Zoroastrians in Early Islamic History: Accommodation and Memory

Islamic Law and Society, 2019

This essay demonstrates Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement of historiography in iftāʼ. It draws upon fatwās on pilgrimage to Ascalon, travel to shrines of al-Ḥusayn in Ascalon and Cairo, and visits to Jerusalem and Hebron. Ibn Taymiyya weaves sophisticated historical narratives into his legal reasoning against visiting tombs of prophets and Ahl al-Bayt. He exposes lacunas, contradictions and unreasonable assertions in truisms about bodies of prophets and saints and their cults. He argues against ziyāra to such sites, blaming Shīʿīs for spreading the innovation at a particularly vulnerable time for Islam. His attack on notions of the religious merits of Jerusalem and of murābaṭa hinges upon his reconstruction of the history the Dome of the Rock and of the Islamic frontier. History leads him to stress the temporality of territorial definitions and their dependence on context. His argumentation resonates in works of later writers, demonstrating the continuing relevance of his fatwās.

A pproximately at the time when Abu Jaʿfar Mohammad b. Jarir Tabari was compiling his Tarikh al-Rasul wa al-Muluk, the High Priest Ādurbād ī Ēmēdān was compiling the Dēnkard and, along with other Zoroastrian sages, redacting important Pahlavi texts. The coming of the Abbasids and the establishment of Islam in fact appears to have driven many to look back and write a history of the past according to their communal perspective. For Zoroastrians, the process of writing down the tradition had already begun during the late Sasanian period. It seemed necessary to record the events of the past so that the leaders of the community of the Good Religion would be able to pass them down from their memory to the future co-religionists. This memory included a history that existed in oral and written form. For this sacred Zoroastrian histori-ography, of which Dēnkard IV is the best known source, the two most important polarizing and devastating events which had cataclysmic repercussions were the coming of Alexander of Macedon in the fourth century bce and that of the Arab Muslims in the seventh century ce. If one is to accept the narrative provided by the Dēnkard IV as well as the Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, these two historical calamities created dire situations for the Good Religion. These texts state that the first event resulted in the murder of the Magi, and the motley crew of Greco-Macedonians who decimated the memory of the Avesta, and as a result doubt and heterodoxy was brought to fore. 1 Another Zoroastrian reads the event as such (SE 4–5): pas zardušt dēn āwurd az framān ī wištāsp-šāh 1000 ud 200 fragard pad dēn dibīrīh pad taxtagīhā ī zarrēn kand ud nibišt ud pad ganj ī ān ātaxš nihād. Ud pas gizistag skandar sōxt ud andar ō drayāb abgand Then Zoroaster brought the Religion. By the order of King Vištāsp 1200 fragards (chapters) in the writing of religious scripture were engraved on golden tablets and written and deposited in the treasury of that fire-temple. And then the accursed Alexander burnt them and threw them into the sea 2

2024

The Explanation of the Religions (Bayān al-Adyān, 1091-2) is the first surviving Persian encyclopedia of comparative religions completed before the better-known Arabic-language the Book of Sects and Creeds (Kitāb al-Milāl wa al-Niḥal) by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm Aḥmad al-Shahrastānī from 1127-8. Beyond that, it is the earliest surviving source on the travelogue writer and Ismaili philosopher Nāṣir Khusraw (d. 1088), but despite its significance, the work was shrouded in obscurity. Its author Abū al-Maʿālī Muḥammad mentions in his Explanation of the Religions that a copy of the famous, but unfortunately now lost, picture book of the third century public sage and preacher, Mānī (3rd c.), the Arzhang (Parthian: Ārthang) was preserved in the library of Ghazna. In the introductory part of his work the jurist and translator Abū al-Maʿālī Muḥammad gives his detailed, and possibly fabricated, genealogy linking him to one of the leading figures of Balkh, ʿUbayd Allāh Yār Khudāy, and to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 661). The style of his book is generally not polemical, though it is not without occasional disparaging remarks. Licit Magic-GlobalLit Working Papers comprises translations of and commentaries on key works of poetics, rhetoric, literary theory, and related areas of inquiry from the literatures of the Islamic world. Together with its website (https://globallit.hcommons.org), online publication (https://medium.com/global-literary-theory), newsletter (https://medium.com/global-literary-theory/newsletters/licit-magic-global-literary-theory-newsletter), and twitter feed (@balaghas), the Working Papers are one of five venues of interim science communication of GlobalLit. Global Literary Theory is an ERC-funded project directed by Rebecca Ruth Gould and based at the University of Birmingham since 2018, that brings into comparison the literary traditions of the Islamic world, including Arabic, Persian, and Turkic traditions. All working papers are downloadable on https://globallit.hcommons.org/licit-magic-working-papers/. This series is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 759346).

The Mediterranean Seminar Review, 2021

The methods of New Historicism remain underutilized in the study of the intellectual culture of the premodern Islamic world, especially in matters of Islamic theology and law. Our knowledge of the immediate context of many debates, as well as backgrounds of the disputants, continues to be superficial in many cases. We often view scholars as cyphers and eschew investigation into the influences behind their arguments. As a result, we reduce paradoxes within debates to competing visions of orthodoxy or project a duplicity upon whatever party appears to be flouting a perceived religious duty. The current study by Luke Yarbrough is an ambitious reconsideration of one such paradox, the proclivity of Muslim rulers to employ non-Muslims administrators, and signifies the promising work to be done in exploring the historical realities and thematic diversity that underlie these debates. He contends that, despite its ubiquity from the ninth to the seventeenth century and beyond, the scholarship decrying the hiring of non-Muslim officials is inconsistent in its argumentation. Moreover, Yarbrough finds that the scholarship behind the treatises were not merely proactive calls to uphold orthodoxy for its own sake. They were instead aspects of a more complicated political and social game wherein diatribes against the employment of dhimmis might signal anything from a response to recent events at court, to an attempt to strengthen a particular madhhab's status, or even an embittered effort to shore up a failing career. To illustrate the rules of this game, Yarbrough draws upon Bourdieu to describe this scholarship as a competition to acquire, control, or regain various types of real and symbolic resources. He argues that these contests were rarely about the employment of non-Muslims, but instead they point to competing understandings of governance between scholars and rulers.