Believing, Blessing, and Seeing the Glory of the World: Muhammad-centric Memory and Devotion in Early Modern Ottoman and Maghrabi Islam

Jonathan Allen

University of Maryland, College Park

Introduction: It is a commonplace among historians of Islam that the person and role of Muhammad gradually rose in centrality and estimation over the course of medieval and early modern history, across the various lands in which Islam developed and thrived. The reworking and expansion of the memory of the Prophet, and concurrent devotion towards him, was a massive, multivocal, polycentric undertaking, one that continues to unfold in contemporary Muslim communities across the world. Textually speaking, besides Muhammad’s evident presence in major Islamic “sciences,” we need only think of the many smaller but still significant genres devoted primarily to him: from early sīra to praise-poems in many vernaculars, and much more in-between, all sites of both culturally enacted memory of Muhammad, and means of devotion. This paper will work through a selection of such devotional materials, focusing primarily on collections of prayers (ṣalawāt, sing. ṣalāt; the practice itself is known as taṣliya) upon Muhammad, and the commentary apparatus that was built up around them in the Ottoman and Maghrabi worlds of early modernity.1

Scholarly attention to these sorts of artefacts of devotion and the history of their use and reception has been surprisingly thin, especially when dealing with the late medieval and early modern periods. As with so much else in Islamic religious history, the quest for origins has tended to move scholarly attention in the direction of beginnings. Popular modes of devotion, whether to Muhammad or otherwise, have received only sporadic treatments.2 The interested student might still be directed, for instance, to Constance Padwick’s 1961 work Muslim Devotions, a useful book to be sure, but no means any sort of final word on the subject. To be sure, scholars have looked at questions of “Muhammadology,” which figures into the study of devotion and piety, but their objects of enquiry have more often than not been “theoretical” works, and not the sorts of devotional texts devoted to the Prophet (or any other sorts of devotional texts) that continue to be objects of popularity in the contemporary world, as noted by McGregor concerning devotional practices generally in his article on Shadhiliyya prayer rituals.3 Even with more theoretical works, the situation is not exactly one of richness, especially for the so-called “post-classical” period.4 Why this deficiency? Part of                                                                                                                1 Note: ṣalāt is here not in the sense of the “canonical” five daily prayers. See Rippin, “Taṣliya,” in EI, and Constance Padwick, Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer Manuals in Common Use (London: SPCK, 1961), 152-171. Also, a brief word on my usage of “devotion”: I have in mind, first, specific practices directed towards God, a saint, or a prophet—in this case, primarily Muhammad, and expressive (and constitutive) of particular beliefs, emotions, memories, and desires regarding that person. Second, I include the apparatus of significances, interpretations, and textual discourses constructing around those expressions and artefacts of practiced devotion 2 There are exceptions. Besides some of the works mentioned in n. 5, the following two should also be mentioned: Richard J. A. McGregor, “A Sufi Legacy in Tunis: Prayer and the Shadhiliyya,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1997), which looks at the use of Shadhiliyya ḥizb; and Julian Millie, Splashed by the Saint: Ritual reading and Islamic sanctity in West Java (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2009). 3 McGregor, “A Sufi Legacy,” 255. 4 Among the exceptions to this trend, see especially a very useful and, for our purposes here, pertinent article by Valerie J. Hoffmann, “Annihilation in the Messenger of God: The Development of a Sufi Practice,” in International Journal of Middle Eatern Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1999); on contemporary devotional practice, see an earlier article by the same author, Valerie J. Hoffman, “Devotion to the Prophet

it is simply a reflection of the general poverty of religious and cultural history for some of the most central areas and periods of Islamic history. It is also the case that the negative appraisal of “post-classical” Islam, especially “post-classical” Sufism—and by extension, “popular” devotion that is often seen as part of this formation—seen in the work of many Orientalists has had a residual retarding effect: the very moniker “post-classical” implies a diminuation and stultification, whether the object be Sufism, philosophy, belle lettres, or popular devotion. This situation has begun to change, with an increasing number of scholars turning their attention to late medieval and early modern religious history, albeit with uneven results.5 My intention here is to help correct this historiography imbalance through focusing on devotion to Muhammad and the construction of his memory and identity in early modern forms of Islam in some of the lands around the Mediteranean basin. Namely, I here will examine devotional texts produced between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, with their commentarial apparatus being built up in the seventeenth and eighteenth, my own primary era of interest. I conclude with a somewhat different, but related, sort of devotional text, an early eighteenth-century prayerbook which focuses on Muhammad’s physical appearance. Fes, Damascus, and Istanbul and surroundings are the geographical field of production; Arabic and Ottoman Turkish are the source languages. My main argumentative themes are as follows: First, I contend that these forms of devotion and the layers of commentary and explication built up around them represent a significant site of inquiry, capable of giving insights into the nature of late medieval and early modern Muslim belief and practice among both the educated, scholarly classes, and among less-educated, non-scholarly, most evidently in relation to Muhammad, but also, through him, to a whole host of other sites of memory and devotion, of discourses and dispositions. Uncovering those strata of beliefs and practices articulated in these texts is my primary objective here. Second, I contend that while many of the devotional texts devoted to Muhammad were originally produced by self-identified Sufis, and imbued with the thought and practice of taṣawwuf, they cannot all simply be reduced to Sufi artefacts, and their consumption and productive circulation far transcended specifically Sufi environments. They are hence reflective of the deeply “Sufic” nature of “post-classical” Islam as recently argued for by Nile Green, without being specifically Sufi (especially in an institutional sense) in use or even in production.6 Third, I suggest that we see in these texts

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         and His Family in Egyptian Sufism, in International Journal of Middle Eatern Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1992). See also Bernd Radtke, “Sufism in the 18th Century: An Attempt at a Provisional Appraisal,” in Die Welt Des Islams, New Series, Vol. 36, Issue 3 (1996). For more theoretical approaches to images of Muhammad, see for instance Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ‘Arabi (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993). 5 On the history of Sufism in the Ottoman Empire, see recent works by John J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350-1650 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and Dina Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman World, 1450-1700 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005). On the Kadızadeli phenomenon, the seminal work by Zilfi is still useful, if dated: Madeline C. Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600-1800) (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamic, 1988); Marc Baer adds some interesting material in Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A handful of books have appeared in recent years on ‘Abd al-Ghanī, for which see below, n. 46. For a reappraisal of this era’s cultural history, namely in the field of philosophy, in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, see an important recent article by Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Myth of ‘The Triumph of Fanaticism” in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” in Die Welt des Islams,” Vol. 48 (2008). 6 Nile Green, Sufism: A Gobal History (Chichester: Wilely-Blackwell, 2012) esp., 125-130. As a result, except when discussing texts—the sharḥ on ibn Mashīsh’s text, for instance—that are specifically and

the articulation of affective ways for early modern Muslims to remember and identify with their Prophet in practices and discourses of devotion, and through devotion to manifest his divine power in the temporal world.7 Muhammad as a cosmically powerful intercessory Prophet revealed in historical time, Muhammad’s presence as a source of prophylactic and meritous potency, and Muhammad’s person as a subject of affective, even imaginal, devotion: all of these modes intersect and are mutually generative of one another. With these themes in mind then, let us begin with one of the “classics” of early modern Islamic devotion, a prayer compendium known as Dalā’il al-Khayrāt.

Figure 1: The opening page of Dāvudzāde Mehmed Efendī’s beautifully executed şerh on Dalā’il al-Khayrāt, with a view of the Prophet’s Mosque in Ottoman Medina—implicitly directing the

reader’s inner gaze towards the Prophet’s physical traces at the beginning of the text.

