p. 240.

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expressed in Christian circles, less because it was pagan or because its literature contained immoral mythological material than because it was, strictly in terms of its own aims, insufficient. When it came to the intimate and intractable anomalies of human behavior—adolescent sexuality, for instance—John Chrysostom, though he was (maybe precisely because he was) the well-groomed pupil of Libanius of Antioch, had to insist that paideia went so far and no farther: "How shall we tie down this wild beast? How shall we place a bridle on it? I know none, save only the restraint of hell-fire."24 The late-antique reaction to this situation highlights yet further the particularity of the Islamic solution. Those leaders of the Christian church who gave most thought to the transformation of the individual were precisely those who, increasingly, saw no way out other than total ascetic withdrawal from the world. It is in the monasteries and clusters of hermits of the late fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries that we find the dogged and skilled pursuit of what Saint Benedict in his Rule called the conversio moTum—the moral transformation of the personality25— according to a process of grooming that has innumerable parallels in later Islamic thought and practice: the close observation of the behavior of holy individuals;26 the creation of habits by dogged observance;27 careful control of posture, gesture, and tone of voice;28 the stern and searching discipline of interpersonal relations imposed by a communal life;29 above all, deep psychological awareness of the quality of trains of thought and the positive cultivation of these heavy moments when the full weight of the 24. John Chrysostom, On Vainglory 76, trans. M. L. W. Laistner, Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961; Cornell Paperbacks, 1967); p. 117. The word gehenna ("hellfire") appears six times in this short treatise. Festugière, Antioche, pp. 224-25. 25. Benedict, Régula 58.17. Conversio morum is the sense, preserved in later manuscripts, of the idiosyncratic conversatio morum: O'Donnell, Cassiodorus, p. 110; A. de Vogue, La Règle de saint Benoît, Sources chrétiennes 186 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1971), pp. 1324-26. 26. Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 21: "Their visible example was a lesson, in other words, as forceful as wisdom and spiritual insight." 27. J. E. Bamberger, " Mnèmê-Diathesis: The Psychic Dynamism in the Ascetical Theology of Saint Basil," Orientalia Christiana Periodica 34 (1968): 233 - 51. 28. Brown, Making of Late Antiquity, p. 88; Basil, Régula fusius tractata 13 and 17; Migne, Patrologia Graeca 36:949B and 961B-964A. 29. Rousseau, Ascetics, pp. 33-55; Basil, Régula fusius tractata 7:928C-933A.

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presence of God and the thought of His Judgment fell upon the individual.30 When, in the Ayyuhá al-walad, al-Ghazzáli narrates how once Hasan al-Ba§ri had let fall his glass at the thought of how the damned cried to the souls in Paradise for one drop of water, his behavior would have been inconceivable as an ingredient of late-antique paideia;31 it would have been a normal and much-to-be-encouraged event in the monasteries of Pachomius, Basil, and Benedict.32 As a result of this channeling of effort into a narrower compass, there was no attempt to create anything resembling a Christian adab for a Christian man of the world. The epitaphs of the later Roman empire bear this out: right up to the end of the sixth century, laymen hardly ever describe the fear of God or of the Last Judgment as motive forces in the virtues that they ascribe, so lavishly, to the dead. From the time of Alexander the Great until the reign of Justinian, a man was seen and remembered in terms of those adjectives that marked him out as a finished product of paideia.33 In the major collection of Latin Christian inscriptions, for instance, out of 1,751 epitaphs that contain catalogues of virtues, the "fear of God" is ascribed in an explicit manner to only three laymen; all other examples concern members of the clergy or ascetics.34 Thus, seen in late-antique and early-medieval Christian terms, the novelty of the Islamic adab was not its religious content, but the application to men in the world, to non-monks, of a religious grooming that had been considered capable of transforming only 30. Evagrius Ponticus, Practica 43, trans. J. E. Bamberger, The Piaktikos (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1972), p. 24. See A. Guillaumont and C. Cuillaumont, Evagre le pontique: traité pratique ou le moine, Sources chrétiennes 170 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1971), pp. 63 - 9 8 ; Apophthegmata patrum, Sisoes 19, Migne, Patrología graeca 6 5 : 4 0 0 A ; Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975), pp. 181—82. These are the qualities of Christian monasticism in the Near East that were known to the Prophet and described in the Qur'árij E. Beck, Das christliche Mónchtum in Koran, Studia Orientaba Fennica 13:3 (Helsinki: Societas Orientalis Fennica, 1946). 31. al-Ghazzali, Scritti scelti, trans. L. V. Vaglieri and R. Rubinacci (Turin: Unione Tipográfica, 1970), pp. 5 5 - 5 6 . 32. A. A. Athanassakis, trans., The Life of Pachomius (Vita Prima Graeca) 88 (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1975), p. 126; Basil, Regula brevius tractata 3 4 - 3 7 , 1 1 0 5 A - 1 1 0 8 A . 33. L. Robert, Hellenica 13 (1965), pp. 2 2 6 - 2 7 . 34. E. Diehl, Inscriptiones Latinae christianae veteres (Zurich: Weidman, 1925|, 1 : 1 - 3 4 0 .

