One Thousand hijaj: Ritualization and the Margins of the Law in Early Twelver Shi'i ziyara Literature.

• Author: Warner, George

INTRODUCTION

This article will examine the earliest extant Twelver Shi'i literature on ziyara (pl. ziyarat)--the ritual visitation of the Imams' tombs that continues to be a staple of Twelver devotional life. Since the first/seventh century, tombs of notable members of Muhammad's house, such as 'Ali and especially al-Husayn, have been the foci of diverse devotional attentions from (proto-)Shi'is and others. Little is known of early Muslim tomb visitation, however, since it was not discussed by legal scholars and material evidence remains meagre. (1) The first sustained, prescriptive discussions of these pilgrimages to survive occur in early Twelver literature of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. (2)

The Twelver ziyara works shed some light upon the form of ziyara as a practice, but they also document its incorporation into Twelver law. This process was not a straightforward one. By seeking to codify ziyara, Twelver scholars ('ulama'; hereafter, ulema) provoked a number of questions regarding the nature of these rituals: How should ziyara be performed? Who should perform it? Should it be a distinctive or even definitive part of Twelver practice? How important was it compared to other rites? It is these negotiations that this article will explore, documenting the highly unusual and consequential process whereby a new set of rituals was accommodated within Islamic legal literature. In many ways the central questions of this process are shared with other, better-known aspects of early Twelver Shi'ism, in particular the changing authority of the Twelver scholarly community in the absence of the Hidden Imam. Such developments have received considerable study in terms of theologies of the imamate, legal theory, and hadith criticism, all central endeavors of the ulema, but this focus has minimized attention to ziyara, a practice usually ignored in theological contexts and confined to apparently peripheral regions of the law. (3) Conversely, in what follows I will argue that ziyara constituted a formative test for the Twelver scholarly community and the construction of a distinctly Twelver law, as scholars pushed the boundaries of the law to explore how its tools and their own authority might best be employed to regulate practice around the Imams' tombs. (4)

TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Early ziyara literature pivots on Twelver scholars' efforts to define ziyara, and we must therefore begin with a few questions of terminology. The most important of these concerns fiqh, which is often glossed simply as "law." Thus far it seems a category into which ziyara literature may easily fit, given that this literature delineates the correct practice of ziyara, as set out by scholars of fiqh (fiiqaha'). More properly, however, fiqh refers to the deliberative process whereby the law is deduced, with books of fiqh presenting the legal rulings that are the result of those deliberations. As such, fiqh can be conceived of as excluding topics not subject to serious deliberation over orthopraxy. This is the common fate of supererogatory devotions, including (usually) ziyara. Accordingly, in what follows we must be alert to the nature and extent of ziyara's incorporation within the total, unambiguous remit of fiqh, what I will refer to as fiqh proper. It may share textual space with fiqh, it may be delineated and deliberated over by fuqaha', but these elements may coexist with others that draw ziyara into a more liminal, less straightforwardly fiqhi space.

Another contentious term emerges from the kind of fiqh with which ziyara is associated: the fiqh of the acts of worship ('ibadat). Since these comprise such practices as prayer and pilgrimage, they are commonly described as rites or rituals. This usage will be retained in what follows (with "rite" and "ritual" used interchangeably), though it must be acknowledged that it has its limits. Some acts classed as acts of worship, such as almsgiving (zakat) make uncomfortable denizens of many a definition of ritual, while many practices regularly studied as rituals--for example, passion plays (ta'ziya) commemorating al-Husayn--are seldom counted by Muslim scholars as 'ibadat. Nevertheless, such considerations need not send us down an endless taxonomical rabbit hole. Recent studies have pointed the way toward examining ritual not through exhaustive lists of what it is and is not, but by close attention to the typologies and hierarchies of action at work within a given context or system. Accordingly, the identification of ziyara as a ritual in what follows is not to intervene in ziyara literature's own complex taxonomies. Rather, it is simply to identify this literature as engaged in constructing a typology of action, and in locating particular actions within that typology, a process that may, correspondingly, be termed ritualization. (5) To describe Twelver fuqaha' as pursuing the ritualization of ziyara in this literature, then, is not to jump to conclusions regarding what type of practice they sought to make of ziyara (unlike canonization, for example), it is only to highlight their interest in exploring what type of practice ziyara might be, while keeping open the question of their aims in doing so.