II. A Pathway to Muhammad: Dalā’il al-Khayrāt: Since its composition in Fes by the Maghrabi scholar and sometime Shādhilī Sufi Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad al-Jazūlī (d. c. 1465), his book of devotion to Muhammad has had a long and productive historical afterlife.8 As Padwick noted several decades ago, the book, many times copied and eventually published, has become virtually ubiquitous across the Islamic world; it has for some years

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         intentionally institutional-Sufi in provenance, I have tried to avoid use of the term “Sufi” as an undifferentiated descriptor. 7 I am inspired in my thinking and investigation here by the work of Rachel Fulton on medieval Western Christian piety, as in her From Judgment to Passion, which she presents as a ‘contribution to the continuing effort to remake medieval intellectual history as a history of persons and communities rather than, as previously, a history of impersonal concepts—in this instance, to situate theology and biblical exegesis within the daily lives of those responsible for crafting them.’ Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 4. 8  See his EI entry for a short biography and overview of his works; for a more comprehensive biography, see Aḥmad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī, Mumtiʿ al-asmāʿ fī dhikr al-Jazūlī wa al-tabbāʿ wa mā lahumā min al-atbā (Fes, 1313), 2-33.

now been available online as well, in both the original Arabic and in translation, reflecting a process of vernacularization that began early in its circulation history. In addition to circulation as such, the text has also attracted a fair number of commentaries, beginning with Aḥmad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī in the mid-seventeenth century. I will here first examine al-Jazūlī’s presentation of Muhammad-centric devotion in his extended introductory material, before proceeding to the two commentaries, al-Fāsī’s Arabic sharḥ and Dāvudzāde’s related work in Ottoman Turkish. In these texts we will be introduced to some of the most basic forms of Muhammad-centric devotion found in all of the sources covered here; because Dalā’il al-Khayrāt gives such clear articulation to these forms, and has continued to be widely used long after its writing, I will begin with an examination of his text itself, despite its initial composition falling outside of our chronological period, focusing on the first introductory sections in which al-Jazūlī clarifies the purpose and meaning of taṣliya. Al-Jazūlī’s prayerbook is divided into three unequally weighted sections: an introductory treatise of sorts, followed by the listing of two hundred and one names of Muhammad, which gives way to the practical core of the book, the prayers themselves. In the first, introductory section, the author begins by describing the purpose of the book: most simply, it is the collation of various prayers of blessing upon Muhammad, along with an exposition of their “virtues” (faḍā’il). He has gathered these prayers and the accompanying explanatory ḥadīth from various sources, but has reduced the isnād apparatus to a bare minimum so as to “make memorization easier.”9 Blessing the Prophet, he writes, is among the most important of things one can do; through these prayers, one can achieve “closeness to the Lord of lords,” and increase in love for the Prophet.10 In a further introduction appended by an anonymous author, probably in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, we learn that one can in fact, in the absence of an instructing shaykh—a usual precondition for spiritual progress—advance by degrees (corresponding to the internal structure of the arranged prayers) until one reach, ultimately, “the station of immersion in the essence of the oneness of the He-ness.”11 Al-Jazūlī himself does not make quite such bold claims, but does proceed to present the “virtues” of ṣalawāt, which are many. First, al-Jazūlī establishes through Qur’anic and hadith citation that God and the angels pronounce ṣalāt upon Muhammad, which establishes the duty of human believers to do so. When one prays one prayer for Muhammad, the prayer generates, as it were, ten prayers from an angel upon the human supplicant. Various iterations of this theme are found throughout the following pages: devotion directed towards Muhammad through ṣalāt rebounds for the devotee, in a sort of cosmic exchange, with Muhammad acting as the “conduit” of blessing and forgiveness for the ordinary believer; one prayer generates ten good deeds in one’s heavenly ledger, and erases ten bad ones. This divine economy is encapsulated in one hadith in which God Himself says, “One who asks Me I give to him. One who draws near to Me by blessing Muhammad, I forgive him his sins though they be like the foam of the sea.”12 The whole of this economy is bound up with the honor and exaltation of Muhammad, God’s beloved and final Prophet—honour and exaltation being standard explanation for the language of the core

                                                                                                               9 Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī, and ʻAlī ibn Sulṭān Muḥammad Qārī al-Harawī, Dalāʼil al-khayrāt wa-shawāriq al-anwār fī dhikr al-ṣalāh ʻalá al-Nabī al-mukhtār (Miṣr: al-Maṭbaʻah al-Kāstalīyah, 1281/1863), 13. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Ibid., 8. This text comes in a mid-nineteenth century lithograph edition, pointing to an earlier nineteenth or eighteenth century origin—the language could be reflective of either. Further study on the vast manuscript and early print editions of this text are in order, obviously. 12 23

pious formula in answering why the ordinary believer should pray for Muhammad of all people. But it is not simply a sort of mechanical exchange of benefits that al-Jazūlī presents. Rather, the ultimate goal of these prayers, he tells us in the concluding pages of his introductory essay, is to generate love in the ordinary believer for Muhammad, love that draws up into God, and is the prerequisite for sincere, true belief in God, in fact. This love should be absolute: one ought to love Muhammad more than one’s property, one’s family, even one’s self, love that will express itself most tellingly in an intense desire to behold Muhammad with one’s own eyes.13 This desire expressed poignantly in one of the prayers: “O God, I believe in Muhammad, though I do not see him—so do not forbid me from the sight of him in the Garden!”14 The purpose of Muhammad-centric devotion, then, is seen to be not just the garnering of temporal and heavenly benefits, but the creation of an affective memory and closeness within the believer towards his or her Prophet. It is in this light that the names of Muhammad are immediately presented for contemplation, followed by prayers of blessing that also call the Prophet and his attributes to mind, making him present to the petitioner, in addition to the meritous exchange intended through the performance of these prayers.15 Turning now to Aḥmad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī’s commentary on this text, we find the most “exoteric” of all the sources examined here. Al-Fāsī (1624-98) hailed from the premier scholarly family in Fes of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, the members of which produced all manner of works, from manuals of taṣawwuf to extended travel narratives, but generally reflective of a respectable scholarly habitus steeped in the “classic” Islamic disciplines.16 In his commentary, titled Maṭāli’ al-massarāt bi-jalā’ dalā’il al-khayrāt, al-Fāsī takes great pains to explicate the popular devotional text for a fellow scholarly audience. He frequently offers insights of a textual critical nature, pointing out differences in various copies of the text, whether ones of omission or addition; he describes his investigation of various copies of the text, including autograph copies, as well as others copied and circulated before al-Jazūlī’s death.17 His comments point to an already widely dispersed and circulating text, frequently copied and recopied. Our commentator also often seeks to fill out the information missing from the hadith, by both providing references for finding the hadith in the “canonical collections,” and sometimes offering contextual information on the presumed historical setting of the traditions. By erecting a scholarly superstructure around this semi-canonical text, and exegeting it in a fashion not unlike certain forms of tafsīr upon the Qur’ān, al-Fāsī secures the text’s place in the scholarly field, legitimizing it as a viable and properly-valenced cultural production, with relative textual stability under his textual-critical eye. His other interpretative modes are also often reflective of scholarly habitus that tends towards locating the text within the ‘exoteric’ scholarly field. Basic tenets of Islamic doctrine are drawn out of the text; for instance, al-Fāsī takes a mention of God’s guidance to reiterate                                                                                                                13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 45. For a full translation of the prayer this phrase opens, see Appendix I. 15 These prayers are diverse in their form, some being composed of short, repetive phrases; some are addressed to God on behalf of Muhammad, his family, his wives, and his companions; interjections of praise to God also feature, as do expository phrases extolling the virtues and status of Muhammad. Besides material from hadith, Qur’ān verses also appear. 16 See Ch. Pellat, “al-Fāsī,” EI2, for an overview of the family and a short biography of Aḥmad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī.  17 Muḥammad al-Mahdī ibn Aḥmad al-Fāsī, Kitāb maṭāliʻ al-masarrāt bi-jalāʼ Dalāʼil al-khayrāt (Bayrūt : Dār al-Maʻrifah lil-Ṭibāʻah Wa-al-Nashr, [197-?]), 3-4, 7.

