Difference Disability Medieval Islamic World: and in The

the MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC WORLD
DIFFERENCE and DISABILITY in

Outlines the complex significance of bodies in
the late medieval central Arab Islamic lands
Medieval Arab notions of physical difference can feel singularly
arresting for modern audiences. Did you know that blue eyes,
baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily ‘blights’,
as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions
about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference?
Difference and
How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close
analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, (auto)biographies, erotic
poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and
theological tracts, the cultural views and experiences of disability
and difference in the medieval Islamic world are brought to life.
Disability in the
Key Features
● Investigates the place of physically different, disabled and
ill individuals in medieval Islam
● Centres on the lives and works of six Muslim men, each
Medieval
Islamic
highlighting a different aspect of bodily difference
● Addresses broad cultural questions relating to social class,
religious orthodoxy, moral reputation, drug use, male
homoeroticism and self-representation in the public sphere
● Moves towards a coherent theory of medieval disability
and bodily aesthetics in Islamic cultural traditions
Kristina Richardson is an Assistant Professor of History at

World
Kristina L. Richardson
Queens College, City University of New York, and is Marie Curie
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut für Arabistik und
Islamwissenschaft, University of Münster, Germany.
Blighted Bodies
Jacket image: a detail of an Ottoman miniature painting from 1595
depicting the Martyrdom of Mansur al-Hallaj © CBL T 474.79.
Jacket design: McColmDesign.co.uk
ISBN 978-0-7486-4507-7
www.euppublishing.com
DIFFERENCE AND DISABILITY IN THE
MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC WORLD
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RICHARDSON PRINT.indd ii 28/06/2012 09:28
DIFFERENCE AND DISABILITY IN
THE MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC WORLD
BLIGHTED BODIES
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This book is dedicated to Wednesday, 9 May 2007
© Kristina L. Richardson, 2012
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 11/13 JaghbUni Regular by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4507 7 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 4508 4 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 6491 7 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 6490 0 (Amazon ebook)
The right of Kristina L. Richardson to be identified as author of this

work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
RICHARDSON PRINT.indd iv 28/06/2012 09:28

Contents
List of Abbreviations vi
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 ʿĀhāt in Islamic Thought 22
2 Literary Networks in Mamluk Cairo 36
3 Recollecting and Reconfiguring Afflicted Literary Bodies 72
4 Transgressive Bodies, Transgressive Hadith 96
5 Public Insults and Undoing Shame: Censoring the Blighted Body 110
Bibliography 138
Index 157
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Abbreviations
BEO Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales

BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
EI3 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition
GAL Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur
IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies
JA Journal Asiatique
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
JSAI Jerusalem Studies of Arabic and Islam
MSR Mamlūk Studies Review
SI Studia Islamica
ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
vi
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Figures
I.1 (page 2) ‘Battle Scene’. (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art,

1975.360, probably Egypt, 8th/14th century. Image copyright ©
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.)
I.2 (page 3) Ibn Zunbul, Kitāb qānūn al-dunyá wa-ʿajāʾibihā min
mashriqihāli-maghribihā. (Source: Library of the Topkapı
Sarayı Museum, Istanbul, Revan 1638, Egypt or Syria, 1563, fos
118v–119r.)
4.1 (page 104) ‘Prophet Muḥammad Preaching’. (Source:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 55.121.40, Baghdad, late 10th/16th
century. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/
Art Resource, New York.)
5.1 (page 115) ‘Young Prince and Mentor Sitting in Landscape’.
(Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 13.228.10.2, Indian Deccan,
c. 1600. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art
Resource, New York.)
vii
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Acknowledgements
This book began as a graduate seminar paper on al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Burṣān

for Professor Michael Bonner’s course on classical Arabic biographical
dictionaries. Set on writing a dissertation on slavery, and convinced that
a study of disability would have too few primary sources, I put aside my
interest in this text. However, the paper did awaken me to the idea of
working on a topic that had not been so thoroughly studied as slavery.
Encouraged by Dana Sajdi’s fascinating work on a Chester Beatty Library
manuscript of an 18th-century Damascene barber’s local history, I leafed
through the Chester Beatty manuscript catalogue in the hope of finding a
singular source on which I could build a similarly interesting study. To
my amazement, I stumbled across A. J. Arberry’s entry for MS 3838, Ibn
Fahd’s 950/AD 1543 ‘treatise on the afflictions suffered by famous schol-
ars’. Only then did I begin to think a study of disability could be a possi-
bility. With the support of the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate
School and the International Institute, I arranged a visit to the Chester
Beatty Library in the summer of 2005. Dr Elaine Wright, curator of the
library’s Islamic collections, was of immeasurable assistance during my
stay there and granted permission to use a library image as the cover art.
My thesis adviser, Dr Kathryn Babayan, introduced me to al-Badrī’s
poetry anthology, which quickly led me to the other writers featured in this
study. I am immensely grateful for her continued support and mentorship.
Support from the National Endowment of the Humanities allowed me to
work under the supervision of Dr Monica Green and Dr Emilie Savage-
Smith in London in the summer of 2009. These two experts in medieval
medical history helpfully introduced me to Latin and Arabic medical lit-
erature on balādhur and baldness, which has strengthened Chapters 2 and
5. My current intellectual home, Queens College of The City University of
New York, graciously granted me a pre-tenure leave and encouraged my
participation in the 2010 Faculty Fellowship Publishing Program. There,
CUNY colleagues Brijraj Singh, Al Coppola, JoEllen DeLucia, Ramesh
Mallipeddi, Karl Steel and Andrea Walkden generously read and com-
mented on various chapters of this work. An ArtSTOR travel grant per-
mitted me to visit archives and museums in Damascus. Julie Singer read
viii
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Acknowledgements
Chapter 2 closely, and usefully suggested ways to reorder the material to

emphasise my argument about friendship. Adam Talib offered many keen
suggestions and corrections for Chapter 3. Professor Geert Jan van Gelder
closely read and helped me revise the introduction. I am extremely grate-
ful for the professionalism and eagle-eyed readings of my copy-editor,
Ivor Normand. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of this
manuscript for their helpful suggestions, and my incredibly patient editor
at Edinburgh University Press, Ms Nicola Ramsey.
Living and working in New York City has been an incredible cultural
experience. With the library, museum and university partnerships, my
work is constantly stimulated with new ideas and discussions with learned
colleagues. Annick des Roches, the Islamic art collections manager at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, invited me to view specimens and peruse
the typed notes on various pieces of artwork at a time when the Islamic
wing was closed to the public for renovation. There, I saw 55.121.40 and
1975.360, both of which are featured in this book. I would like to thank Dr
Ozgen Felek for her translation of the Ottoman inscription on 55.121.40.
And, were it not for my students at Queens College, I would never have
looked so closely at representations of disability in visual sources. I thank
them for expanding my view.
Especial gratitude goes to my godmother Lillie Virginia Ming, who
sadly died just before this book went to press, my mother Ann, who
wanted us children and raised us firmly and lovingly, my father Thomas
for his patience and intellectual encouragement, my little sister Kelly, who
has aided my writing with an endless supply of pens, ink cartridges, paper
and notebooks over the years, and my daughter Cecilia Mae Rose is a rose
is a rose is a rose.
ix
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Introduction
By the 9th/15th century, a distinct, stripped-down visual and literary

aesthetic had found expression in Egyptian and Syrian art and literature.
The paring down of scenic backgrounds to a wash of colour in paint-
ings, of intricate forms to simplified outlines in visual media, of three-
dimensional figures and sets to two-dimensional silhouettes in shadow
theatre, and of idiom and formulae to more straightforward language in
literature all departed from 8th/14th-century stylistic norms that prized
thematic and visual detail, layering and explication. Two exemplary
paintings that typify this style receive treatment here for their unique
figural representations and later for their relationship to this book’s central
source-texts.
The earlier of the two is an unknown 8th/14th-century artist’s water-
colour sketch of men fighting and dying in hand-to-hand combat (Fig.
I.1); and the art historian Esin Atıl has noted the ‘unusual’ simplicity of
the painter’s technique.1 In this 14 3 18.3 cm remnant of a larger sketch,
ink outlines of male bodies and body parts in profile appear violently
posed. Because the blank background offers no sense of scale, situational
context or pictorial depth, severed heads and amputated legs seem to float
in the scene. One head has the point of a sword lodged in its crown, and
a sword runs clean through the thigh of an amputated leg. The bodies are
all painted with the same thin brown wash. Aside from one warrior who
sports blue-grey forearm guards and a turban, and another man wearing
part of a turban, the bodies are nude. The generic, impersonal facial fea-
tures suggest the artist’s disinterest in individual portraiture, which was
unusual in 8th/14th-century Arab paintings. Rather, the forms and move-
ments of an anonymous group of men create the greatest impression on
the viewer.
A similar style can be observed in an Egyptian or Syrian manuscript of
Ibn Zunbul’s 1563 Kitāb qānūn al-dunyá wa-ʿajāʾibihā min mashriqihā
li-maghribihā (Order of the World and Its Wonders from East to West),
which the author illustrated himself. This manuscript technically quali-
fies as an Ottoman Arab product, since the Ottomans conquered Mamluk
Egypt and Syria in 922/1517; but its similarities to works such as the battle
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Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World
Figure I.1 ‘Battle Scene’. (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.360, probably
Egypt, 8th/14th century. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art
Resource, New York.)
scene have led Duncan Haldane, for one, to argue for its continuities with
Mamluk art and even to feature one of its illustrations in his book Mamluk
Painting.2 In most 10th/16th-century ʿajāʾib manuscripts, intricately
detailed bodies of monsters and demons, not ordinary human beings, filled
the pages. Ibn Zunbul’s artistic treatment of these extraordinary bodies
is stylised, vivacious and simplified, evoking the minimalist expres-
sion of the 8th/14th-century watercolour. A two-folio watercolour in the
1563 piece depicts Solomon and Alexander building walls to sequester
the hybrid demons and monsters that live at the end of the world. (Fig.
I.2). Such images of monstrous races were common in illustrated ʿajāʾib
manuscripts, such as those of al-Qazwīnī’s ʿAjāʾib. Persis Berlekamp, in
evaluating a 722/1322 copy that is missing several folios, was able to draw
on the rather standardised layouts of these works to conjecture that, after a
folio describing red-haired inhabitants of Ramni island and blind inhabit-
ants of the islands of Zanzibar, another folio was originally interpolated.
She noted: ‘One folio apparently missing. It may have had illustrations
of the following species: the soft-legged people; winged people with

Introduction
Figure I.2 Ibn Zunbul, Kitāb qānūn al-dunyá wa-ʿajāʾibihā min mashriqihāli-
maghribihā. (Source: Library of the Topkapı Sarayı Museum, Istanbul, Revan 1638,
Egypt or Syria, 1563, fos. 118v–119r.)
elephant heads; winged people with horse heads; double-faced people;

double-headed multi-legged people; and chest-faced people.’³ Figure I.2
corresponds to this stock image of monstrosity, but is also singular for the
simplified human forms that were gaining prominence in visual works.
Yājūj, Mājūj (that is, Gog and Magog) and a third figure have elephantine
ears, and one of them is shown fully nude with its indeterminate genitals
exposed. Of the thirteen other figures behind the wall, one observes: two
turbaned men (presumably scholars) without noses or mouths, who each
carry a bare-headed bearded male on his shoulders; two yellow-haired
supplicants gazing upwards with clasped hands; two individuals with ten-
tacles for legs; two sets of conjoined bodies; a headless person with facial
features carved onto the chest; and two other more anonymous-looking
figures. As with the Mamluk sketch, the colour palette is muted and
dominated by shades of brown. The background of the painting consists
entirely of black curlicues and blue-grey dots. This apocalyptic sketch
has inspired a range of strongly felt judgements. Richard Ettinghausen,
for one, has suggested that it has an ‘ornamental aspect’, even noting its

distinctively ‘aggressive directness, revealing at the same time a crude

boldness of design and disdain for nonessential detail’.4 David James,
in referring to the corpus of paintings in the manuscript, has judged that
‘[t]he painter’s technical competence did not match his imagination though
all [the illustrations] have a simple folkish charm’.5 Most recently, Rachel
Milstein and Bilha Moor praise it as one of only two ‘brilliant, although
extreme, representatives of their period’.6 The force of the paintings and,
consequently, of the modern judgements appears to stem from the sheer
novelty of the artist’s aesthetic, not necessarily painterly, technique.
Both of these singular pieces feature stylised, schematic human figures
with crude and perfunctory facial features, but otherwise striking physical
features, painted against plain or abstract backgrounds. In the 8th/14th-
century sketch, the deracinated figures are neither situated in a physical
scene nor attributed any sort of social context beyond what one can derive
from their physical gestures, postures, garb and accoutrements, essentially
from their very bodies. The emphasis lies not in small details, for these
are entirely absent, but in the general impression of physicality, such as
colour, shape, size and biological sex. One sees in these images no robes
decorated with small flowers, no detailed landscapes, no intricate geo-
metrical motifs, no architectural elements, only bodies that are mostly bare
in an array of unsettling configurations. Bodies – depicted impersonally,
bared unconventionally – are pulled sharply into focus, creating a sense
of physical immediacy in the midst of battle chaos and the stirrings of the
apocalypse.
What interests me here is not the representation of marked and broken
bodies in the 8th/14th and 10th/16th centuries, because such images
abounded, but rather the simplified, even crude, method of representing so
many different types of bodies. The images project such force precisely
because they have been rendered so ordinarily. These two images origi-
nated in 8th/14th- and 10th/16th-century Egypt and Syria, as do many of
the sources in this study. (The remaining sources come from 10th/16th-
century Mecca.) Like the paintings, the sources are distinguished by
plainly expressed, but striking, representations of cognitive and physical
difference in everyday sources, like personal letters, biographical and
autobiographical writings, travel narratives, romantic poetry celebrating
male and female beloveds, occasional poetry, polemical tracts, historical
chronicles and theological treatises. The stylistic innovation of Mamluk
and Ottoman paintings finds a counterpart in the literature of the period.
Blighted Bodies is a critical microhistory of a chain of six male Sunni
scholars linked by the social bonds of friendship and academic mentor-
ship in Cairo, Damascus and Mecca who produced writings about bodies