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those who had withdrawn from society to give themselves over to an alternative paideia in the miniature society of the celibate monastery, "as if in another world."35 For that reason, although the motor force of his adab might be similar, the problem that faced the exponent of the classical concept of adab, as Ira Lapidus has defined it, was a very different one from that which faced the Christian ascetic holy man (as I came to make his acquaintance some ten years ago). It was far closer to that of the late-antique philosopher, the "saint of paideia," who had succeeded in internalizing the paideia that he shared with his fellow members of the educated upper classes. For, unlike the Christian holy man, the Muslim exponent of adab could be said to stand at the "core" of his culture, realizing at their fullest intensity the ideals to which all observant Muslims subscribed. His moral authority came from his capacity to distill in his person the widely diffused essence of the Homo Islamicus. As Ernst Gellner put it: "Islamic propriety emanates from their essence, as it were."36 Hence the problem which faced al-Ghazzali was to make his own, in a manner that bit deep into his personality, norms that were thought to cover every aspect of his life quite as relentlessly and as inclusively as any grooming by Hellenistic paideia. Such a process of internalization could not be eased by the renunciation of wide areas of human life and of human relationships, as the Christian holy man had done. As a result, alGhazzali's autobiography, al-Munqidh min ad-dalal, though frequently compared to the Confessions of Augustine, bears little resemblance to that book. For the point of the Confessions centers on the freeing of Augustine's will "to take joy in the law of the Lord"; but, for Augustine, this happens through an earthquake of the will associated with the total renunciation of his sexuality, according to a model of the personality that excluded the possibility of unbroken transitions between a man's social and his physiological nature, which is the hallmark of the thought of al-Ghazzali.37 The evolution of al-Ghazzali is far 35. Basil, Regula fusius tiactata 5. 2:921A. 36. E. Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld, 1969), p. 149. 37. Augustine, Confessions, 8.8.19-12.30. See R. J. O'Connell, Saint Augustine's Early Theory of Man, A.D. 386-91 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968) and M. R. Miles, Augustine on the Body, American Academy of Religion Dissertation Series 31 (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979).