the exclusive origin of faith in the act of God, as proven by Qur’ān citation, and a citation from Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī’s Qūt al-Qulūb (one of the rather rare Sufi sources employed).18 Material from the history of the early community also appears, situating devotion within Islamic historical memory: in discussing Muhammad’s deliverance of the people from the worship of idols and statues, al-Fāsī notes that the author has included those two and not the worship of “fire and stars” because idol-worship was the pre-Islamic Arab custom, the people among whom Muhammad carried out his mission. As a result, he notes, “There remains in the peninsula of the Arabs but one religion, the religion of Islam, different from other forms of worship. Verily, it remains so up to the present.”19 Other aspects of the community’s more recent memory are also impricated with the text. He begins his commentary with a brief life of al-Jazūlī, in which he describes the saintly author as having composed the Dalā’il in Fez while using the library of the great Qarawiyyin mosque—an allusion to the textual-traditional background that al-Fāsī clearly prizes. However, he goes on to describe al-Jazūlī’s susbsequent transformation into a wonder-working Sufi saint, ultimately culminating in the saint’s incorruptible body as discovered during his transferal from his original burial plaee to his current tomb in Marakesh.20 Hence saintly memory is worth connecting to these devotions, a source of authorization and contextualization—even if the authorization of exoteric scholarly practice is predominant for al-Fāsī. As for the devotion to Muhammad that lies at the core of the Dalā’il, al-Fāsī is unambiguous in his endorsement of it, and presents a picture of affective, effective devotion that dovetails with his more “exoteric,” scholarly concerns—no disjuncture exists between the two modes. He argues that there is “no means [of drawing close] to Him closer and more magnificent than the most noble Messenger of God” than the practice of taṣliya; by it “one is united to the good-will of the Merciful, receives happiness and satisfaction, and by it blessings and answers to petitions are made manifest.”21 He relates a hadith—though without an isnād this time—in which God declares to Moses that the best way Moses can come close to Him, closer than Moses’ thoughts to himself or the adherence of his spirit to his body, is by constantly invoking ṣalāt upon Muhammad, who is, al-Fāsī explains, the beloved of God. Hence, love of Muhammad on the part of the believer—even the prophet Moses!—draws one into the presence of God, in a sort of causative chain.22

For a somewhat different situating of this crucial devotional text, we next turn to an eighteenth-century Ottoman production, Dāvudzāde Mehmed Effendī’s Tawfīq muwafiqq al-khayrāt li-nīl al-barikāt fī khidhmat al-sha’ādāt. Dāvudzāde (d. c. 1756) was an eighteenth century Ottoman scholar apparently resident in Istanbul, about whom I have been able to find no more information than is contained in the colophon, wherein he is described as “one who preaches and advises, a ḥadīth and tafsīr expert.”23 His extensive sharḥ on the Dalā’il partially reproduces material from al-Fāsī, but also adds a great deal not found there; I have here only dipped into this fascinating and multilayered text. In terms of form, within the commentary, each line is translated into Turkish, usually with a verbatim (though idiomatic)                                                                                                                18 Ibid., 6. 19 Ibid., 5. 20 Ibid., 2-3. 21 Ibid. 9. 22 Ibid., 10. 23 Dāvudzāde Mehmed Effendī, Tawfīq muwafiqq al-khayrāt li-nīl al-barikāt fī khidhmat al-sha’ādāt, p. 18, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Isl. Ms. 672. Conventional historiography would probably interpret such a designation as applying to an ‘anti-Sufi’ or reformist of a Kadızadeli vein—a designation that does not hold up in the body of the text, however, as our author, while showing no signs of being an institutionalled-connected Sufi himself, clearly has no qualms with taṣawwuf per se.

translation, sometimes followed by a longer expansion for explicatory purposes; as the author notes in his introduction, while comprehension of a text is not canonically necessary, it is certainly preferable, hence the translation and expansion.24 This is then followed by further explanatory material of various sorts, much of it drawn from al-Fāsī and reflective of his particular concerns—but it is here much pared down, reduced to some grammatical or lexical explanations, and some remarks about variant versions of the text. On the whole, his exegesis is much more free-ranging, and intended more for exhortation and theological clarification, unsurprising given the author’s apparent position as a preacher. For instance, in discussing the bismila and its merits, he includes a tradition in which the nineteen letters of the phrase correspond prophylactically to “the nineteen demons of Gehenna,” as well as the nineteen hours of the day that do not have designated prayer-times.25 In discussing the etymological derivation of rabb, our author quickly moves into a homelitic mode, describing God’s creative power in the development of the child in the womb, concluding with an admonition to his reader to be patient with God, as “it is His ‘custom’ to prolong things in their development,” just as with the child in the womb.26 Again, further along, he urges meditation of the fears and terrors of the Day of Judgment, and the efficiacy of taṣliya for ameliating those terrors; he describes at length (with a careful mixture of “classical” Arabic terms and their more colloquial Turkish equivalents) the questioning of the grave, the crossing of the Bridge, and so on—all directed at a “popular” audience, and reflective of a preacherly habitus encouraging wide devotion among his Turkish-speaking “public.”27 In another point of interesting divergence from al-Fāsī, Dāvudzāde includes three miracle stories that tie directly into the relationship between the ordinary believer and devotion, and act as Dāvudzāde’s de facto arguments for the centrality of such devotion for all Muslims, male and female. In the first two stories, given in Dāvudzāde’s introduction, we learn about the inspiration behind al-Jazūlī’s most famous book—al-Fāsī’s chronological retelling of al-Jazūlī’s life is reduced to a few sentences (the incorrupt body of the saint is mentioned, as is the importance of his tomb to the people of the Maghrab), the reader instead being treated to two miracle stories of much greater length. In the first story, the saintly scholar is described as seeking to draw water from a well in Fes in order to practice his ablutions. However, he is mysteriously prevented from drawing water, which baffles him. He is even more baffled when a “tall girl” appears, asks him what his problem is despite his being great and learned, then breathes upon the well, causing it to gush up and overflow with water. Al-Jazūlī is amazed and asks her the source of her power: she replies that is because of her constancy in invoking blessings and peace upon the Prophet and “adhering continually to him.”28 In the second story, al-Jazūlī encounters, in a dream, another female devotee, this one a “lady” whose miraculous power consists in being able to journey out to a fabulous lion-guarded island in the sea where she prays before being miraculous returned home. Al-Jazūlī is able to question her, learning, unsurprisingly, that her miraculous power is due her special                                                                                                                24 Ibid., 9. 25 Ibid., 12. This is reflective of a development within Islamic traditions of the significance of the number nineteen. 26 Ibid., 16. 27 Ibid., 32, 36. Some of Dāvudzāde’s concerns are reflective of specifically Ottoman issues. For instance, Dāvudzāde includes a long discussion of the legal opinions regarding the necessity or preferability of uttering the taṣliya at every mention of Muhammad’s name, whether in spoken speech or in text. While concern over this question was not limited to the Ottomans, it had gained a special prominence due to controversy provoked by the Kadızadelis in the previous century; our author provides a tentative preference for the preferability of frequent utterances of the taṣliya in nearly all circumstances. 28 Ibid., 10.