Introduction
marked by ‘blights’ (ʿāhāt, in Arabic) – a category that included indi-

viduals who were cognitively and physically different, disabled and ill.7
In relation to these six authors, physically marked people in these works
figured as selves, lovers, family members, literary subjects and pious
authorities, offering insight into the ways in which personal relationships
and literary topoi shaped the substance of stories and histories. These
men’s writings, comprising a sizeable corpus of unpublished manuscripts
and edited works, challenged perceptions and boundaries of the com-
munity and the category ahl al-ʿāhāt (people of blights). Taken together,
these works push the historian to reconsider the centrality of elected affini-
ties in shaping trends in knowledge production, the prominence of physi-
ognomic categories in everyday life and the capacity for anomalous bodies
to threaten notions of human decency, Muslim piety and aesthetic beauty.
ʿĀhāt
In classical Arabic, the term ʿāha denotes a mark that spoils the presumed
wholeness of a thing. In Ibn Manẓūr’s 7th/13th-century dictionary Lisān
al-ʿarab, ʿāha is defined by a single word – āfa, which itself means
‘blight’ or ‘damage’. To contextualise the meaning of ʿāha, Ibn Manẓūr
cited the following hadith: ‘[The Prophet Muḥammad] forbade the selling
of fruits until they were free of the blight or damage (al-ʿāha aw al-āfa)
that afflicts the seed and the fruits and rots them’.8 In this entire entry, Ibn
Manẓūr makes no reference to human or animal bodies, even though, as
early as the 5th/11th century, a hagiographer attributed a warning not to
interact with ‘anyone who has an ʿāha on his body’ to Imām al-Shāfiʿī
(d. 204/820).9
Adapting modern categories of physical difference to past societies can
obscure the particularities of local epistemologies and has clear limitations
for the Islamic Middle Period. For one, classical Arabic vocabularies of
physical difference are rather specialised and reflect views of body that
differ significantly from Western views. The concept of ʿāha does not
correspond directly to the meaning of ‘disability’, a word that conveys
a particular perspective on bodies. For one, the focus lies on the body’s
physical and cognitive limitations, which are determined against the model
of a supposedly fully able body.10 This category of blightedness or being
marked encompasses more hybridity than the modern category of ‘disabil-
ity’, as people of blights were characterised by physical deviance defined
as debility, superability and physiognomic undesirability. (However, in
modern standard Arabic, the term iʿāqa, which literally means hindrance,
obstacle or retardation, signifies ‘disability’.) Disabilities like blindness,

deafness and paraplegia; diseases like leprosy and halitosis; temporary

ailments like ophthalmia and jaundice; and extraordinary physical features
like blue eyes, crossed eyes, flat noses, black skin, baldness, hunched
backs, lisps and thin beards all fell under the heading of ʿāhāt. A failure
to acknowledge these vocabularies presents other analytical limitations, as
linguistic categories often reflect or create cultural categories. One legal
historian has gone so far as to claim that ‘in classical Islamic sources I
could not identify any single general term that would combine all people
with disabilities as a group . . . It is only in contemporary literature that
we find somewhat generalised terms, such as ashāb al-ʿāhāt or dhawu
al-ʿāhāt (“owners” or bearers of impairments, defects).’11 In fact, both
aṣḥāb al-ʿāhāt and dhawū al-ʿāhāt were in currency to refer to what I
have termed here ‘people of blights’, making it possible for scholars to
access disability in late medieval and early modern Islamicate history.
Blights formed a central category of identification in the Islamic
Middle Ages, as evidenced by the extent to which biographers incorpo-
rated physical traits into descriptions of a person’s intellect and character.
Hilary Kilpatrick has noted that, in Kitāb al-Aghānī (The Book of Songs),
Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967) ‘hardly ever refers to the physical
appearance of his poets. If he does so, the aspects which interest him are
skin colour, partial or complete blindness, lameness and extreme hand-
someness.’12 Furthermore, a person with a noticeable physical difference
often incorporated this attribute into his very name, suggesting the body’s
centrality in subject formation and its prominence in the social imagina-
tion. ‘The kunya [patronymic] reveals intellectual or moral qualities or
defects, physical peculiarities . . . A great number of bodily peculiarities
and defects are expressed in alqāb [nicknames].’13
The prose writer Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baḥr al-Baṣrī (d. 255/868 or
869) acquired the sobriquet al-Jāḥiẓ (lit. ‘the goggle-eyed one’) because of
his protruding eyeballs. He was renowned for his elegant turn of phrase,
his keen wit and the breadth of literary subjects he undertook. One of his
lesser-studied works transfers this cultural tendency to privilege abnormal
physical characteristics as salient identifiers into a way of structuring
biographies. His Kitāb al-burṣān wa’l-ʿurjān wa’l-ḥūlān wa’l-ʿumyān
(The Book of the Leprous, the Lame, the Cross-Eyed and the Blind) is
an unusual work of anecdotal biography about human and non-human
animals that lived with physical blights. (The medical historian Michael
Dols has referred to the book as a ‘curious compilation’.)14 In the book’s
introduction, al-Jāḥiẓ discusses the disfigurements and illnesses that he
will use as anecdotal categories. ‘I will mention what is said about people
lacking beard hair and eyebrows, people with warts, and about hunch-

Introduction
backs, and how body parts (al-jawāriḥ) in these illnesses are described and
what emerges in poetry, anecdotes, parables and traditions.’15 Completed
sometime between 206/821 and 237/851, Kitāb al-burṣān is arranged
topically, from roughly the longest section (lepers) to the shortest (hand-
edness), a structure recalling that of the Qur’ān, whose chapters are also
arranged by decreasing length. Recognising his own proximity to the
subject matter, al-Jāḥiẓ even dedicates a brief section to goggle-eyed
people, though he conspicuously does not mention himself there.16 It is
possible that al-Jāḥiẓ wrote other similarly themed works. In his own
Al-Bayān wa’l-tabyīn, al-Jāḥiẓ refers to works of his titled Kitāb al-ʿurjān
(The Book of the Lame) and Kitāb al-jawāriḥ (The Book of Body Parts),
which he noted mentions ‘leprosy (al-baraṣ), lameness, left-handedness,
hernia, frontal baldness (al-ṣalʿ), hunchbacks, those bald from an illness
(al-qaraʿ), and other types of defects of body parts’.17 Charles Pellat sus-
pects that Kitāb al-jawāriḥ is al-Burṣān under another title.18 Pellat also
names Kitāb dhawī al-ʿāhāt (The Book of Those with Physical Blights)
as one among al-Jāḥiẓ’s corpus of more than 200 works, but offers no
comment about its relation to al-Burṣān.
Modern Historiography
Bodies in Islamicate and Near Eastern scholarship have been approached
from various theoretical positions. More broadly conceived studies on the
body, like Bedhioufi Hafsi and Malek Chebel’s investigations of Muslim
bodies in colonial discourses, Fuad Khuri’s close readings of Islamic
source-texts to understand the contemporary ‘Islamic’ body, and Traki
Zannad-Bouchrara’s investigation of bodies and space have tended to be
presentist in scope and sociological or anthropological in method.19 Hafsi
and Zannad-Bouchrara are both French-educated Tunisian sociologists
who have interrogated the effects of colonial domination on indigenous
notions of the social and ritual bodies in Islamic North Africa. Khuri,
an anthropologist, draws on Islamic foundational texts to discern body
ideology in the contemporary Arab-Islamic world, then reads the body
as a system of semiotic signs. His method of using 1st/7th-century texts
to decode physical gestures, movements and postures for their universal
meanings in a so-called Islamic culture has been critiqued as problem-
atic.20 Chebel, who is also an anthropologist, examines the anatomical
and symbolic dimensions of the body in late 20th-century North Africa.
Looking at vocabularies of the body, reproduction, individual body parts,
death, body language, superstition and magic, he evokes the ways in
which the body was lived, experienced and understood.

General histories on disability are less common, and the only mono-
graph I am aware of, Fareed Haj’s Disability in Antiquity (1970), is rather
dated. This anecdotal survey of disablement caused by disease, armed
conflict and corporal punishment summarises much of this history, but
advances no arguments about it. In spite of the title, the temporal range
is 632 to 1258 CE in the central Islamic lands. More recent encyclopaedic
entries on bodies and disabilities frame methodological issues and present
historiographical information – work that was not done in the seminal
survey publication of Islamicate studies, The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1st
and 2nd edns).21 The Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an includes entries on
specific body parts, illnesses and sense faculties.22 Separate entries on dis-
abilities and the female body appear in the Encyclopedia of Women and
Islamic Cultures, and a brief article on disabilities is included in Medieval
Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia.23 Simply the fact of their inclu-
sion in these works signals an important recognition of these topics as
legitimate categories of academic inquiry.
Among historians of Islamicate literatures, only Sadān and Malti-
Douglas have taken up the subject of disabled bodies, with Sadān spe-
cialising in Abbasid literature about physical defects, and Malti-Douglas
concentrating on blindness in the Mamluk period.24 Art historians have
written extensively about figural representation in Islamicate art, though
studies of visual representations of disabled people have yet to be com-
pleted.25 Several scholars of the Qur’an and Islamic law have focused
their research on the disabled body as an analytical category in classical
and contemporary legal sources.26 Ghaly expertly explores a number of
theological principles and theological debates in the classical and post-
classical eras on bodies and disability. In Islamicate historical studies,
research on the body has focused on ritual bodies,27 gendered bodies,28
sexual bodies29 and disabled/marked bodies.30 Two fields that are under-
developed are ethics and archaeology. Leslie Peirce has described what
could be a promising opening into the first field: two 10th/16th-century
Ottoman Turkish works that link morality to specific body parts and even
to certain illnesses.31 Archaeologists of disease and disability have recov-
ered considerable information about many pre-modern societies, though
work on the Middle East could be increased. One intriguing finding was
unearthed during an excavation of an Israeli grave near the presumed site
of Jesus’ baptism. The 3rd/9th-century burial site contained the remains of
thirty-four Nubian men and women, many of whose skeletons showed evi-
dence of ‘tuberculosis, leprosy and facial disfigurement. Those individu-
als, attracted to the site, traveled enormous distances in hope of washing
away their illness.’32 Just as the study of disability offers openings into the