EARLY ZIYARA LITERATURE

The shape of early Twelver ziyara literature reflects that of early Twelver legal literature in general: we have bibliographical records of many works on ziyara being written over the course of the third/ninth century, of which only the titles survive, (6) with extant works gradually emerging over the course of the fourth/tenth century. This article addresses these first extant writings, extending from the middle of the fourth/tenth century to the middle of the fifth/eleventh. The oldest is al-Kulayni's (d. 329/941) encyclopedic al-Kafi, which contains a group of chapters on ziyara. From the next generation we have Kamil al-ziyarat by al-Kulayni's student, Ibn Qulawayh (d. 367 or 368/977f.), the first surviving book devoted solely to the topic, and a set of chapters in al-Saduq's (Ibn Babawayh the younger, d. 381/991) legal encyclopedia Man la yahduruhu al-faqih. Their mutual pupil al-Muffd (d. 413/1022) leaves a short work on ziyara, al-Mazar, alongside a section in his (mostly) legal manual al-Muqni'a. We will have little cause to consult this latter work, as it is also the subject of an expansive commentary by al-Muffd's student al-Tusi (d. 460/1067), Tahdhib al-ahkam. (7) These five works (excluding al-Muqni'a) form the basis of the present study. (8) A sixth, rather different work that will be an occasional point of reference is al-Tusi's Misbah al-mutahajjid, a devotional manual that includes material on ziyara dispersed amid other types of supererogatory worship. (9)

The first of these books was written at a time when pilgrimage to the Imams' tombs already constituted a key part of Twelver identity, (10) and had already generated a considerable body of text and practice. They do not, therefore, represent the origins of ziyara, which are usually located in visits to al-Husayn's grave not long after his death in 61/680. Though the earliest instances of such rites are contested, poetic references to visiting al-Husayn's tomb from the first/seventh century onward and documented Abbasid suppression of such pilgrimages in the third/ninth century both indicate a longstanding and significant continuity of practice. (11) Other sites of devotion soon emerged, foremost among them Kufa, (12) and it is also possible that state-sponsored rites of a Shi'i character developed in connection with particular locations as early as the fourth/tenth century. (13) What the early Twelver ziyara literature adds to this picture is an unprecedented level of detailed ritual direction in text, laying out pilgrimage rituals that sometimes take several pages to describe, as well as extensive discussions of their nature and significance. Most of this material is presented as hadith, and the extent to which it predates the first surviving works is therefore debatable, but both the volume of the ziyara corpus and its thematic coherence indicate an origin significantly prior to its appearance in the literature under discussion. As we shall see, however, Twelver authors continued to be exercised by questions of how this material should be managed.

The early ziyara literature is dominated by two bodies of text. The first corpus comprises what 1 will here call the ziyara litanies: long, distinctive texts for recitation at the tomb, in which the pilgrim greets the deceased and evokes God's blessings upon them (often accompanied by curses upon their enemies). These litanies are extremely numerous and vary in their length and details, but are highly formulaic in style and content. They address God, requesting favor and witnessing his oneness, but the main addressee is the figure in the tomb. Most litanies first greet the deceased before enumerating their virtues, attesting that they fulfilled their duties, and lamenting the wrongs done to them, culminating in martyrdom. They almost always conclude with a request for the deceased's intercession (shafa'a) on judgment day. Stylistic features include repetition, most conspicuously of the greeting al-salamu 'alaykum, rhyme, and rhythmic phrasing--features shared with other kinds of ornate prose in Arabic, including a great many supplications (ad'iya, sg. du'a'). Often the text for recitation is interspersed with ritual directions--commanding the pilgrim to move to a different part of the shrine, pray two raka'at, etc.--but not always. In the great majority of cases, these litanies are presented as hadith narrated from an Imam.

Though they first appear in Twelver books, the litany texts exhibit a notable absence of sustained, distinctly Twelver theological content, let alone a developed theology of ziyara. They praise the Imams at length, but do so without reference to the more miraculous powers accorded to the Imams in some Twelver...