devotion to Muhammad, which includes a particularly powerful prayer (its identity remains hidden however).29 In the third story, which comes in the course of a long discussion of the merits of the bismila, Dāvudzāde describes a woman who is married to a “hypocrite” who constantly mocks her for her habit of beginning her tasks with the bismila. To make a long story short, through a series of miraculous interventions, the woman proves the ignorance of her husband and the superiority of her daily piety.30 What are we to make of these stories? First, the centrality of women to all three is unmistakable, and somewhat surprising. While not absent from similar tales of manāqib and the like, women are rarely this prominent in such stories. Is it possible that Dāvudzāde has women particularly in mind in writing this text? Such a speculation can, for now, only remain that, a speculation; we simply know too little about women’s religiousity and piety in the Ottoman world to speculate much further.31 However, it is certainly the case that our author wishes to emphasize the importance and accessibility of devotion to Muhammad (and piety in general, as shown by the bismila story) for all Muslims, men and women, and in their own language, one of the purposes of this work to begin with. Closeness to Muhammad, the stories tell us, is possible for anyone in Ottoman society, not just scholarly or saintly men; in fact, they might be superceded by women! And closeness to Muhammad, as is repeated endlessly in this work, is a direct channel to God and to immense and endless blessings. This emphasis on the broad accessibility of devotion, especially to Muhammad, and its fundamental power is sustained in the body of the commentary. For instance, in an expansion in Turkish on one of the traditions about the merits of the ṣalāt, the author argues that “everyone, male or female of the community, free, male slave, or female slave,” ought to pray the ṣalāt and thereby have ten good deeds written in his or her heavenly defter.32 In discussing the thick darkness that afflicts any seeking to cross the great Bridge into the Next World, which all—prophets, martyrs, male and female Muslims—Dāvudzāde notes that it is only through the light of Muhammad upon the believer, obtained through ṣalāt upon him, that anyone can safely traverse the dangerous terrain of this world, the grave, and the passage into the Next World.33 In sum, effective, affective devotion is not restricted to a tiny spiritual elite of scholars. Dāvudzāde’s overall purpose in his sharḥ, then, is to encourage such devotion in his reader, to draw out the meanings and implications latent in the devotional text, and to situate that text within wider fields of Islamic doctrine and practice, “popular” and otherwise, all with an eye to non-elite readers or listeners.

Finally, it should be noted that at no point does al-Jazūlī, Dāvudzāde, or al-Fāsī, contend that devotion to the Prophet necessitates affiliation with a ṭarīqa or even knowledge of more esoteric doctrines: these are not denied, or completely passed over, but they are also not given as prerequisites for true devotion. Yet, the overall image of Muhammad and the believer’s close relationship with him found in the Dalā’il and its commentaries positively echoes with Sufi doctrines, which should come as no surprise given the environments in which the above authors wrote, one suffused with tenets and practices genealogically related to taṣawwuf, perhaps, but long since detached from that specific setting or discourse. In                                                                                                                29 Ibid., 10-11. 30 Ibid., 12. 31 What has be covered at present is rather sporadic in nature: see, for instance, a discussion of a female religious teacher on trial, in Leslie Pierce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 251-275; and Baer’s brief discussion of an example of elite female piety in Baer, Glory, 85-93. 32 Davdzade, Tawfīq, 23. It is worth noting that when using the Arabi loan mū’mīnīn, Dāvudzāde consistently pairs the masculine form with the feminine. 33 Ibid., 27.

turning then to a selection of early modern Sufi approaches to Muhammad, we find both elements of that shared environment, as well as more specifically mystical and cosmological renderings that set them apart.

III. Mystical Cosmologies and Muhammad: For an exploration of more explicitly “Sufi” or at least “mystical-philosophical” images of Muhammad, we now turn to two works of sharḥ from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first one, by the Ottoman Sufi Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı, treats a curious thirteenth-century short prayer, al-Ṣalawāt al-Mashīshiyya, written by an enigmatic rural Maghrabi saint, expressing an extremely ‘high’ view of Muhammad from within a “monistic” view of God and the cosmos.34 The second sharḥ, by the Ottoman Damascene mystical-philosopher and general bon vivant ‘Abd al-Ghanī Nābulusī, deals with yet another ṣalawāt, this one attributed to the much-venerated twelfth-century Baghdadi saint ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jilānī, but in reality probably a thirteenth century or later text, somewhat expressive of a “monistic” perspective.35 In both of these texts, we take something of a detour into the field of theoretical constructions of Muhammad.36 Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı (1652-1725) was among the most prolific of all Ottoman Sufis in textual production, turning out some 150 works of varying lengths in his lifetime, some directed towards a Persian-reading, well educated literate elite, others clearly with a view towards wider dispersion in the burgeoning “middling classes” of the period.37 Much like his Damascene contemporary ‘Abd al-Ghanī Nabūlūsī, Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı had no qualms about writing relatively accessible works dealing with wuḥdat al-wujūd, the perspectives of which he defended against competing positions among other theologians and philosophers; he was also, unlike ‘Abd al-Ghanī, an active Sufi shaykh, and hence represents the most unambiguously institutional Sufi of the authors considered here. Whatever other effects the Kadızadeli efflorescence of the seventeenth century may have had, a shutting down of “high mystical” discourse was not one of them, as this sharḥ, widely copied and eventually printed, demonstrates; if anything, the controversies only served for men such as Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı as an impetus for broader, often bold, exposition of Akbarian theology.38 In his sharḥ we see a

                                                                                                               34 For an introduction to this text and a translation and modern commentary, see Titus Burckhardt, “The Prayer of Ibn Mashīsh (As Salāt al-Mashīshīyah),” in Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 12, No. 1 & 2. (Winter-Spring, 1978. On ibn Mashīsh, see R. le Tourneau, “Abd al-Salām b. Mashīsh,” in EI2. 35 For an over of the widespread and rather convoluted ‘Abd al-Qādir tradition, see Jonathan Allen and Ahmet Karamustafa, “’Abd al-Qādir al-Gilānī,” in Oxford Online Bibliographies, forthcoming 2014. “Monistic” views of the cosmos and the divine, as well as other ‘high Sufic’ cosmologies, were not uncommon during the thirteenth century and on; ibn ‘Arabī is now the best-known proponent of such views, but was hardly the only one. These ṣalawāt could have been produced in any number of environments and from within any number of mystical tendencies. 36 Sufi commentaries on works of ‘popular devotion’ proliferated during this period. Besides these two sharḥ I also consulted two others—one in Turkish, one in Arabic—which unfortunately could not be included here in the body of the text: Ibn Kīrān, Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib ibn ʻAbd al-Majīd. Sharḥ al-ṣalāh Al-Mashīshīyah (Abū Ẓaby: al-Majmaʻ al-Thaqāfī, 1999); Müstakimzade Süleyman Sadeddin, Vasiyetname (Istanbul: Matbaa-yı Âmire, 1282). 37 For a brief overview of his life see his entry in the EI2. For the socio-economic and political configuration of this period see Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Ottoman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); his arguments concerning the relative “democratization” of Ottoman society during this period have direct bearing on the increasing possibilities for consumption of the sorts of relatively short, accessible works that make up much of Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı’s outpout. 38 According to Ismail Selim Ecirli, who produced an English translation (unfortunately unavailable to me en toto; only the first ten pages or so of his dissertation are available online) of this text, there are some