Introduction
history of Nubian Christian pilgrimage, healing and sacred spaces, so too

does it have the potential to speak to a range of disciplinary questions and
historical moments.
Historians of disability in the Middle East have begun incorporating
into their own works insights from the debates of theorists and historians
of the body and disability. Two major currents of thought that have been
integrated into the scholarship are the recognition of the constructedness
of conceptions of the body and the positioning of disabled people as his-
torical subjects, not just objects of study. Scholars of the medieval and
early modern Middle East have deployed various methods in studying the
body as a category of historical and anthropological analysis, and with
varying effects have used particular notions of the body to understand his-
tories of disability. In his sweeping history of mental illness, or madness,
in Islamicate societies of the 3rd/9th to 10th/16th centuries, Michael Dols
recognised that the definitions and boundaries of sanity are culturally
constructed. To understand culturally specific ideas about the body, Dols
explored the ways in which mental illnesses were treated. As suggested
by the title, Dols examined cases of junūn, which, though an enormous
category, does not include the many degrees and types of mental illness
recognised in the Islamicate world. Stephan H. Stephan has produced what
could be considered a companion piece to this work in which he explores
the vocabularies of mental illness.33 Dols systematically presents medical,
religious and magical cures of mental illness to show how each model
presumes a particular attitude to the body. For instance, a medical model
of cure presupposes that illness originates within the body, whereas a
religious model is based on divine origin and control of bodily processes.
Medieval Historiography
In the introduction of Kitāb al-Burṣān, al-Jāḥiẓ preserved the earliest
known ʿāhāt-themed Arabic writings, all of which were written by al-
Haytham b. ʿAdī (d. 207/822). The first is a mostly unnarrativised list of
noble Muslim men divided into five categories: those who were blind,
one-eyed, cross-eyed, blue- or green-eyed (azraq) or had protruding
teeth.34 Al-Jāḥiẓ discussed Ibn ʿAdī twice in his introduction, first affirm-
ing that though he has known of Ibn ʿAdī’s piece of writing (kitāb) about
lepers, the lame, blind, deaf and cross-eyed, he does not want to use these
same categories in Kitāb al-Burṣān. (It is unclear whether this ‘piece of
writing’ constitutes a longer version of the list of sixty-one men or is an
entirely different, perhaps narrativised, work about people of blights.) In
the second instance, he reproduced a part of Ibn ʿAdī’s list that has not

survived elsewhere – the names of ten lame male ashrāf (noble Muslims),
adding that ‘[Ibn ʿAdī] mentioned no others besides these. However, he
did mention the blind, but those he neglected to mention are more than
those he did mention.’35
This evidence of Ibn ʿAdī’s writing supports a 7th/13th-century
writer’s claims that Ibn ʿAdī incurred people’s hatred in his lifetime
because he revealed their faults and shortcomings (maʿāyib).36 In spite
of a possible backlash from one’s contemporaries, other Abbasid writers,
like al-Jāḥiẓ, expanded on Ibn ʿAdī’s list of ashrāf who were physically
blighted. In Kitāb al-muḥabbar, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Ḥabīb’s (d.
245/860) lists of the physically marked ashrāf include some of the same
names as Ibn ʿAdī’s, but also contain additional names and incorporate
anecdotes and poetry. He also adjusted the categories of physical differ-
ence, adding to them leprosy, lameness and thin-beardedness, and omit-
ting blue eyes.37 Another work of Ibn Ḥabīb’s, Kitāb al-munammaq fī
akhbār Quraysh, follows the same structure and uses the same categories
as in Kitāb al-Muḥabbar, but its lists and anecdotes focus exclusively on
members of the Qurayshi tribe.38
Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889) compiled a list of ahl al-ʿāhāt in his ency-
clopaedic Kitāb al-maʿārif that begins with the following descriptions
of prominent 1st/7th- and 2nd/8th-century Muslim men who possessed
multiple ʿāhāt:
ʿAṭāʾ b. Abī Rabāḥ [d. 114 or 115/733 or 734] was black, one-eyed, paralysed,
flat-nosed and lame. Then he went blind after that. Abān b. ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān
[d. 105/723 or 724] was deaf – extremely deaf – and had leprosy. His body
turned green wherever the leprosy afflicted him, but not on his face. He was
hemiplegic, and it was said in Medina, ‘May God bestow on you Abān’s hemi-
plegia’, as this was his affliction. He was also cross-eyed. Masrūq b. al-Ajdaʿ
[d. 63/682] was hunchbacked and lame because of a wound that he sustained
at Qādisiyya. He was also hemiplegic. Al-Aḥnaf b. Qays was one-eyed, and it
is said that he either lost his eye in Samarqand or because of a pox. He had a
twisted foot and walked on its outer edge. Abū al-Aswad al-Duʾalī [d. 69/688
or 689] was lame, hemiplegic and suffered from halitosis. ʿAmr b. ʿAmr b.
ʿUdas [death date unknown], a horseman of the Banū Dārim, had leprosy and
halitosis. It is said that his children had mouths like dogs. Al-Aqraʿ b. Ḥābis
[death date unknown] was lame and, due to illness, bald (aqraʿ), and for this
reason was called Al-Aqraʿ. ʿUbayda al-Salmanī [d. 72/694] was deaf and
one-eyed.39
Possessing multiple aberrant traits intensified their ugliness, which

explains their prominence at the head of the section. After this opening
narrative come sections on lepers, the lame, the deaf, hand and nose
10

Introduction
amputees, those with a mutilated hand, the cross-eyed, the blue-eyed, the
bald (al-ṣalʿ), the thin-bearded, those with protruding teeth, those with
bad breath, the one-eyed and the blind. Poetry and anecdotes about the
profiled men’s physical conditions fill out these sections. In spite of Ibn
Qutayba’s expansion of categories of blight, the temporal limits of the first
century of Islam remain in place. ʿĀhāt remained for many more centuries
useful categories for cataloguing the major actors of the early caliphal
period. In the case of Abān, son of ʿUthmān the third Sunni caliph, hemi-
plegia became his personal disease, a phenomenon reminiscent of diseases
in 20th-century America being named after the researcher who discovered
it (for example, Parkinson’s disease) or renamed after a famous person
afflicted with a known illness (for example, Lou Gehrig’s disease). Here,
the Medinan community appropriated the symbol of Abān’s hemiplegia
as prideful, and Ibn Qutayba reinforced this ‘metaphor of illness’ for his
3rd/9th-century audience. The other lists rather function to define physical
otherness for the nascent Muslim community, all the while demonstrating
that none of these conditions disqualifies a person from being Muslim or
precludes full acceptance in the Muslim community. The normative body
belongs to an Arab male who has dark (not blue or green) eyes, dark (not
light) hair, a hooked (not flat) nose, a full (not thin) beard, and brown (not
black) skin, and who stands at medium height. The archetype of male
beauty was the Prophet Muḥammad, who is described in Qur’ān 33: 21 as
a ‘beautiful model’ (uswa ḥasana).
Ibn Qutayba also wrote about men’s and women’s ʿāhāt in a chapter on
women in ʿUyūn al-akhbār.40 Poetry, hadith and sayings of the Prophet’s
companions fill sections on tallness, shortness, beards, eyes (one-eyed,
bleary-eyed, cross-eyed and blue-eyed), noses, halitosis, leprosy, lame-
ness and hernia. Ibn Qutayba recorded elsewhere his amazement at the
lengths to which people would detail other’s physical faults. ‘In this
majlis, a lot of words flowed about the defects of a dark-skinned slave,
but I didn’t see anyone there who knew the difference between toes that
overlap over neighbouring ones and the ankle bone, [or who knew] a club-
foot from a deformed foot, or dark lips from a white blotch on the inside
of dark lips’.41 Writing in the same period, the poet and caliph who reigned
for a single day, Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 296/908), wrote romantic epigrams
about men with ophthalmia and fever.42
Mufīd al-ʿulūm wa-mubīd al-humūm (The Provider of Useful Kinds of
Knowledge and Remover of Sorrows), an encyclopaedia compiled circa
551/1156, features information that its author, Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad
b. Aḥmad al-Qazwīnī, judged to be useful information for an educated
reader.43 The work is organised into books. In ‘The Book on Histories’,
11

chapter 11 is entitled ‘Those with ʿāhāt’; chapter 12 is called ‘ʿĀhāt of

the descendants of the Prophet’; and the title of chapter 13 is ‘Also about
ʿāhāt, but with some additions’.44 None of the three chapters features new
material. Earlier recorded lists are reproduced.
In Kitāb al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, an encyclopaedic work on mathematics,
geography and history, the Persian author Aḥmad b. ʿUmar b. Rusta
(d. 4th/10th century) lists the names of famous people with ʿāhāt, those
who were excessively tall and short, those who had multiple ʿāhāt, lepers,
the lame, the deaf, amputees (nose, ear and hand), the cross-eyed, the blue-
eyed, the bald (al-aṣlaʿ), one-eyed descendants of the Prophet, the blind,
those who were post-term infants and those who were pre-term.45 Aside
from omitting the categories of mutilation, thin-beardedness and halitosis,
and adding sections on extreme height, Ibn Rusta’s section follows Ibn
Qutayba’s discussion in Kitāb al-maʿārif rather closely, with only some
minor word variations. In the same century, Abū al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad Sarī
al-Raffā (d. 4th/10th century) penned erotic verses celebrating male belov-
eds with blue eyes, crossed eyes and ophthalmia; and the Buyid vizier Ibn
ʿAbbād (d. 385/995) praised a young lisper with these verses:
I asked a young fawn: What is your name?

He answered simpering: ʿAbbath [for Abbas, a common name].
I started to lisp myself,
I asked him: where are the cupth and the plateth?46
Al-Baṣā’ir wa’l-dhakhā’ir (Visions and Treasures), an anthology on

literary topics by the Buyid writer Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023),
defined a number of physical traits, some of which were considered
blights, with incredible precision.
If his eye protrudes visibly, then he is jāḥiẓ. If his eye is small and narrow, then
he is aḥwaṣ. If his wanders towards his ear, he is akhzar . . . If his nose is short
and narrow, then he is adhlaf. If his eye is green, then he is called azraq. If it
[the eye] is between white and green, he is called ashhal. If they are veiny, he
is ashkal.47
Though al-Tawḥīdī does not mention any historical figures in this

section of his book, the inclusion of clear definitions of types of physical
difference offers insight into their salience for writers of the period.
Al-Thaʿālibī’s (d. 429/1038) Kitāb laṭāʾif al-maʿārif (The Book of
Curious and Entertaining Information) is another encyclopaedic compi-
lation with a section on ahl al-ʿāhāt. Departing from the organisational
schemes of earlier writers, he starts by dividing his list of men with ʿāhāt
into social groups: rulers, Qurayshi, poets and legal scholars. Then the
12

Introduction
list shifts to being organised by physical traits: the one-eyed, one-eyed

military commanders, the blind, rulers who were blinded, the very tall, the
very short, post-term and pre-term infants and bald caliphs.
In Talqīḥ fuhūm, Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201) based his list of names of
notable men and women with physical blights on the works of Ibn Rusta
and al-Thaʿālibī.48 One major difference is his section on black notables,
which includes the Companions of the Prophet, the pious men who came
after them, poets, ascetics and female devotees. This section is the only one
with such a detailed subcategorisation of people. According to Taqī al-Dīn
al-Badrī (d. 894/1489), Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Jazarī al-Shāfiʿī (d.
after 660/1262) included a list of blind notables in his similarly titled work
Tanqīḥ fuhūm al-āthār (Re-Examination of the Knowledge of Hadith).49
With the exception of al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Burṣān, these pre-8th/14th-
century works were largely enumerations of names. The 8th/14th century
marked the resurgence of narrativised biographies of ahl al-ʿāhāt. Ṣalāḥ
al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī’s (d. 764/1363) Nakt al-himyān ʿalá nukat al-ʿumyān
(Emptying the Pockets for Anecdotes about the Blind) consists of 313
biographical entries about prominent blind men, and in it he apologised
for not using al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s (d. 463/1071) work about blind
men, because he could not find a copy from his local bookseller or in
libraries.50 His much later Al-Shuʿūr bi’l-ʿūr (Knowledge of the One-
Eyed) consists of entries about one-eyed men and women. According to
al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), al-Ṣafadī wrote as yet unrecovered histories
about weak-sighted and hunchbacked people.51 He was also a prolific poet
whose Al-Ḥusn al-ṣarīḥ fī miʾat malīḥ includes many verses about men
who bore ʿāhāt on their bodies. Some of these romantic poems, including
ones about a lame man and a man with a wounded cheek, are preserved
in al-Badrī’s Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ (The Shining Dawn), a work that will be
treated in greater detail in Chapter 3.52
Methodology
Blighted Bodies takes up this literary history in early 9th/15th-century
Cairo, carries it into 9th/15th-century Damascus and culminates in
10th/16th-century Mecca, incorporating throughout the analysis a social,
lived dimension to a close reading of texts. It is meant to highlight texts
that engage sustainedly with ahl al-ʿāhāt and to contextualise them with
the voices of the authors, communities and audiences that created and
responded to these texts, and that sometimes in responding managed to
alter the texts. Although ahl al-ʿāhāt signifies more than just disabled
people, it is through the lens of disability aesthetics that I have chosen
13