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closer to that of the uneasy Petrarch: for both men are already committed to the sophisticated and exacting grooming of their traditional religion; but both hoped to find their way, by a more effective internalization of religious precepts, to a new simplicity on the other side of vast sophistication.38 A further consequence was that the moral authority that stemmed from the maintenance of a form of adab was a compound infinitely more complex than can be found in any neighboring non-Islamic society in the Middle Ages. For adherence to an adab whose peak is in the internalization of the shari'a and (as Francis Robinson stresses) a large measure of identification with the life of the Prophet, as that is known in the Qur'an and the hadith, committed a man to bringing together an impressively wide spectrum of criteria of excellence, drawn from a wide sphere of human activities. By contrast, for medieval Christian thinkers on moral authority, it could be assumed that the full weight of the divine law was able to rest only on those who, by clearly delineated and ideally irreversible rituals of renunciation, had both delimited the area of human experience on which this law could be brought to bear effectively, and had, by such delimitation, cut themselves off from a large area of the business of the world, most notably from those links with society and with man's common instinctual nature that are cogently condensed in (though by no means exhausted by) sexuality and family life. Such men could then wield moral authority from a locus outside lay society.39 As a result, when a need was felt, as in the eleventh-century West, to extend moral authority to embrace life in this world as a whole—marriage and warfare, in particular—the immediate upshot was the transposition and application of the old ascetic paradigms: a clear assertion of hierarchy, 38. Hannah H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence," Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 5 0 0 - 5 0 1 , characterizes Petrarch's attitude: "The Renaissance Humanists believed that education should equip a man to lead a good life, and that therefore the function of knowledge was not merely to demonstrate the truth of given precepts, but to impel people toward their acceptance and application. They believed also that men could be molded most effectively, and perhaps only, through the art of eloquence, which endows the precept with immediacy, persuasive effect, and which stimulated a man's will as well as his reason." 39. Peter Brown, "Eastern and Western Christianity in Late Antiquity: A Parting of the Ways," The Orthodox Churches and the West, Studies in Church History 13, ed. D. Baker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), pp. 8 - 1 6 .

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by which a celibate clergy, held to exemplify a monastic paradigm of excellence, controlled the "lower" life of the laity.40 Caught between a Western society obsessed for centuries with the need to give precise social and political expression to an implicit, unchallenged hierarchy in which the "spiritual" dominated the "temporal,"41 and a South Asia which, I am told by my friends, is the natural habitat both of Homo hierarchicus and of the World-renouncer, Islam stands out by reason of its low ritual profile. Yet nothing is more impressive in these papers to a Western medievalist than the cumulative sense they convey of an Islamic religious culture held together in space and time by a web of intangible and unbreakable filaments of moral authority. To assess the moral authority of a Simeon Stylites, it was enough for a Christian layman to count the number of times he prostrated himself on his pillar, giving up at 1,244—or so his biographer expected readers to think.42 To decide to give one's loyalty to the "emerging" leader of the family of the Farangi Mahall, as Francis Robinson reveals it through the biographies of its members, was to pass him and his family through a process of moral and social accountancy that amounted to an almost complete tour d'horizon of human possibilities, from mystical experience and relations with governments to the correct place to sit in a motor car. Any group that allowed a man to exercise moral authority in its midst in such terms had to make a choice of a blend of criteria as intangible and as mysteriously efficacious as the properties of a medieval pharmacist's compound. To conclude, I should like to abandon comparisons, throw academic caution to the winds, and risk a suggestion that it is precisely the complexity of moral authority in Islam that accounts for the continued momentum and possibilities of growth and adjustment illustrated by these papers on Islam in South Asia. For, because such authority can be seen as a constellation of a wide 40. G. Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest, trans. R. E. Bennett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946); R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, Pelican History of the Church 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 3 4 - 4 4 and 1 0 0 - 3 3 . 41. G. E. Caspary, Politics and Exegesis: Origen and the Two Swords (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 1 0 2 - 2 4 , contains seminal remarks on the basis and continuity of this specific type of hierarchy in Christian thought. 42. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Historia religiosa, Migne, Patrologia graeca 82:1481A.

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range of excellencies to which the Islamic community as a whole pays lip service, moral authority can very easily be weaned from the more blatant structures of power and hierarchy in the surrounding world. It does not necessarily abandon these structures; rather, it drains onto itself, and by implication away from these, the diffused values of the Islamic community. It makes plain that the true core of Islamic authority is where the Islamic tradition has been most effectively internalized and passed on to others, and not where the soldier, the politician, the landowner, and the colonial governor might expect to find it. By belonging to the internalized norms of a universal Islamic paideia, the Muslim 3 XI = < S «9

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