prime example of “high Muhammadology,” rendered in the vernacular, albeit an Arabicizing, literate one. In terms of form, Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı begins each section of the commentary with an elaboration upon one line from the prayer, translating and clarifying the language, but never at any great length. The bulk of each section is devoted to extensive theological elaboration and discussion, centered around, though not exclusive to, the person of Muhammad. At times Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı engages in questions of philosophical and theological dispute, querying and addressing the ideas of “the theologians” and “the philosophers,” consistently over-ruling their speculations in favor of monistic Sufi ones.39 The image of Muhammad that emerges in this work does so out of the matrix of Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı’s overall mystical, wuḥdat al-wujūd-centric cosmology, which he elaborates upon extensively in commenting on ibn Mashīsh’s originally laconic (but highly suggestive) text.40 The prayer itself is contextualized at the beginning within Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı’s vision of ongoing saintly inspiration, which he understands as proceeding along the great cosmic chain of divine “overflow” or emmenation, which operates through the conduit of the Muhammadan Reality, Muhammad’s pre-existent, luminous, spiritual, true nature. In this case, saintly inspiration or vision confirms devotion to Muhammad, as the forms it takes are revealed to have their origin in the very presence of God; the ongoing process of inspiration supports, rather than detracts from, the prophetic supremacy of Muhammad.41 As for Muhammad himself, he is here seen from two perspectives: his universal, cosmic, and pre-eternal nature, and his revealed-in-time, physical, accessible nature. From the cosmic perspective, Muhammad is the locus of God’s creative activity: it is from his primordial light, the first thing created, that God brings the rest of the world into being; Muhammad is the supreme site of manifestation, the mirror in which God is revealed to Himself and to the world. All the existences and possibilities of the world, on the one hand, and all of the attributes of God (all of which are related in this theological scheme), then, are encompassed in Muhammad, making him the supreme locus of the mystic’s contemplation.42 For the Muhammadan Reality is not just universal, cosmic, and divine: as the locus of divine manifestation, Muhammad also has an “outer” facing aspect, through which he acts as a conduit for the divine self-manifestation to the rest of creation, and, especially, to the pious

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         twenty-eight manuscript copies in Istanbul alone. Ismail Selim Ecirli, Ismā’īl Ḥaqqī Bursawī’s Commentary on al-ṣalawāt al-Mashīshīyah: a Translation with Introduction and Notes (Thesis submitted at the International Islamic University Malaysia, July 2004), 1. 39 For instance, his discussion of the philosophers’ idea of ‘separate substances,’ which he sees as leading inexorably to a doctrine of an eternal universe. İsmail Hakkı, Sharḥ al-ṣalawāt al-Mashīshīyah (Būlāq, 1279), 39. 40 There is much in Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı that is familiar from previous exponents of ‘Akbarian’ or ‘monist’ Sufism/mystical philosophy; in his writings on Muhammad, one may see many points of convergence with al-Jīlī especially. At the same time, Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı introduces his own concepts and reworkings, besides particularities of contextualization. 41 Ibid., 4, 25. This is a common theme; in his commentary on the Muhammediye, while discussing the ‘two lights’ of Muhammad, of prophethood and sainthood, he notes (switching, as he often does before making statements he thinks best left to the few, into Arabic): ‘The gate of sainthood is open and from it successively come various sorts of spiritual openings.’ Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı, Sharḥ al-Muḥammadīyah al-musammā bi-faraḥ Al-rūḥ (Istanbul, 1294), 192. If Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı authorizes continued saintly inspiration through Muhammad, a somewhat later Sufi in the Maghrab, ibn Kīrān (1758-1812) situates another potentially controversial practice, tomb-visitation, in the person of Muhammad: “And for this it is said: the ziyāra of the saints is form only; there is no object of ziyāra in truth save our lord Muhammad, because they are derived (muqtasibūn) from his light, streams from his sea.” Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib ibn ʻAbd al-Majīd ibn Kīrān, Sharḥ al-ṣalāh al-Mashīshīyah (Abū Ẓaby: al-Majmaʻ al-Thaqāfī, 1999), 73. 42 Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı, Mashīshīya, 7-8, 13.

devotee, the divine “overflow” in him filtering down to the quotidian and specific. It is in this “aspect” that Muhammad’s historical and physical nature comes into play, for through his manifestion in the created world below, Muhammad reveals the divine, both through his historical mission and his ongoing intercessory presence in the world. Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı deploys a variety of metaphors to explain Muhammad’s intermediary nature. Muhammad resembles the sultan’s vizier, he argues, the man through whom the “hidden” power and will of the sultan, ensconsed in the palace, is manifest to the people, and through whom the people can communicate with the sultan.43 Muhammad’s nature can also be seen in the arrangement of the human body. He is like the cartilage that connects and cushions bone and muscle, allowing their articulation—Muhammad is the “border” between the divine and the created (an essentially unitive whole, recall, in this cosmology), the articulation point between the two. He is also like the heart, here meaning the coupling point between body and spirit. Just as the heart, in Sufi anthropology, brings together the otherwise distinct physical body and non-bodily spirit, “facing” in both directions, Muhammad unites the created and the divine.44 Muhammad’s “this-wordly” manifestation is of course concomitant on his cosmic, pre-eternal nature. He is the manifestation of every virtue, the exemplar of every virtue and every form of knowledge; even his physical form is exemplary. He is the “active Qur’ān,” embodying the characterstics of the uncreated Book in a created body—and serving as a exemplar for the rest of humanity, in addition to his role as conduit to God.45 The community of the saints in the present world, as well as the ordinary believer, can look to him for access to the contemplation of the true unity of the world in God, as well as receive through him divine illuminations and openings. ‘Abd al-Ghanī, finally, in some ways resembles Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı in his approach, but also shows points of divergence in his commentary, Kawkab al-mabānī wa-mawkib al-maʻānī —unsurprising given his rather different approach to mystical thought and practice.46 A Sufi adherent in only a very loose sense, ‘Abd al-Ghanī (1641-1731) never undertook more than passing participation in institutional, shaykh-centric taṣawwuf, instead largely contenting himself with private mystical practice and teaching mystical doctrines (especially the works of ibn ‘Arabī) to his own circles of students and sometimes a wider public.47 Many of his writings—and he was extremely prolific—are devoted to the exposition and defense of Akbarian thought and mystical philosophy more generally, though he also addressed questions and issues of a more general religious and cultural nature, from fiqh to dream interpretation to music. This commentary is reflective of his teaching concerns, uniting mystical-philosophical, Akbarian theology with the exoteric analysis of a popular devotional text, a collection of ṣalāt upon Muhammad similar to those collected by al-Jazūlī (for the tenor of these prayers see the excerpt below in Appendix I), with the same mixture of praise

                                                                                                               43 Ibid., 34, 44 Ibid., 41-42. 45 Ibid., 9, 19, 29. For the concept of the ‘active Qur’ān,’ see also Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı, Kitāb silsile-i şeyhk Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı bi-tarîkh-i Hilvetī, ([Istanbul], 1291), 3. 46 On his life and thought, see the following studies of a rather uneven quality, useful despite some problematic conclusions in each: Samer Akkach, ’Abd Al-Ghani Al-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007); Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufi Visionary of Ottoman Damascus `Abd Al-Ghani Al-Nabulusi, 1641-1731 (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005). 47 ‘Abd al-Ghanī never participated in the communal life of a zawiya, for instance, and made no attempts to establish himself as the shaykh of a particular ṭarīqa, despite his formal affiliations (secured essentially as honoriums) with the Qādiriyya and the Naqshbandī. Rather, his contributions to Sufism were largely textual, whether as contributions to devotional and theological literature, as here, or through polemics and apologetics.

for Muhammad, affective devotion and desire for closeness to him, and economy of intercessory exchange. Unlike Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı’s cursory treatment of grammatical and syntactical items, ‘Abd al-Ghanī shows as great a deal of interest in such explication as in theological elaboration, reflective of his own vast scholarly interests, and proceeds in proper commentary style, word by word or lemma by lemma.