to approach this study, because this method invites consideration of

blighted bodies, and of other bodies they encounter, and even forces me
to consider how my own reactions to these bodies may influence my
analysis. ‘Aesthetics studies the way that some bodies make other bodies
feel’, in Tobin Siebers’ succinct encapsulation of the field. Investigating
emotion places the individual at the centre of historical inquiry, a method
that provides a critical launching point for larger social histories, allow-
ing historians to trace broad social responses back to the aggregation of
individual responses. As Siebers notes, ‘when bodies produce feelings of
pleasure or pain, they also invite judgments about whether they should
be accepted or rejected in the human community’.53 The physical body
becomes interchangeable with the social body through a metonymic
identification. Aesthetic theory invites us to consider stages of encounters
and exchanges that reveal dialectics of influence, rather than a unidirec-
tional flow of power from the top down. The ways in which dominant and
subjugated bodies participate in sustaining systems of oppression form
the foundation of all theories of difference. What is interesting about
combining aesthetic and disability theories is that ‘disability is the master
trope of human disqualification, not because disability theory is superior
to race, class, or sex/gender theory, but because all oppressive systems
function by reducing human variation to deviancy and inferiority defined
on the mental and physical plane’.54 Disability theory pares down a host
of interactions to discrete bodies and our reactions to them, much as the
simplified visual expressions in Mamluk and Ottoman watercolours (and,
as we shall see, texts) invited viewers to confront blunt representations of
all sorts of bodies.
Chapter Summaries
The chapter structure of this book developed from my methodological
choices. If aesthetic theory privileges ‘stages of encounters and exchanges’
and disability theory focuses on embodied systems of oppression, then a
history of writers (some blighted) and of their blighted literary and his-
torical subjects finds its richest representation as an amalgam of intercon-
nected personal exchanges. Aside from the first chapter, each chapter
focuses on people and texts connected to people and/or texts featured in
earlier chapters. By exploring a chain of men writing on a shared theme,
one not only sees how mentors and friends shaped their professional
work, but also begins to appreciate the role of emotional bonds in the
history of knowledge production. Chapter 1 explores the theme of ʿāhāt
in religious and juridical sources and examines representations of the
14

Introduction
bodies of the Prophet Muḥammad. According to Islamic hagiographi-

cal writings, Muḥammad possessed a raised disc of skin the size of a
pigeon’s egg between his shoulder blades that resembled a hump but was
described by early Muslim theologians as a singular ‘mark of prophet-
hood’. His body is thus perfectly marked, as opposed to unblemished, and
he is never described in Islamic sources as being among the ahl al-ʿāhāt.
Chapter 2 traces the late medieval development of a body aesthetic that
invited appreciation of blighted bodies, drawing mainly from the personal
letters and poetry of the Cairene hadith specialist and writer Shihāb al-Dīn
al-Ḥijāzī (d. 875/1471). His literary production and personal relationships
were fraught with the intersections of body aesthetics, Sufism, disabil-
ity, illness and sexuality. In his early twenties, he survived an overdose
on balādhur, a potentially fatal drug valued by scholars for its ability to
enhance memorisation, though the ordeal marked his body with red boils,
forcing him to realign perceptions of his own body and to craft new visions
of physical desirability. His friendships and encounters with six other men
named Shihāb al-Dīn (collectively known as the Seven Shihābs, meaning
the Seven Shooting Stars), especially the famed intellectual Shihāb al-Dīn
b. Hajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449), give texture to al-Ḥijāzī’s attempts
to make sense of the extreme ostracism he endured after the overdose,
feeling sequestered like the demons of the 1563 painting, who, marked
in body, are relegated to the end of the world. Chapter 3 reveals how the
body is remembered in two anthologies assembled by al-Ḥijāzī’s student,
the Damascene Taqī al-Dīn al-Badrī (d. 894/1489), who compiled prose
materials about the human eye and erotic verses about men with marked
bodies. In the second anthology, al-Badrī groups the verses by blight. The
reassembly of poems about subjective body parts creates a hybrid corpus
of work and a conglomerate human body that is the sum of its individual
diseased parts. Al-Badrī is not only assembling a set of poems, but also
reassembling a segmented male body that is wholly blighted. The dis-
jointed bodies of the Mamluk battle sketch recall al-Badrī’s anthology of
blighted body parts. Chapter 4 turns to the relationship of al-Ḥijāzī with
another of his Damascene students, Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Hādī (d. 909/1503),
who transcribed a list of 2nd/8th- and 3rd/9th-century hadith-transmitters
with blighted bodies. This chapter also draws out Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s close
relationship with his most famous student, Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 953/1546), a
Damascene historian who wrote a book consoling people who were losing
their eyesight. Finally, Chapter 5 gives dimension to the close friend-
ship of Ibn Ṭūlūn with Ibn Fahd (d. 954/1547), a Meccan historian who
wrote a book that controversially exposed some of his contemporaries as
being bald underneath their turbans. (Ordinarily, a man would only have
15

removed his turban in public to perform ablutions before prayer or to enter

public baths. Some of the fighters in the Mamluk battle sketch are depicted
without turbans, underscoring the violent upending of norms that combat
produces.) His work so angered these men that they seized the book from
his home and washed the pages at the local mosque, dissolving the ink.
He attempted to undo their shame (and his own) through public debates
with the Meccan theologian Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 974/1567), who had
been named in the book as bald, about the lawfulness of revealing others’
physical blights and by ultimately rewriting the work, omitting the names
of these bald men.
Notes
1. Esin Atıl, Renaissance of Islam: Art of the Mamluks (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Press, 1981), p. 254, fn. 36. An 8th/14th-century Shirazi
illustration of two individuals and a shepherd with his flock shares artis-
tic elements with this work. See Kitab-i Samak Ayzar, Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford, MS Ousely 380, 1330–40 CE, fo. 387v.
2. Duncan Haldane, Mamluk Painting (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1978),
p. 56.
3. Persis Berlekamp, ‘From Iraq to Fars: Tracking Cultural Transformations
in the 1322 Qazwīnī ʿAjāʾib Manuscript’, in Anna Contadini (ed.), Arab
Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill,
2010), p. 90.
4. Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), p. 182.
5. David James, ‘Arab Painting, 358 A.H./969 A.D.–1112 A.H./1700 A.D.’, Mārg:
A Magazine of the Arts 29.3 (June 1976), p. 46.
6. Rachel Milstein and Bilha Moor, ‘Wonders of a Changing World: Late
Illustrated ʿAjāʾib Manuscripts (Part I)’, JSAI 32 (2006), p. 2.
7. One definition of ‘blight’ is ‘an eruption on the human skin consisting of
minute reddish pimples’, and it has application to an incident that will be
analysed in Chapter 2. However, I am using this term in its more general
sense of ‘any cause of impairment, deterioration or decay’.
8. Muḥammad b. Mukarram Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311 or 1312), Lisān al-ʿarab
(Language of the Arabs) (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1956), 13:520. The entries
for ʿāha in al-Fīrūzābādī’s (d. 815/1412 or 1413) Al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ
(Comprehensive Dictionary) and al-Zabīdī’s (d. 1205/1791) dictionary Tāj
al-ʿarūs (Crown of the Bride), a commentary on Al-Qāmūs, very closely
mirror the one in Lisān al-ʿarab. See al-Fīrūzābādī, 2:579 of the 1855
Cairene edition, and al-Zabīdī, 9:401 of the 1888 Egyptian edition.
9. Abū Bakr al-Bayhaqī (d. 458/1065 or 1066), Manāqib al-Shāfiʿī (Excellent
Deeds of al-Shāfiʿī), ed. Aḥmad Saqr (Cairo: Dār al-turāth, 1971), 2:132.
10. Of course, disability scholars take issue with the notion that any body is
16

Introduction
perfectly able-bodied or whole, as all bodies operate within specific limita-

tions. Some scholars have linked the social classification of bodies by their
cognitive and physical capabilities with the rise of neoliberal capitalism,
which values bodies for their productive labour, privileging the able-bodied
person as the ultimate citizen. See Robert McRuer’s essay ‘Capitalism
and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer
Domesticity’ in his Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
(New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 77–102.
11. Vardit Rispler-Chaim, Disability in Islamic Law (New York: Springer,
2006), p. 3.
12. Hilary Kilpatrick, ‘Abū l-Faraǧ’s Profile of Poets: A 4th/10th Century Essay
at the History and Sociology of Arabic Literature’, Arabica 44.1 (1997),
p. 105. These categories are not so arbitrary as they appear. Alexander Borg
has suggested that, because shape and colour ‘differentiate surface qualities
in the visual world[, . . . i]t may therefore be symptomatic of a principle of
iconicity in the morphological subsystem of Arabic grammar, determining
the correlation of form and meaning, that attributes of both shape and color
in this language [classical Arabic] are encoded by the same canonic form:
the scheme aCCaC’. See his ‘Towards a History and Typology of Color
Categorization in Colloquial Arabic’, in Robert E. MacLaury et al. (eds),
Anthropology of Color: Interdisciplinary Multilevel Modeling (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing, 2007), p. 264.
13. Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Names (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1989), pp. 50, 54. For representative examples of such alqāb, see
M. A.-C. Barbier de Meynard, ‘Surnoms et sobriquets dans la littérature
arabe’, JA 9 (March–April 1907), pp. 173–244.
14. Michael Dols, ‘The Leper in Islamic Society’, Speculum 58.4 (October
1983), p. 901.
15. Al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-burṣān wa’l-ʿurjān wa’l-ʿumyān wa’l-ḥūlān (The Book
of the Leprous, the Lame, the Blind and the Cross-Eyed), ed. Muḥammad
Mursī al-Khawlī (Cairo/Beirut: s.n., 1972), p. 9. For an outline of the book’s
contents, see pp. 570–81 of the 1990 Beirut edition.
16. Ibid. p. 276.
17. Al-Jāḥiẓ, Al-Bayān wa’l-tabyīn, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn
(Cairo: Maktabat al-khānjī, 1968), 1:94–5.
18. Charles Pellat, ‘Nouvel essai d’inventaire de l’oeuvre Ġahizienne’, Arabica
31 (1984), pp. 129, 137.
19. Hafsi, Corps et traditions islamiques: divisions ontologiques et ritualités
du corps (Tunis: Noir sur Blanc, 2000); Chebel, Le corps dans la tradition
au Maghreb (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984); Khuri, The
Body in Islamic Culture (London: Saqi Books, 2001); Zannad-Bouchrara,
Symboliques corporelles et espaces musulmans (Tunis: Cèrès, 1984); and
Anna Barska, ‘Ways of Understanding Body in the Maghreb’, Hemispheres
21 (2006), pp. 17–29.
17

20. Madeline Zilfi, ‘Review of The Body in Islamic Culture’, MESA Bulletin
39.2 (2005), pp. 206–7.
21. According to a 9 November 2006 email from Everett Rowson, EI 3 will
include entries on the body, sexuality and disability.
22. See s.v. ‘Ears’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Face’, ‘Feet’, ‘Hand(s)’, ‘Heart’, ‘Womb’, ‘Insanity’,
‘Plagues’ and ‘Hearing and Deafness’.
23. Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, 1st edn, s.v. ‘Disabilities, Arab
States’, ‘Body: Female’, ‘Science, Medicalization and the Female Body’;
Meri and Bacharach (eds), Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia,
1st edn, s.v. ‘Disabilities’.
24. Yūsuf Sadān, Al-Adab al-ʿarabī al-hāzil wa nawādir al-thuqalāʾ: al-ʿāhāt
wa ’al-masāwiʾ al-insāniyya wa makānatuhā fī al-adab al-rāqī (ʿAkkā:
Maktabat wa-Maṭbaʿat al-Sarūjī, 1983); Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Mentalités
and Marginality: Blindness and Mamluk Civilisation’, in C. Issawi et al
(eds), The Islamic World from Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honour
of Bernard Lewis (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1989), pp. 211–37.
25. See, for example, Rachel Milstein, Miniature Painting in Ottoman Baghdad
(Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1990); Eva Baer, The Human Figure
in Islamic Art: Inheritances and Islamic Transformations (Costa Mesa, CA:
Mazda Publishers, 2004); Emilie Savage-Smith, ‘Anatomical Illustration
in Arabic Manuscripts’, in Anna Contadini (ed.), Arab Painting: Text
and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010),
pp. 147–60.
26. See Rispler-Chaim, Disability; Mohammed Ghaly, Islam and Disability:
Perspectives in Theory and Jurisprudence (London and New York:
Routledge, 2010) and his ‘Islam en Handicap: theologische perspectieven’,
Theologisch Debat 2.3 (2005), pp. 20–3; Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Ḥawwā,
Ḥuqūq dhawī al-iḥtiyājāt al-khāṣṣah fī al-sharīʿat al-Islāmiyya (Beirut: Dār
Ibn Ḥazm li’l-ṭibāʿa wa’l-nashr wa’l-tawzīʿ, 2010).
27. See, for example, Brannon Wheeler, ‘Touching the Penis in Islamic Law’,
History of Religions 44.2 (2004), pp. 89–119; Megan Reid, ‘Exemplars
of Excess: Devotional Piety in Medieval Islam, 1200–1450 CE’ (PhD
diss., Princeton University, 2005); Shahzad Bashir, ‘Shah Isma’il and the
Qizilbash: Cannibalism in the Religious History of Early Safavid Iran’,
History of Religions 45.3 (2006), pp. 234–56; Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion
and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011); Scott Kugle, ‘The Heart of Ritual is the Body: Anatomy of an
Islamic Devotional Manual of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Ritual
Studies 17.1 (2003), pp. 42–60; Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism,
Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2007).
28. See, for example, Leila Ahmed, ‘Arab Culture and Writing Women’s
Bodies’, Feminist Issues 9.1 (1989), pp. 41–55; Paula Sanders, ‘Gendering
the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law’, in Nikki
18