Theological explanation, however, lies at the heart of this endeavor. In explicating his theological ideas concerning the Prophet, he does not vastly diverge from Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı, but rather provides us with a complementing view. According to ‘Abd al-Ghanī, Muhammad is the locus of divine manifestation, created from God’s light, and pre-existent before his descent into the world of bodily form and manifestation, as the famous hadith “I was a Prophet and Adam was between water and clay” attests. This primordial light, as one of the glossed prayers would seem to suggest, is also the matrix from which the saints and angels are brought forth after “wandering” bewildered and in a state of love, incapable of locating the outer bounds of Muhammad’s pre-existent nature.48 In him all of the mystical stations and degrees are realized, all human knowledge is contained; he is not subject to the multiplicity of the universe, like all other beings, instead being constantly immersed in the witnessing of the true unicity.49 His manifestation in space and time is three-fold. First, the whole of creation is derived from his primordial, first-created light. Within historical time, he is sent down in human form, even as he is inwardly the first and most perfect of creatures; his historical mission is thus one of drawing creation back to God, purifying the corruption of the flesh, and teaching the signs of God as contained in the Qur’ān and Sunna. His victory in battle, the spread of his religious community, and his miracles are all signs of his divine origin and purpose.50 His historical mission in time over, his spiritual presence continues, through his intercession and through the spiritual connection effected between himself and supplicants.

As for the purpose and effectiveness of devotion to Muhammad, ‘Abd al-Ghanī argues that the human person on his or her own is incapable of receiving the light of the Divine, the numinous overflow of which Muhammad is the locus. Taṣliya establishes a “link” between the spirit of the supplicant and the Prophet, so that one’s spirit can receive the divine light and be transfigured in it. Even further, ‘Abd al-Ghanī presents the possibility of the supplicant’s effacement in the luminous Muhammadan Reality, through beholding the face of the Prophet. This effacement leads directly into subsumption in the light of God, as one’s own existence passes away and is replaced with the existence of the Prophet, which is tantamount to saying the existence of God. Only God’s love for us, channeled through Muhammad, and our love for God remains.51 Much as al-Fāsī located Muhammad and devotional practice to him within the apparatus of exoteric scholarly concerns, these two mystical scholars interpret their Prophet in light of mystical-philosophical thought and practice, and defend it against rival interpretations and retractors. By intersecting texts of popular devotion with the philosophy of wuḥdat al-wujūd, they lead the devotee into the “inner” reality of Muhammad, so that one                                                                                                                48 ʻAbd al-Ghanī ibn Ismāʻīl Nābulusī, Kawkab al-mabānī wa-mawkib al-maʻānī: sharḥ Ṣalawāt al-Quṭb al-Jīlānī, (al-Qāhirah: Dār al-Āfāq al-ʻArabīyah, 2010), 109. 49 Throughout, but see for instance ibid., 106. 50 Ibid., 120. 51 Ibid., 106, 114, 123. Cf. ibn Kīrān: “And there is no doubt that this ascension and transmission is not united to one save by means of him peace and blessings of God be upon him and his family, for by him the nafs become hearts in faith, and the hearts spirits through watchfulness, and the spirits secrets through witnessing, and the secrets have beening familiarized with the dawning of the sun of gnosis in them, which is the intending meaning of lights therein.” Ibn Kīrān, Sharḥ, 63.

comes to perceive the entire cosmos through the lens of his intermediation. Devotional practices become one conduit to this understanding; through commentary, the assumed implicit meanings are made explicit and available to the devotee in forming his or her relationship with Muhammad, the Pride of the World. His or her devotion is then channeled towards seeking a relationship with the Prophet as a means of drawing into the very fabric of the cosmos and hence into the presence of God, Who is the inner encompassing being of the outwardly manifest universe.

IV. Seeing Muhammad’s Body: Turning from “high” mystical philosophy now, we conclude our survey by examining a seemingly very different sort of text, an early eighteenth century Ottoman prayerbook devoted primarily to Muhammad. Compiled and executed by one otherwise unknown Dervīş İbrāhīm bin Ḥafīẓ Halīl in 1716, the whole of the text is quite beautiful in its execution, the various discrete sections each headed with a delicately executed ‘unwān (headpiece), the text written in a neat, bold naskh, and extensively vocalized. The little book contains a diversity of material, but with a generally uniting theme of devotion to Muhammad, here with an especial focus upon his physical appearance and presence. It opens, appropriately enough, with al-Fātiḥa, the Arabic lemma followed—in-line, not as interlinear—by a Turkish translation and exegetical expansion. The presence of this translation itself—of one of the most central texts in Muslim worship—indicates to us that this prayerbook has comprehension in the vernacular as one of its clear goals.52 This is followed by ninety-nine names of Muhammad in Arabic, separated by colored roundels; more Arabic, sans translation (the only such instance within this book), follows with a selection of hadith. In the first, we learn of the immense potency of having written descriptions of Muhammad’s bodily form in one’s home: they will protect against fire and flood, sickness and pestilence, and all manner of evil.53 This hadith, which partially explains the compiler’s inclusion of the following material, is followed by somewhat more conventional hadith in which the cosmic supremacy and pre-eternal nature of Muhammad is extolled. “I was a Prophet and Adam was between water and clay,” for instance, is collated here, along with various other hadith whose content is largely a piece with the ideas we have encountered previously.

The bulk of this little prayerbook is taken up, not in hadith or explanatory material, but in selections of physical descriptions, first of Muhammad (who, as might be guessed, is presented as having the most perfect of bodies), followed by physical descriptions of the

                                                                                                               52 Dervīş İbrāhīm bin Ḥafīẓ Halīl, [Ḥilye-ye Şerīf], 8-12, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Isl. Ms. 1008. 53 The hadith, composed in less then exemplary Arabic, runs: “There is no one who writes out this my description then places it in his house except that Satan will not draw near his house, nor oppressive power, nor trial or pestilence strike that house, no sickness nor pain nor the envy of an envious person, nor the magic of a magician, nor flood nor fire, nor theft, [unclear], nor misfortune And there will not afflict him worry, sadness, nor anxiety, so long as this blessed, beneficious description is in that place, house, and castle, which dwells in it [sic]. And whoever recites/reads it and listen to it, it is the proof, profound reliance, and sincerity of the Prophet, peace and blessing be upon him.” Ibid., 17-18. It most likely entered circulation in the seventeenth century, the time period in which calligraphic ḥllye began to be produced. If so, it joins a small cadre of ‘early modern hadith’ concerned with practices and material culture unknown to previous ages, such as coffee consumption and tobacco use. It seems likely that part of the impetus for ḥilye and devotion to Muhammad’s bodily aspect came from the general patterns of market formation/intensification and spread of new, centrally consumed commodities; this however remains speculation on my part.

Rāshidūn caliphs (including a short prose treatment in Turkish of ‘Alī’s caliphate).54 As can be seen in Figure 2, the original Arabic is given first, in a larger script, with a Turkish translation in a smaller, somewhat more cribbed script running below. The translation eventually stops following the Arabic exactly, sacrificing interlinear continuity for a idiomatic clarity; that, and, significantly, the vocabulary is close to a spoken, every-day register, with far less Arabicing loans than in most religious texts from the period. Of the Turkish texts considered in this paper, this one by far would have been the most easily accessible to the widest array of Turkish speakers, either as readers or as listeners to the text being read.

Figure 2: A page from [Hilye-i ṣerīf], with Arabic descriptions of Muhammad in the larger, bolder naskh, vernacular Turkish translation/paraphrase beneath.

What are we to make of this text and others like it? First, it is important to note that it

is a part of a much larger tradition of texts, text-centric objects, and other forms of material culture in the Ottoman lands devoted to either the physical appearance of Muhammad or other physical traces associated with him, a tradition that is itself a subset of the larger realm of Muhammad-centric memory and devotion that we have been tracing. We have already seen aspects of this in the Dalā’il al-Khayrat tradition, where focusing on the memory of the physical traces of the Prophet and his companions functioned as a means of drawing the devotee into Muhammad’s sacred and powerful presence. In Arabic, books of shamā’il (characteristics) and awṣāf predated the Ottomans, but seem to have become especially popular with them—the material in this prayerbook is partially drawn from such

                                                                                                               54 Ibid., 32-71. As an aside for future research, the history of the memory of earliest Islamic history, especially in its devotional, ‘popular’ manifestations as here, is yet another aspect of Ottoman religious history that remains as yet unwritten.

collections.55 They were also reworked into poetic forms. One of the most beloved forms of Muhammad-centric piety, Yazıcıoğlu Mehmet’s Muhammediye, is a long narrative poem in simple Turkish that both extolls the Prophet and narrates his life, includes ample physical descriptions of Muhammad.56 There also existed poems devoted entirely to Turkish reworkings of these descriptions.57 Moving into more material culture territory, at some point in the sixteenth century Arabic calligraphic textual depictions of the Prophet’s physical appearance—ḥilye—emerged and became deeply popular, both as items held in households and in institutional settings such as mosques and tekkes (see Appendix II for an image of a particularly fine ḥilye). This popularity continues to the present.58 Related to these, prayerbooks including images of objects associated with the Prophet (some of which the Ottomans claimed to possess) proliferated.59 Our prayerbook may be seen as falling in both the prayerbook and ḥilye category, but with the difference that it contains no images, and that it is clearly meant to be comprehended, not just seen or possessed.

Of course, its prophylactic purpose is clearly intended, indeed explicitly stated (though only in Arabic); in this it would seem to be a piece with the calligraphic ḥilye. We may also interpret the beautifully executed text as itself a devotional offering, meant to glorify the memory and textual presence of the Prophet. Yet there is a still further level of meaning and use here, I think, indicated by the extensive use of colloquial Turkish. The reader (or listener) is meant to understand the descriptions and to be able to imagine Muhammad, to make him present not just textually or prophylactically, but affectively—to fulfill, in part, the desire we saw expressed in al-Jazūlī (and is manifest elsewhere) to see Muhammad with one’s own eyes, to connect, not just with his spiritual presence, but with his very quotidian (if exceptionally handsome!) body in all its details, from his nose to his eyelashes to his skin color to his height. In so doing, one is imaginally present to the Seal of the Prophets, the pre-existent Prophet, who is also flesh-and-blood like the devotee, and who                                                                                                                55 One of the most popular such collections is from Tirmidhī: many copies in manuscripts and printed editions, for instance, Muḥammad ibn ‘Isā Tirmidhī, Shamā’il al-Nabī (Bayrūt: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2000). 56 Yazıcıoğlu Mehmet, Kitab-i Muhammediye fī kemalât al-ahmediye, (Sultan Mehmet, [Istanbul], 1280/1863). This text and its transmission history, which I have not been able to properly treat here due to space considerations, is an obviously important component for a comprehensive history of early modern Muhammad-centric memory and devotion construction; it is also said to have been especially popular among women. Ahmet Karamustafa’s hopefully forthcoming work will likely deal with its formation and early history (personal communication); its later use remains a desiradatum. 57 For instance, Ekber Meḥmet Efendī, Şemā’īl-i ṣerīf, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Isl. Ms. 411, who describes how he took and reworked the descriptions from “Tirmidhī, the universal teacher/ rose garden of knowledge, the nightingale of tradition.” The long-form poem describes Muhammad, praises him, and provides a poeticized history of his life and mission. The Muhammad that emerges is an exemplar of human excellence: “He was both not too tall of stature, nor too short of limbs/ Neither white nor black, he was light/ in everything he was moderate.” 58 For some background on the phenomenon of depictions—painted and verbal—of Muhammad (and previous prophets, as well as the Rāshidun) in the Middle Ages, and a brief overview of the later ḥilye practice, see Oleg Grabar, “The Story of Portraits of the Propeht Muhammad,” in Studia Islamica, No. 96 (2003), espc. 33-34 ; also see Annemarie Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (New York University Press, 1990), 34-36. Grabar notes that the Arabic ḥilya, which originally meant, per Lane, “quality or aggregate of attributes and qualities, appearance, something pleasing, ornament,” by the early Ottoman period came to primarily mean, in Schimmel’s words, “external personal appearance, form and features, description of the personal virtues and qualities of the Prophet,” especially in calligraphic representation (though obviously not just there). 59 On these prayerbooks, see Christiane J. Gruber, The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 117-151.

remains present both in his spiritual state and in the physical traces of his immaculate body left in the world, be they relics or verbal descriptions.60 Here we are at the heart of devotion to the Prophet, available, as we saw in Dāvudzade, to everyone, continually, either through the simple physical presence of descriptions of Muhammad, or through the conscious (or dreaming unconscious perhaps) remembering through those same textual traces of the Prophet’s body.

V. Conclusion: We have seen now a rather wide range of ways in which the culturally remembered image of Muhammad was constructed and devotion towards him expressed across the early modern worlds of the Maghrab and the Ottoman Empire. If there is a common theme uniting all of these discourses and devotions, it is the dual nature of Muhammad most explicitly described by Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı and ‘Abd al-Ghanī, but implicit in all of the texts: on the one hand, he is the supreme, final Prophet, uniting heaven and earth, the uncreated and the created, the divine and the human. Accordingly, he is understood as the true conduit of divine revelation and effacious power towards other humans, thanks to the second aspect of his nature, his being a human prophet whose mission lay among very quotidian people, within historical time. This basic understanding of Muhammad, both distinct from more self-conciously “historical” ones, yet also potentially (and geneaologically) concomitant with it, we have seen, could be elaborated in many different ways, and be constructed within vastly different apparatus criticus: from the exoteric scholastic habitus of an al-Fāsī to the mystical cosmology of an Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı, to the devotional pragmatics of a Dervīş Ibrāhīm. Its expression could be manifest through an affective relationship of love for the Prophet resulting in closeness to God, through prayers of blessing upon him in exchange for benefit and reward, through the presence of his names and attributes as potent prophylactic, and so on. All proceeded from a type of cultural memory of the Prophet, but one that sought to continually new layers of experience and resulting memory through the practices and articulations of devotion.