Introduction
R. Keddie and Beth Baron (eds), Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting
Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991),
pp. 74–98.
29. See, for example, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Saqi Books, 1998); Ze’ev Maghen, Virtues of the Flesh:
Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
2005); and Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in
the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006).
30. See, for example, Michael Dols, Majnūn: The Madman in Medieval Islamic
Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Nicholas Mirzoeff,
‘Framed: The Deaf in the Harem’, in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla
(eds), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and
Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 49–77;
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, ‘The Historical Study of Disability in Modern
Iran’, Iranian Studies 43.2 (2010), pp. 167–95; Boaz Shoshan, ‘The State
and Madness in Medieval Islam’, IJMES 35 (2003), pp. 329–40; Sara
Scalenghe, The Body Different: Disability in the Middle East, 1500–1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); M. Miles, ‘Signing
in the Seraglio: Mutes, Dwarfs and Jestures at the Ottoman Court 1500–
1700’, Disability and Society 15 (2000), pp. 115–34; and J. W. Frembgen,
‘Honour, Shame, and Bodily Mutilation: Cutting Off the Nose Among Tribal
Societies in Pakistan’, JRAS 16 (2006), pp. 243–60.
31. Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of
Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 178.
32. Orit Shamir and Alisa Baginski, ‘Medieval Mediterranean Textiles,
Basketry, and Cordage Newly Excavated in Israel’, in Yaacov Lev (ed.),
Towns and Material Culture in the Medieval Middle East (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 2002), p. 152. Also of interest is Piers Mitchell’s publication on
syphilis in Mamluk Palestine: ‘Pre-Columbian Treponemal Disease from
14th-Century AD Safed, Israel, and Implications for the Medieval Eastern
Mediterranean’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121.2 (2003),
pp. 117–24.
33. Stephan H. Stephan, ‘Lunacy in Palestinian Folklore’, Journal of the
Palestine Oriental Society 5 (1925), pp. 1–16, esp. pp. 2–3.
34. Azraq can also mean ‘blind’, ‘ill-omened’, or ‘deceitful’, but because
Ibn ʿAdī had already used blindness as a category, and all the categories
were physical features, the definition of ‘blue-eyed’ makes the most sense
here. For discussions of definitions of azraq, see al-Thaʿālibī, The Laṭāʾif
al-maʿarif of Thaʿālibī: The Book of Curious and Entertaining Information,
trans. C. E. Bosworth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968), p. 93,
fn. 27, and Geert Jan van Gelder, ‘Kitāb al-Burṣān: Al-Jāḥiẓ on Right- and
Lefthandedness’, in Arnim Heinemann et. al. (eds), Al-Jāḥiẓ: A Muslim
Humanist for Our Time (Beirut: Orient-Institut/Würzburg: Ergon Verlag,
19

2009), p. 239, fn. 4. I am also preparing a monograph about blue and green
eyes in medieval Islamdom.
35. Al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-burṣān [1968], p. 7.
36. Jamāl al-Dīn Ibn al-Qiftī (d. 646/1248), Inbāh al-ruwāh ʿalá anbāh al-nuḥāh,
ed. Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl (Cairo: Dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1950), 3:365.
For more on the works of Ibn ʿAdī, see Stefan Leder, Das Korpus al-Haiṯam
ibn ʿAdī (st. 207/822): Herkunft, Überlieferung, Gestalt früher Texte der
aḫbār Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991).
37. Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-muḥabbar (The Book of the Elaborately Ornamented),
ed. Ilse Lichtenstadter (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-maktab al-tijārī li’l-ṭibāʿa wa’l-
nashr, 1942), pp. 296–305.
38. Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-munammaq fī akhbār Quraysh (The Book of
Embellishment: Reports on the Quraysh), ed. Khvurshid Aḥmad Fariq
(Beirut: ʿAlam al-kitāb, 1985), pp. 404–6.
39. Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb al-maʿārif (The Book of Knowledge) (Cairo: s.n., 1882),
p. 194; Kitāb al-maʿārif, ed. Tarwat ʿUkāsha (Cairo: Dār al-maʿārif, 1969),
pp. 578–9.
40. Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb ʿuyūn al-akhbār (The Book of Choice Anecdotes)
(Cairo: Dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1925–30), 4:53–69.
41. (Mā raʾytu aḥad an minhum yaʿrif farq mā bayna l-wakaʿi wa’l-kawaʿi wa-lā
al-ḥanafa min al-fadaʿa, wa-lā al-lamā min al-laṭaʿi.) Ibn Qutayba, Ādab
al-kātib (The Qualifications of the Scribe), ed. M. Grünert (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1900), p. 9.
42. Al-Badrī, Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ fī waṣf al-wujūh al-ṣibāḥ, British Library,
London, England, MS 1423 (add. 23,445), 875/1471, fos 156b and 162b.
43. This work has been frequently misattributed to al-Khawārizmī (d. 383/993),
though the author makes reference therein to his 6th/12th-century contem-
poraries. For a discussion of its authorial attribution, see Geert Jan van
Gelder, ‘Mirror for Princes or Vizor for Viziers: The Twelfth-Century
Arabic Popular Encyclopedia Mufīd al-ʿulūm and Its Relationship with the
Anonymous Persian Baḥr al-fawāʾid’, BSOAS 64.3 (2001), pp. 313–15.
44. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Khawārizmī (misattributed), Kitāb mufīd al-ʿulūm wa-mubīd
al-humūm, ed. ʿAbdallāh b. Ibrāhīm al-Anṣārī (Ṣaydā and Beirut: Manshūrat
al-maktabat al-ʿaṣriyya, 1980), pp. 477–81.
45. Aḥmad b. ʿUmar Ibn Rusta, Kitāb al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa (The Book of Precious
Objects), ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1891), pp. 221–5.
46. Abū al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad Sarī al-Raffā, Al-Muḥibb wa’l-maḥbūb wa’l-
mashmūm wa’l-mashrūb (The Lover, the Beloved, the Scent and the Drink),
ed. Miṣbāḥ Ghalāwinjī (Damascus: Majmaʿ al-lughat al-ʿarabiyya, 1986),
1:91–124. Cited in Thomas Bauer, Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der ara-
bischen Welt des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts: eine literatur- und mentalitäts-
geschichtliche Studie des arabischen Gazal (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1998), pp. 285–7. The Buyid verse is cited in Frédéric Lagrange, ‘The
Obscenity of the Vizier’, in Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi
20

Introduction
(eds), Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of

Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 170.
47. Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, Al-Baṣāʾir wa’l-dhakhāʾir, ed. Wadād al-Qādī
(Beirut: Dār ṣādir, 1988), 6:146.
48. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn al-Jawzī, Talqīḥ fuhūm ahl al-athar fī ʿuyūn al-taʾrīkh
wa’l-siyar (The Inculcation of Knowledge of Hadith Specialists: On the Best
of History and Biographies) (Cairo: Maktabat al-ādāb, 1975), pp. 446–50.
49. Taqī al-Dīn al-Badrī, Al-Durr al-maṣūn, al-musammá bi-Siḥr al-ʿuyūn
(The Hidden Pearl, also known as, The Magic of the Eye), ed. Ṣiddīq ʿAbd
al-Fattāḥ (Cairo: Dār al-shaʿb, 1998), 1:105.
50. Yūsuf Sadān, ‘Risāla fī al-damāma li-Muḥammad b. Ḥamza al-Kūzliḥṣārī
al-Īdīnī wa-mā sabaqahā min muwāqif al-udabāʾ min al-ʿāhāt wa’l-qabḥ’,
al-Karmil 9 (1988), p. 14.
51. Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1968), p. 432.
52. Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, Al-Ḥusn al-ṣarīḥ fī miʾat malīḥ (The Pure Beauty
of 100 Handsome Men), ed. Aḥmad Fawzī Hayb (Damascus: Dār Saʿd
al-Dīn, 2003); al-Badrī, Ghurrat, fos 153a, 156a, 158a, 158b, 160a.
53. Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2010), p. 25.
54. Ibid., p. 27.
21

1
ʿĀhāt in Islamic Thought
Islam is a praxis-orientated religion, meaning that religious devotion

resides in and on the body and is expressed through such bodily acts as
ritualised prayer, fasting, dietary restrictions, modest dress and pilgrimage
to Mecca. With bodies figuring so centrally in Islamic theology, it is essen-
tial for any study of bodies in Islamicate culture to examine how bodies
are presented in the Islamic source-texts of Qur’an and hadith, which
provide the basic narratives about the body which Muslim theologians and
scholars have used in constructing and refining notions of the body and
physical difference.
Included among the approximately 6,000 verses of the Qur’an is a
variety of verses about different types of blights. It is worth mentioning
that, of all the blights, blindness (spiritual and physical) is disproportion-
ately well represented. In addition to forty-eight verses about blindness,
there are also seven on muteness, two on lameness, two about leprosy and
one mention of blue eyes.1 The Qur’anic position on the moral state of
blighted people may be summarised in the following verse: ‘there is no
blame on the blind, nor is there blame on the lame, nor is there blame on
the sick’. Though people with these physical conditions carry no adverse
moral associations, God does not view them as the same as their sighted,
walking, healthy counterparts. ‘The blind and the seeing’, God proclaims,
‘are not alike’.2 They are physically distinct, physically different; and
the Qur’an even addresses the unethical responses to such differences in
1st/7th-century Arabian society. One reads, for example, the Qur’anic sug-
gestion for believers to share meals with the blind, as well as the sighted.3
This particular verse speaks to the tendency among Arabs to avoid eating
with the blind, as many found the experience unsavoury, allegedly
because the blind would touch food in order to identify it.4 Difference
is duly acknowledged as a condition of humanity in the Qur’an, but the
behaviour of believers towards the physically different is regulated, not
the behaviour of the marked. It is incumbent on every Muslim to respond
ethically to human differences.
In the six canonical Sunni hadith collections, one finds more specific
and anecdotal discussions of disability. Marked bodies do appear in Sunni
22

hadith literature, especially as subjects of anecdotes. For instance, certain

accommodations are made for participation of physically disabled people
in rituals, prayers and other religious obligations. But neither Muḥammad
nor his companions ever referred to the ill, disabled or physically marked
as a particular class of people; and the term ʿāha only appears in refer-
ence to blighted crops. Even so, several later hadith-compilers who reor-
ganised reports by topic did insert chapter headings classifying certain
reports as pertaining to dhawī al-ʿāhāt. This consistency in terminology
suggests that chapter headings were transmitted from a common source
or sources. Qāḍī al-ʿIyāḍ’s Al-Shifāʾ (The Cure), al-Nuwayrī’s Nihāyat
al-arab (Wish-Fulfilment), Ibn Ḥabīb al-Ḥalabī’s Al-Najm al-thāqib (The
Piercing Star) and al-Qasṭallānī’s Al-Mawāhib al-laduniyya (The Mystical
Blessings), for instance, are extended works about the Prophet’s physical
characteristics, moral behaviour and divine mission. In each one’s sec-
tions on Prophetic miracles (muʿjizāt), the authors included subsections on
healing sick and physically blighted people. These miracles are contained
in Ibn Mājah’s (d. 273/886 or 887) Sunan, which is one of the six books of
canonical Sunni hadith. Ibn Mājah himself did not use the term ʿāhāt, but
these later compilers did. Qāḍī al-ʿIyāḍ entitled his chapter ‘On healing
the sick and dhawī al-ʿāhāt’, whereas Ibn Ḥabīb named his ‘On the
speech of the dead and of children and on his healing of dhawī al-ʿāhāt’.
Al-Qasṭallānī described his chapter as being about ‘healing dhawī al-ʿāhāt;
raising the dead; the speech of the raised dead; and the speech of young
boys who confirm Muḥammad’s prophethood’.5 Significantly, all three
authors use the same phrase to refer to marked people.
These section headings allow the reader to understand how these indi-
vidual writers constructed the category of the physically blighted. It is
particularly easy with al-Qasṭallānī’s collection, for in his section on the
physically blighted, distinguishing between reports on dhawī al-ʿāhāt and
everything else is not difficult. By reading al-Qasṭallānī’s list, one finds
that demonic possession/mental illness (junūn), blindness and injury to
eyes and thighs constitute ʿāhāt. With Qāḍī al-ʿIyāḍ’s grouping, the dis-
tinction is less distinct, for what is the difference between a sick individual
and one with physical blights? Is there an implicit overlap between the two
categories, making easy separation of the two a fruitless undertaking? In
any case, Qāḍī al-ʿIyāḍ’s list includes the ʿāhāt of al-Qasṭallānī’s list, as
well as head fractures, dropsy, amputated hands, and injuries to the leg,
forearm and throat. Significantly, Muḥammad’s corporeality was central
to healing episodes involving dhawī al-ʿāhāt. After Muḥammad spat on
the afflicted body part, it was healed. In one case, a woman’s mute son
speaks after drinking water that Muḥammad had used to rinse his mouth
23

and wash his hands. Even indirect contact with the body of the Prophet
proved sufficient to cure muteness. The Prophet physically transmitted his
baraka (spiritual wisdom and blessing transmitted from God) through a
bodily fluid to people afflicted with illnesses or blights and thereby cured
them.6 Blighted bodies are always presented to the Prophet as being in
need of fixing or curing. Unlike other Muslim petitioners who visit the
Prophet seeking advice that would restore their spiritual equilibrium,
the spiritual needs of the ahl al-ʿāhāt are apparently fulfilled when their
bodies are ‘normalised’.
Although hadith literature purportedly places Muḥammad in direct
bodily contact with dhawī al-ʿāhāt, perhaps the emphasis on eradicat-
ing their blights stoked fears and misgivings about the people of blights
in the popular Mamluk and early Ottoman imagination. In Al-Maqāṣid
al-ḥasana (Excellent Goals), al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), a Shāfiʿī historian
and hadith specialist, scrutinised proverbs and sayings that held dubious
hadith status in order to determine their authenticity or weakness. One
such hadith reads: ‘Fear the people of blights (Ittaqū dhawī al-ʿāhāt)’.7
Al-Sakhāwī does not know the origins of this saying, but speculates that
it could either be a corruption of al-Shāfi‘ī’s exhortation to ‘Beware the
fair-haired’ or a corruption of the prophetic hadith ‘(There is) no ʿadwā
(no contagious disease is conveyed without Allāh’s permission), . . . nor is
there any Hāmah [protection], nor is there any bad omen in the month of
Safar, and one should run away from the leper as one runs from a lion’.8
The physician and theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350)
interpreted the Prophet’s command to flee the leper as medically sound
advice, as leprosy was transmitted through shared air and physical contact.
Therefore, the Prophet could not have been advocating the social isolation
of lepers, but was trying to protect non-afflicted individuals.9 Al-Sakhāwī
appears to accept a similar justification of the hadith, arguing that, if the
dubious hadith were indeed a distortion of the Prophet’s words, then
running from lepers in fear is the same as fearing the blighted. This trans-
fer of ideas, he reasons, must have been how the command to fear people
with physical blights gained currency as a bona fide hadith. Whatever
the transmutations that resulted in the diffusion of this false hadith, it is
nonetheless significant that the notion had become popularly accepted in
Mamluk Cairo as Muḥammad’s actual words.
What moral and cultural conditions existed to create a space where
such a command could acquire the status of doctrine? Tobin Siebers has
traced the hysteria surrounding the coding of the eye as treacherous in
various cultures and times, finding that, in times of chaos, people tend to
search out
24

the slightest discrepancy in the group in the hope of recognising the powers
of evil. Immediately a mark or blemish that was considered perfectly natural
becomes a sign of the supernatural. It is viewed as being different, even though
it does not change appearance. In other words, the community not only remarks
but marks the accused.10
The criteria for what constitutes a mark or a blemish or an indication of

difference are arbitrarily determined and socially constructed, and the
process of isolating certain physical characteristics as signs of evil is not
particular to Islamicate societies. Even so, there are Islamic traditions that
support the association of ʿāhāt with immorality and avoidance, some of
which have corollaries in Jewish and Christian thought. Al-Sakhāwī does
not mention these sources, which might lend credence to his claim that
‘Fear the people of blights’ was regarded as a true hadith; but they were
likely to have been well known. The devil (iblīs) and the antichrist (dajjāl)
are typically described in hadith and post-formative theological writings
as one-eyed, and Iblīs’s epithet is ‘The One-Eyed’.
Anecdotes about the untrustworthiness of one-eyed people circulated
in 10th/16th-century Cairo. The encyclopaedist al-Ibshīhī related that, one
day, al-Mughīra ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Ḥārith b. Hishām al-Makhzūmī, a
one-eyed Companion of the Prophet, was dispensing food to the poor. A
fellow Arab was watching him from a distance but did not partake in the
feast. When al-Mughīra noticed him, the Arab said: ‘Your food looks deli-
cious, but I am afraid of your eye’. When al-Mughīra asked him to explain
his feelings, he replied that al-Mughīra and al-Dajjāl have only one eye.
An observer commented to the Arab that al-Mughīra lost his eye in battle
while defeating the Byzantines, to which he responded: ‘Truly, al-Dajjāl
would not have lost his eye fighting for the cause of Allah’!11 He finally
deduced that al-Mughīra could not be the antichrist. In Muslim eschatol-
ogy, al-Dajjāl will appear at the end of times to lead obedient Muslims
astray. Only Jesus the Messiah will be able to defeat him; and, once he
does, a forty-year period of peace will prevail on earth before the Day of
Judgement. Al-Dajjāl will be identified by the word ‘unbelief’ etched into
his forehead, by his obesity and by blindness in one of his eyes.12 Partial
blindness has linguistic associations with the concept of deficiency and
moral connotations of evil. The Arabic term for ‘one-eyed’ or ‘blind in
one eye’ (aʿwar) shares a triliteral root with the words ʿawār (blemish)
and ʿawra (genitalia, women or women’s voices). Shame and deficiency
are common to all three words; and, according to Abdelwahab Bouhdiba,
this connection probably pre-dated Islam: ‘From pre-Islamic times Arab
society, like many others, was ill disposed towards the one-eyed, who were
25

supposed to bring misfortune . . . The one-eyed is the half-condemned.’13

Other undesirable characteristics are frequently ascribed to Iblīs and
al-Dajjāl, like black skin and slitted eyes, which altogether may have fed
into the popular belief that the hadith which al-Sakhāwī was investigating
was indeed sound.
Imām al-Shāfiʿī and Blighted Bodies

Why would al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), the eponymous founder of a Sunni
school of legal thought, have commanded his followers to beware the
fair-haired, and how significant was such an idea to Shāfiʿī jurisprudence?
These questions take on greater urgency in light of the fact that, of the six
scholars featured in this book, five are identified as followers of the Shāfiʿī
school. The other two, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī and Ibn Ṭūlūn, were Ḥanbalīs
from Damascus. This section’s focus is not to suggest that Aḥmad b.
Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) never discussed blighted bodies. In fact, he married
his cousin Rayḥāna, a smart, one-eyed woman, and rejected her less intel-
ligent, though quite beautiful, sister as a marriage partner.14 Inner qualities
of beauty prevailed over considerations of physical beauty, and this choice
confirmed for his followers his deep commitment to a pious lifestyle.
However, no biographies or hagiographies mention any comments he ever
made about physiognomy or disability.
As for al-Shāfiʿī, it is known that his interest in theology and law devel-
oped later in life. As a young man, archery, medicine (ṭibb) and physiog-
nomy (firāsa) captured his interest most strongly. His poetry dīwān even
includes the following homoerotic couplet about physical recovery from
illness. It is distinguished by its inversion of the common literary trope
of a lover made sick by his love for a whole and healthy beloved and the
circularity of illness and sound health.
When my love fell ill, I visited him.
Then I fell ill from being around him.
So my beloved came to visit me,
And his gaze upon me cured me.15
Al-Shāfiʿī’s interests infused many aspects of his intellectual life. He

even went to Yemen in search of books on physiognomy. No descriptions
of his physique have been transmitted, though al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111)
did describe him as physically unattractive.16 The centrality of theol-
ogy and medicine to al-Shāfiʿī is reflected in the maxim ‘Knowledge is
twofold: knowledge of the body and knowledge of religion’, which has
been frequently attributed to the Prophet; but, according to al-Dhahabī
26

(d. 748/1348) and al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), themselves both Shāfiʿīs,

al-Shāfiʿī actually spoke these words. Ibn Abī Uṣaybīʿa (d. 668/1269 or
1270) wrote without attribution in his biographical dictionary on physi-
cians that ‘knowledge of bodies has become linked with knowledge of
religion’ (jaʿala ʿilm al-abdān qarīnan li-ʿilm al-adyān),17 which is
perhaps a corruption of the aforementioned maxim or even a reference
to the specialised study of prophetic medicine (al-ṭibb al-nabawī). Also,
followers of al-Shāfiʿī have noted the resemblance between his name and
al-Shāfiʿ, which is one of God’s names and means ‘The Curer’.
Al-Bayhaqī (d. 458/1065 or 1066), one of the earliest compilers of
al-Shāfiʿī’s teachings, reported that Ḥarmala b. Yaḥyá (d. 243/857) heard
al-Shāfiʿī urge his followers to
beware the one-eyed, the cross-eyed, the lame, the hunchback, the fair-haired,
the thin-bearded and anyone with a blight (ʿāha) on his body. And anyone who
diminishes creation, beware of him, for he is a friend of controversy, and his
behaviour is distressing. And he repeated, ‘Truly, he is a friend of deception’.18
Identifying an entire group of people as deceptive, controversial and dis-

tressing marks their characters as fundamentally counter to shariʿa ideals.
Some of these conditions could not be altered or reversed, so a one-eyed
person, for instance, is condemned for life to being morally compromised
and marked as an object of apprehension. Unlike people with moral fail-
ings who can change their attitudes and actions to accord with Islamic
ideals, blighted people are condemned by their own bodies and have no
hope for moral redemption.
To continue with al-Shāfiʿī’s musings on blightedness, he also offered
pronouncements and anecdotes about physiognomy and afflictions,
including two variations of an anecdote about the fair-haired. In the first
story, a man approached al-Shāfiʿī with some perfume that he had pur-
chased and began to describe it to him. Al-Shāfiʿī asked him from whom
he had bought the perfume, and the man replied: ‘From a fair-haired man’.
Al-Shāfiʿī responded: ‘Return it to him. Nothing good has ever come to
me from a fair-haired man.’ His reaction is deeply personal. His own
experience has taught him not to expect good from this particular group,
and by universalising his experience he acquires the authority to order his
followers to steer clear of them. In the second version, al-Shāfiʿī asked the
man if he had bought the perfume from a thin-bearded, fair-haired man,
and when the man responded yes, he ordered him to return the perfume.19
This particular version excludes the personal dimension, though repeating
the same sentiments. Full beards were, and are still today, signs of mas-
culinity and virility in the Islamicate world, so much so that sparse facial
27