Returning to my initial three central arguments, the validity of the first—that these sorts of works of devotion to Muhammad are important loci of analysis, for both “high” and “low” thought and practice—has, I think, by now become clear. We can being to see, in fact, the ways in which the practices and beliefs developed within and associated with these devotional works interacted with more “theoretical” concerns and wider religious and cultural discoures, as reflected in the resultant commentary apparatus that each has collected; we can also see, in part, the relationship between lived devotional practice and the theological elaborations and arguments scholars developed. All of these forms and elaborations of devotion depend upon shared historical memories, both of the Prophetic past, and of later saintly and scholarly authorizations of devotion. The relationship within all of these things is one of multiple circularity, of movement from theological articulation to textual production (often in the vernacular) to devotional practice and back to theological articulation and defense (or attack or critique), and so on.61 Significantly, as we have seen just in this                                                                                                                60 Recall that for Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı the pre-existent, luminescent nature of the cosmic Muhammad does not preclude his bodily existence: rather, as he notes in his commentary on the Muhammadiye, the physical characterstics are signs of and generated by Muhammad’s inner reality, and serve as entryways to that reality. It is a relatively logic move, in fact, to contemplation of those bodily characteristics, both as a prophylactic summoning of Muhammad’s powerful presence, and as a route to affective identification with him. On the connection in the writings of al-Jīlī (and important interlocutor for both Ismā’īl Ḥaḳḳı and ‘Abd al-Ghanī) between the Muhammadan Reality and Muhammad’s physical body, see “Annihilation in the Messenger of God,” 355. 61 The circulation of devotional texts from one region—in the cases above, primarily the ‘peripherial’ Maghrab—into others is a subset of this process; it goes hand in hand with translation and transformation

sampling, these discourses and practices did not remain confined to hermetically sealed spheres, be they “Sufi” or “‘ulama” or “popular religion.” For, as my second argument contends, the theological and devotional matrix in which all of these works arose and inhered in has partially “Sufic” origins (alongside other sources), but cannot simply be reduced to those origins. The centrality of the cosmic Prophet, the intercessory exchange of prayer and merit, the possibility of intimate personal devotion and affective piety—these all appear as practically “generic” beliefs and practices, largely unchallenged, even by emergent proponents of “reformism,” for whom some of these practices smacked of innovation. But those were outlying opinions, as of yet.

Finally, what of my third suggestion: that we can see a move towards a sort of affective, emotionally invested piety directed towards Muhammad? Or, to put it differently, how are all these forms of devotion, all of these ways of remembering and summoning up Muhammad different from older modes of remembrance and devotion?62 To be sure, we see in these texts an intense interest in the person of Muhammad, a desire, not simply to imitate the Prophet (though that is there also) or simply to follow his sunna, but love for the Prophet, desire to see him and to be close to him, to know him, and through him, to draw close in love to God. The memory and image of Muhammad summoned up here, through the source devotional texts or the metatexts that heighten and clarify them, directs the believer to both the cosmic, pre-eternal Muhammad, and to his very physical, bodily presence, a presence that continues for the believer as a locus of love and contemplation, in play with other forms and modes, but distinctly affective and personal. Exactly how such an attitude developed out of “traditional” sources and methods, and why, remains to be discovered, though we have seen here its clear articulation in early modernity.

What I have sketched out here in outlines is only a beginning. The history of Muhammad in early modern Muslim thought and practice is a potentially vast enterprise, even with the rather narrow geographical parameters I have employed; dealing with just the sorts of texts and devotions I have outlined here would be a monumental task. All of the themes begun here need much more study. One would also need to incorporate tafsīr material, popular stories of Muhammad and the prophets, encomial texts such as al-Shifā and its commentary tradition, and the various reworkings and vernacularizations of sīra. Both the ideological and practiced aspects of Muhammad-centric devotion and memory lay at the heart of early modern Islamic religious life, and while the possibilities of our recovery of that life are necessarily limited, there are still immense possibilities for discovery and understanding within those limits, bringing us into contact with the beliefs, hopes, fears, and daily practices of not just the elite believers but of pious Muslims all across the lines of class, age, education, and gender. That alone is truly exciting.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         into vernaculars, here Ottoman Turkish, but elsewhere Persian, Urdu, Malay, Javanese, Chinese, and so on. I am here influenced by ideas worked out by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 62 This question ties into a long ongoing historiographic debate on the nature of so-called ‘Neo-Sufism,’ for which it is proposed that devotion to Muhammad became an especial practice in ‘reformed’ Sufi ṭarīqas from the mid-eighteenth century onward. My findings here tend to support those who would question such a conclusion (see especially R. S. O’Fahey and Bernd Radtke, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” in Der Islam 70, no. 1 (1993): 52–87.), but also see Radtke’s conclusion to his study of some eighteenth century Sufis in Radtke, “Sufism,” 360-361, in which he presents a more nuanced, though provisional view of the gradual intensification of devotion to Muhammad in some sources.

Appendix I: Excerpts from the Ṣalawāt:

Excerpt from Dalā’il al-Khayrāt: O God, I believe in Muhammad though I do not see him, so do not forbid me the sight of him in the Garden! And grant me provision with his companionship, place me in his religious community, give me to drink a fresh, quenching, healthgiving drink form his Basin, no thirst ever afterwards. Verily You are powerful over everything! O God, cause the spirit of Muhammad to impart to me life and peace! O God, as I believe in him though I do not see him, so do not forbid me the sight of him in the Garden! O God, accept the great intercession of Muhamad, and elevate his exalted degree, and fulfill his request in the Other World—he is the foremost—as You fulfilled for Abraham and Moses. O God, blessings upon Muhammad and the Family of Muhammad, as You blessed Abraham and the family of Abraham, and blessing (bārik) upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad, as You blessed Abraham and the family of Abraham. You are praiseworthy and effecious! Al-Jazūlī, Dalā’il, 45-46. Prayer 17 from Ṣalawāt ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jilānī: O God, we entreat You through the Word that unites to the inner meanings of Your nobility, and we ask You by You that You show us the face of our Prophet, and that You efface from us our sins through the witnessing of Your beauty, and that You hide us in the oceans of Your lights, protected from the distractions of this world, desiring You—O He, O God, O He, O God, O He, O God! No god but You! Give us to drink from the potion of Your love, and immerse us in the oceans of Your unicity, so that we revel in the midst (baḥbūḥa) of Your Presence. And cut off from us the imaginings of Your creatures by Your grace and mercy, and enlighten us with the light of obedience towards You. Guide us and do not lead us astray, give us to see our own faults and not those of others, through the sanctity of our Prophet and lord Muhammad, peace and blessing be upon him, and upon his house and his companions, the lamps of existence, and the people of witnessing, O most merciful Merciful! We ask You that You connect us with them and bestow upon us their love, O God, O Living, O Righteous, O Possessor of Noble Magnificence! O Lord receive from us—You are the Hearing, the Knowing! And give to us beneficial gnosis, verily You are powerful over everything O Lord of the worlds! O Merciful, O Compassionate, we ask You that provide us with the vision of the face of our Prophet, in our sleep and in our waking, and that You bless and grant peace upon him, continual blessing to the Day of Judgment, and that You give blessing to the best of us. In ‘Abd al-Ghanī, Kawkab, 125.

Appendix II: Calligraphic Ḥilye:

A three-panel ḥilye by Ḥafīẓ Osmān Efendī (d. 1698). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Isl. Ms. 238.