hair came to be seen as a physical defect. Fair hair may refer to Persian,
Slavic or Turkish identity.
Al-Shāfiʿī’s attribution of moral deficiencies and behavioural difficul-
ties to the entire category of ahl al-ʿāhāt represents a sweeping judgement
that, on the face of it, contradicts Islamic doctrine that moral failings
inhere in no individual. This seeming disconnect between al-Shāfiʿī’s
pronouncements and Islamic doctrine does not seem to have affected
his theology or jurisprudence. Islam does not admit to the doctrine of
‘original sin’, and many of Muḥammad’s companions were among the
ahl al-ʿāhāt, as shown in the Introduction; but certain Qur’anic verses can
be interpreted in support of al-Shāfiʿī’s ideas. Qur’an 40: 58 reads: ‘And
the blind and the seeing are not alike, nor those who believe and do good
and the evildoers’; and, if ‘the blind and the seeing’ refer to the physi-
ologically unsighted and sighted, then al-Shāfiʿī’s interpretation becomes
possible. The sighted and unsighted represent polar opposites in terms of
physical ability, just as the believer and evildoer represent dichotomous
spiritual orientations. Could al-Shāfiʿī have understood this verse to
suggest that moral and physical extremes are related? Neither al-Shāfiʿī
nor his followers and companions offer explanations for the numerous
negative judgements he made regarding a variety of physical attributes,
but such readings of the Qur’an as this one allow for conclusions such as
those at which al-Shāfiʿī arrived. He believed that different characteristics
augured different moral connotations. Perhaps tellingly, Ibn Abī Hātim
al-Rāzī conspicuously omitted al-Shāfiʿī’s disciple al-Rabīʿ b. Sulayman
al-Jīzī (d. 256/870) who may have been lame, from his biography. Other
biographers tried to associate al-Jīzī with Mālik b. Anas.20
The invisible blight of mental illness/demon possession (junūn) was
also construed as a reflection of one’s moral standing. Al-Shāfiʿī defined
majnūn as the opposite of rightly guided (rashīd).21 Al-Shāfiʿī drew links
between physiognomic traits and intelligence, once remarking: ‘I have
only ever seen one smart fat man’.22 Linking weight to intellect appears
to have been a rare connection, as most early Islamic sources were
ambiguous about the topic, leading one modern historian to declare that
‘it remains open to debate if the quality of corpulence implied in early and
classical Islam is a positive or negative attitude’.23 However, in terms of
physical aesthetics, plump women were generally considered desirable.24
In the same chapter on physiognomy, al-Shāfiʿī pronounced that ‘there
is no good in Abyssinia. When Abyssinians are hungry, they steal. When
they have enough to eat, they drink and fornicate.’25 Such negative opin-
ions about Ethiopians were sufficiently widespread in al-Shāfiʿī’s time that
al-Jāḥiẓ, a 3rd/9th-century writer who is thought to have been of African
28

descent (the evidence is inconsistent), penned a work extolling the virtues

of Ethiopians.26 The two men had met each other, but al-Jāḥiẓ gives no
indication in this text that al-Shāfiʿī influenced his choice of topic. If the
following exchange did, in fact, take place, then it must have been a very
early meeting between these two scholars who had demonstrable interests
in physiognomy and physical difference. Al-Jāḥiẓ encountered al-Shāfiʿī
upon entering a mosque in Baghdad and reportedly asked him: ‘What can
you say about a castrated man?’ Al-Shāfiʿī responded: ‘Have you seen
him, just as I’m looking at you now, Abū ʿUthmān (al-Jāḥiẓ)?’27 In other
words, al-Shāfiʿī had nothing to say because he could not identify a cas-
trated man by casual sight; he could only speak to traits visible through
ordinary social interactions.
Al-Ibshīhī, a Cairene writer who studied with and later taught many
Shāfiʿī scholars, echoed a similar sentiment in the eightieth chapter of his
encyclopaedia. He terminated a section on ‘illnesses like halitosis, lame-
ness, blindness, deafness, ophthalmia and paralysis’ with a supplication:
‘O God, by your mercy, grace and magnanimity, may you keep us from
the evil of blights (sharr al-ʿāhāt)! Amen.’28 In spite of this dramatic
and negative closing, the section itself incorporates anecdotes and poems
that showcase humorous and negative associations with blighted people.
While the precise route of transmission of al-Ibshīhī’s knowledge is not
known, he is closely linked with Shāfiʿī circles of learning. In fact, one of
his students was Taqī al-Dīn b. Fahd al-Makkī, the great-grandfather of
our historian Jār Allāh who in his 950/1543 treatise on physically marked
hadith specialists quoted al-Shāfiʿī as saying ‘Beware the fair-haired,
blue-eyed’.29 This citation in a 10th/16th-century biographical work
explicitly demonstrates the transhistorical significance in Muslim contexts
of al-Shāfiʿī’s teachings on physiognomy in the Muslim world.
The Prophet Muḥammad’s Body

Within Arabic and Persian Islamic literatures, extensive archives of mate-
rial exist about the bodies of Muslim prophets, particularly Muḥammad.
In early modern Persianate and Shiʿi visual arts, prophets were commonly
depicted with their faces and hands exposed, unlike the practice in Arab–
Sunni contexts of veiling or blanching out the faces of prophets.30 The
quality and quantity of information about Muḥammad’s physical appear-
ance and behaviour far exceed what is available for earlier prophets. The
written material is sufficiently vast that the genre is referred to as shamāʾil
literature. Al-Tirmidhī compiled the first major collection of hadith that
dealt specifically with the behaviour and physical characteristics of the
29

Prophet. The resulting work, Al-Shamāʾil al-muḥammadiyya, includes an

entire chapter devoted to the seal of prophethood. The earliest descrip-
tion of Muḥammad is found in this work and has become one of the most
authoritative and definitive ones for Muslims. Related by ʿAlī b. Abī
Ṭālib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, it offers little subjective evalu-
ation of Muḥammad’s form. ʿAlī is almost matter-of-factly descriptive in
the following narrative:
The Prophet was neither tall nor short; the fingers and the toes were thick, the
head was large, the joints were broad and a long thin line of hair stretched from
the chest to the navel. While walking he used to bend forward as if he was
descending from a higher level to a lower. I have never known the like of him
before or since.31
Other companions and contemporaries of the Prophet were more forth-
coming in their praise of him. Barāʾ b. ʿĀzib (d. 72/691 or 692) said: ‘I
have never seen anything more beautiful than the Prophet’, and Jābir b.
Samura (d. 74/693) affirmed that ‘he certainly appeared to me to be more
beautiful than the moon itself’.32 Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 68/688) declared that
‘when he conversed it seemed as if light was coming out of the two front
teeth’.33 These descriptions came to represent the ideal male body, one
that was perfectly marked with the seal of the prophets. His name was
sometimes identified with the perfect, presumably unsexed, human body.
Of the various properties attributed to the name Muḥammad,
al-Qasṭallānī mentions one that inscribes the human body in the graphic
form of his name. The name in Arabic is written thus: ‫ﻣﺤﻤﺪ‬, and
al-Qasṭallānī notes that
Among all that God has honoured is the human being, whose form resembles
the writing of this word (Muḥammad). The first ‫ ﻡ‬is his head; the ‫ ﺡ‬is his two
sides; the ‫ ﻡ‬is his navel; and the ‫ ﺩ‬is his two legs. And it is said that whoever
deserves to enter the hellfires will not, except for the deformed of body, out of
respect for (the perfection of) the form of the word (Muḥammad).34
Those who are ‘deformed of body’ are subject to a different set of rules
governing their eternal fate. They will not be spared God’s wrath and
will consequently spend the afterlife suffering in hell if their lives have
warranted such a punishment. Ibn Marzūq al-Ṭilimsanī (d. 766/1364)
related this tale before him, and others like al-Ḥallāj (d. 309/922) and Ibn
ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) recorded their own versions of the symbolism of
Muḥammad’s name.35
Muʿtazilī theologians in medieval Baghdad also contemplated the
ways in which bodily marks functioned in terms of religious identifica-
tion. Al-Muʿāfā al-Jarīrī (d. 390/1000) summarised a theological debate
30

among Muʿtazilī scholars who disputed whether religious men could legiti-
mately perform miracles or whether all claims to miraculous works after
the Prophet’s death necessarily came from charlatans and false prophets.
Ultimately, they determined that, although the visible blight (ʿāha ẓāhira)
of having one blind eye is al-Dajjāl’s distinguishing physical sign, half-
blindness is not a universal mark of evil. After all, many good-hearted
people share this trait with al-Dajjāl. As such, false and true prophets cannot
be distinguished by particular physiognomic marks. ‘As for prophethood,
the true prophet is he who is called to prophethood, and the false one is he
who lies about his claims to it. These two types are the same in physiog-
nomy (khilqa), form and the human body.’36 The outer surfaces of the body
provide no evidence of the authenticity of one’s claims to prophethood,
which is a novel reading of the outward (ẓāhir) reflecting the (bāṭin).
Muḥammad was said to have a singular marking on his body that
marked him as a prophet. Though no sources describe it as a blight, hagi-
ographers depict it as something that arose through an angelic intervention
that split his body open. Ibn Isḥāq (d. between 150/767 and 153/770), the
Prophet’s earliest biographer, reported that Muḥammad had his belly split
open by two angels, corroborating God’s statement in Qur’an 94: 1: ‘Have
We not opened up your heart and lifted from you the burden that had
weighed so heavily upon your back?’ Al-Ṭabarī, al-Qasṭallānī and other
later authors have also transmitted this story with slight variations. Related
in Muḥammad’s voice, it unfolds as follows:
One day while I was in a wide plain in Mecca, two angels appeared to me. One
of them fell to the earth, and the other hovered between the earth and sky. One
asked the other, ‘Is this the one?’, to which he replied, ‘This is he’. Then
the first angel commanded the second one to rip open my belly and take out
the heart. The angel cleansed the heart of Satan’s influence, then performed the
ritual cleansing on both the heart and belly. Next, the first angel commanded
the second angel to sew me back up, and the seal (khātim) of prophethood
appeared between my shoulder blades just after this incident.37
Once the cleansing was complete and his torso sewn up, the seal mate-
rialised on his body, symbolising the unification or completion of the
Abrahamic prophetic tradition. For Muslims, Islam represents a seamless
continuation of Judaism and Christianity, not a reactionary belief system
against them. In Qur’an 33: 40, Muḥammad is described as the seal of the
prophets (khātim [or khātam] al-nabiyyīn); and hadiths and literature on
shamāʾil (physical and abstract characteristics of Muḥammad) elaborate
on this characterisation. In a tradition narrated by ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, he
is the final messenger of God who bears on his body the seal or mark
31

of prophethood (khātim al-nubuwwa) – a raised disc of skin the size of

a pigeon’s egg located between his shoulder blades.38 The term khātim
can mean ‘stopper’ or ‘authenticating mark’, and there was considerable
debate among medieval theologians about how to understand the use of
this word in the Qur’an.39 If we are to interpret this term as a mark of
prophethood, then the alignment of prophethood with physically distin-
guishing characteristics added new dimensions to discussions of physical
difference.
Conclusion
The interrelatedness of body aesthetics, piety and physical difference
emerged in the Islamic source-texts and in biographical and hagiographi-
cal writings about Imām al-Shāfiʿī. In the predominantly Shāfiʿī envi-
ronments of Mamluk and Ottoman Arab territories, such a focus carried
weight in these milieus. Imām al-Shāfiʿī’s suggestion that ‘anyone with
an ʿāha on his body’ is prone to certain negative behaviours reinforced
existing associations between physical difference and moral behaviour in
the 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries. Such notions certainly cropped up in
religious, literary and historical works of the late Mamluk era. Competing
representations of and reactions to physical difference (such as praise
for the pious, one-eyed Companion of the Prophet Abū Sufyān and con-
demnation of the one-eyed antichrist al-Dajjāl) circulated in juridical
and religious sources, exposing the capacities of Mamluk subjects for
tolerance and anxiety towards a single form of difference. In spite of this
dichotomous range of moral associations with blighted people, numerous
sources of Shāfiʿī jurisprudence reveal negative depictions of individuals
with marked bodies, informing social and theological conceptions of the
body and difference in the Arab world.
Notes
1. For blindness, see Qur’an 5: 71; 6: 154; 11: 28; 22: 46; 27: 66; 28: 66; 41: 17,
44; 47: 23 and so on. For muteness, 2: 17–18; 2: 171; 16: 76; 6: 39; 8: 22; 17:
97. For lameness, 24: 61 and 48: 17. For leprosy, 3: 49 and 5: 110. For blue
eyes, 20: 102. A more detailed analysis of disability terminology and sym-
bolism in the Qur’an can be found in Maysaa S. Bazna and Tarek A. Hatab,
‘Disability in the Qur’an: The Islamic Alternative to Defining, Viewing,
and Relating to Disability’, Journal of Religion, Disability and Health 9.1
(2005), pp. 5–27.
2. Qur’an 48: 17; 35: 19; 40: 58. Sometimes when blindness is evoked in the
32

Qur’an, a metaphorical, spiritual blindness is meant, so this last verse could

alternatively be interpreted as a statement about humans’ moral states.
3. Qur’an 24: 61.
4. See Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273), Al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām
al-Qurʾān (Cairo: Dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī li-ṭibāʿa wa-nashr, 1967), 12:312–
19.
5. Qāḍī al-ʿĪyāḍ (d. 544/1149), Al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafá, ed.
ʿAlī Muḥammad al-Bajāwī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat ʿĪsa al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī,
1977), 1:451; Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī
(d. 732/1332), Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat dār
al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1923), 18:331–3; Badr al-Dīn al-Ḥasan Ibn Ḥabīb
al-Ḥalabī (d. 779/1377), Al-Najm al-thāqib fī ashraf al-manāqib, ed.
Muṣṭafā Muḥammad Ḥusayn al-Dhahabī (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 1996),
p. 100; Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Qasṭallānī (d. 923/1517), Al-Mawāhib
al-laduniyya bi’l-minaḥ al-muḥammadiyya, ed. Ṣāliḥ Aḥmad al-Shāmī
(Beirut: Al-Maktab al-islāmī, 1991), 2:577.
6. There have also been reports of the Prophet’s baraka being transmitted in
dreams. In Mecca, a pious woman named al-Muwaffaqa (d. 634/1236 or
1237) was cured of her lameness after dreaming that the Prophet took her
hand and made her walk. For her tomb inscription, see Marco Schöller,
The Living and the Dead in Islam: Studies in Arabic Epitaphs (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2004), 2:489–90.
7. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sakhāwī, Al-Maqāṣid al-ḥasana fī bayān
kathīr min al-aḥādīth al-mushtahirat al-alsinah (Egypt: Maktabat al-khānijī,
1956), p. 18.
8. Muḥammad b. Ismāʾīl al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: The Translation of the
Meanings of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, trans. Muḥammad Muḥsin Khān (Beirut: Dār
al-ʿarabiyya, 1985), 7:409.
9. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Medicine of the Prophet, trans. Penelope Johnstone
(Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1998), p. 113.
10. Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1983), p. 21.
11. Shihāb al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Ibshīhī (d. 850/1446), Mustaṭraf
fī kull fann mustaẓraf (The Most Fascinating Topics from Every Elegant
Art), ed. Muṣṭafá Muḥammad al-Dhahabī (Cairo: Dār al-ḥadīth, 2000),
p. 643. Al-Mughīra is identified as a one-eyed noble in Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb
al-Muḥabbar, p. 303.
12. In many medieval Christian European texts, the antichrist is described as
possessing unusual physiognomic traits. See Bernard McGinn, ‘Portraying
Antichrist in the Middle Ages’, in W. Verbeke et al. (eds), The Use and
Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages (Leuven: Leuven University Press,
1988), pp. 1–13.
13. Bouhdiba, Sexuality, p. 62.
14. Christopher Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Oxford: OneWorld Publications,
33

2006), p. 5. Because none of the scholars in this study belonged to the Mālikī
or Ḥanafī schools, my analysis will focus on the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī schools.
15. Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, Dīwān al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, ed. Imīl Badīʿ
Yaʿqūb (Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1991), p. 115. Al-Badrī cites another
version of this poem, the second verse of which reads ‘When my beloved was
cured, he visited me, / And his gaze upon me cured me’. See his Ghurrat, fo.
162b.
16. Carole Hillenbrand, ‘Aspects of al-Ghazali’s Views on Beauty’, in Alma
Giese and J. Bürgel (eds), Gott ist schön und Er liebt die Schönheit:
Festschrift für Annemarie Schimmel zum 7. April 1992 (Bern and New York:
Peter Lang, 1994), p. 256.
17. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, Kitāb ʿuyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbaʾ (Choicest
News about the Classes of Physicians), ed. Umruʾ al-Qays b. al-Ṭaḥḥān
(Egypt: Maṭbaʿat al-wahbiyya, 1882), p. 2. Michael Cooperson trans-
lates ʿilm al-abdān as ‘knowledge of bodily ailments’ in Classical Arabic
Biography: The Heirs of the Prophet in the Age of al-Maʾmūn (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 16.
18. Al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib, 2:132. Similar versions of this story are recorded in
Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 327/938), Ādāb al-Shāfiʿī (Manners of al-Shāfiʿī),
ed. ʿAbd al-Ghānī ʿAbd al-Khāliq (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1953),
pp. 131–2, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), Manāqib al-Shāfiʿī
(Egypt: Al-Maktabat al-ʿalāmiyya, 1862), p. 121. Al-Sakhāwī listed more
than thirty authors, including Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, who penned works
in the manāqib al-Shāfiʿī genre. See his Al-Jawāhir waʾl-durar fī tarjama
Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Ḥajar (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1999), 3:1,258–9.
Al-Rūmī, in his own hadith collection, transmitted a variant of the warning
against those who diminish creation: ‘Every defect is cursed’. See Mihran
Afshārī and Mahdī Madāyanī, Chahārdeh risāleh dar bāb-e futuvvat-o aṣnaf
(Tehran: Chashmah, 2002), p. 89. I am grateful to Kathryn Babayan of the
University of Michigan for this last reference.
19. Al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib, pp. 132–3.
20. R. Kevin Jacques, ‘The Other Rabīʿ: Biographical Traditions and the
Development of Early Shāfiʿī Authority’, Islamic Law and Society 14.2
(2007), pp. 152–3.
21. Dols, Majnūn, p. 436.
22. Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī, Ādāb, p. 132. The editor identifies this man as one
Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan.
23. John Nawas, ‘A Profile of the ʿmawālī ulamaʾ’, in Monique Bernards and
John Nawas (eds), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), p. 472, fn. 15.
24. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Beauty in Arabic Culture (Princeton: Markus
Wiener, 1999), pp. 56–65.
25. Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī, Ādāb, p. 135.
26. Ethnic tensions may have been exacerbated by the rebellion of African slaves
34

working the Basran marshlands, which lasted from 259/869 to 265/882. For
more on this rebellion, see Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African
Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1998).
For a review of medieval and early modern Arabic- and Turkish-language
refutations of anti-Ethiopian prejudice, see Baki Tezcan, ‘Dispelling the
Darkness: The Politics of “Race” in the Early Seventeenth-Century Ottoman
Empire in the Light of the Life and Work of Mullah Ali’, International
Journal of Turkish Studies 13.1 (2007), pp. 85–95. The Iraq War has raised
popular interest in the contemporary situation of Africans in Iraq, for which
see Theola Labbé, ‘A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight’, Washington Post, 11
January 2004, p. A01; and Ann M. Simmons, ‘Back to Africa, from Iraq’,
Los Angeles Times, 14 January 2004, pp. A1 and A14.
27. Al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib, p. 135.
28. Al-Ibshīhī, Mustaṭraf, p. 644.
29. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat al-ẓirāf fī al-mawʾiẓa bi dhawī
al-ʿāhāt min al-ashrāf (Charming Anecdotes: An Admonition of
Descendants of the Prophet with ʿĀhāt), Chester Beatty Library, Dublin,
Ireland, AH950/1543 CE, MS 3838, fo. 5a.
30. Wijdan Ali, ‘From the Literal to the Spiritual: The Development of the
Prophet Muḥammad’s Portrayal from 13th-Century Ilkhanid Miniatures to
17th-Century Ottoman Art’, Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 4 (2001),
pp. 1–24; Raya Y. Shani, ‘Noah’s Ark and the Ship of Faith in Persian
Painting: From the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth-Century’, JSAI 27 (2002), pp.
127–203; Oleg Grabar and Mika Natif, ‘The Story of Portraits of the Prophet
Muḥammad’, SI 96 (2004), pp. 19–38 + 4 plates.
31. Hidayet Hosain, ‘Translation of Ash-Shamaʾil of Tirmizi’, Islamic Culture 7
(July 1933), p. 398.
32. Ibid., pp. 398, 400.
33. Ibid., p. 401.
34. Al-Qasṭallānī, Al-Mawāhib, 2:25.
35. Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration
of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985), p. 115.
36. Muʿāfá b. Zakariyyā al-Jarīrī, Al-Jalīs al-ṣāliḥ al-kāfī wa’l-anīs al-nāṣiḥ
al-shāfī, ed. Muḥammad Mursī Khawlī (Beirut: ʿĀlam al-kutub, 1987),
3:316.
37. Ibn Hishām, The Life of Muḥammad: A Translation of Isḥāq’s Sīrat Rasūl
Allāh, trans. A. Guillaume (Lahore and Karachi: Oxford University Press,
1967), p. 72; al-Qasṭallānī, Al-Mawāhib, 1:166.
38. Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī, Al-Shamāʾil al-muḥammadiyya, ed.
Muḥammad ʿAwwāma (Medina: s.n., 2001), p. 88.
39. Chase F. Robinson, ‘Neck-Sealing in Early Islam’, JESHO 48.3 (2005),
p. 402, fn. 2; Yohanan Friedmann, ‘Finality of Prophethood in Sunnī Islām’,
JSAI 7 (1986), pp. 180ff.
35

2
Literary Networks in Mamluk Cairo
The English term ‘disability’ focuses on physical and cognitive perform-

ance and productivity – what the body can or cannot do. The equivalent
classical Arabic term ʿāha literally means ‘blight’ or ‘damage’, and it can
refer to objects both inanimate (crops, trees) and animate (human and non-
human animals). The category of blightedness certainly encompasses ‘dis-
ability’, but incorporates aesthetics and character. Blights disrupt beauty
and can constitute character flaws. Like ‘disability’ or ‘handicap’ today,
the meaning of blightedness was changing and performing new work in
culture throughout the Islamicate Middle Ages. For instance, from the 8th
to the 13th centuries, blue eyes were included with such impairments as
blindness, deafness and paralysis on Arabic-language lists of people with
physical defects; and, as early as the 9th century, Arab poets wrote erotic
verses to individuals with such physical blights as blue eyes, crossed eyes
and ophthalmia. The earliest negative mention of blue or green eyes in the
Islamic period is preserved in Qur’an 20: 102, which reads: ‘the day when
the trumpet is blown, and on that day We will gather the guilty, blue-eyed
[zurqan]’.1 (This is the lone mention of blue eyes in the Qur’an.) Blue
eyes were extraordinary physical traits among Arabs, marking blue-eyed
people as physically and, in this context, morally other. The Prophet, for
instance, reportedly had deep black eyes. Al-Thaʿālibī (d. 873/1468), a
Mālikī theologian from North Africa, summarised the two most common
interpretations of the term zurq in the Qur’an. The first explanation, which
was also supported by Muḥammad’s cousin Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 68/688), pur-
ports that the people to be gathered are those who have black skin and blue
eyes, for these traits are ugly. After being assembled, they will then be
blinded. A second interpretation is that people with blue complexions are
extraordinarily ugly, because their skin is the colour of ashes (ramād). ‘It is
official in the speech of the Arabs that this [ashen] colour is called azraq.’2
Another observer, al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480), indicated in his commentary on
this verse that zurq referred to people with blue eyes and bodies, meaning
that they were once beautiful and then their bodies changed.3
In the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, blue eyes still
retained their associations with aberration and difference. For instance,
36

Andreas Tietze translated Muṣṭafā ʿAlī’s description of a man in 1599

Cairo as ‘a young lad on horseback his head wrapped, thick-lipped, with
churlish feet, with boorish claws, with sores on his cheeks and wounds
on his back, mis-shapen and ugly, when he opens his mouth resembling
a blue-eyed (?) ogre’.4 In a litany of terms signifying physical unattrac-
tiveness and disgusting mien, the inclusion of blue eyes as a category
of ugliness confounded Tietze, who seems to have perceived blue eyes
positively, leading him to question his reading or the copyist’s accuracy.
In a reversal of norms, Arab writers of the 9th/15th and 10th/16th
centuries produced male homoerotic verses to blighted beloveds. One
such author, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, not only penned romantic poetry for
male and female beloveds but was also physically and intellectually trans-
formed and marked by a drug overdose. In his work and life, one finds the
emergence of an alternative vision of dignity and desirability that gives
new dimension to everyday life, love, courtship and friendship.
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī

Medieval Arab names incorporate histories of paternal descent, migra-
tion, tribal affiliation and religious identification. The full name of this
chapter’s main subject is Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī
b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Ḥijāzī al-Anṣārī al-Khazrajī al-Saʿdī al-ʿUbādī
al-Qāhirī al-Shāfiʿī. His given name is Aḥmad, and his honorific is Shihāb
al-Dīn, which means ‘shooting star of the faith’. His father’s name was
Muḥammad, his paternal grandfather was ʿAlī, and his paternal great-
grandfather was named Ḥasan.5 Al-Ḥijāzī also claimed descent from the
Khazrajī tribe, one of the two Medinan clans that welcomed Muḥammad
and his followers into the city after they had departed from Mecca. The
two tribes later merged and became collectively known as the Anṣār, or
helpers. Al-Ḥijāzī’s name also indicates that he claimed Cairo as his home
and that he was an adherent of the Shāfiʿī legal school, which was the
majority legal group in northern Egypt before the arrival of the Ottomans
in 922/1517, after which time the Ḥanafī school came to predominate.
So, al-Ḥijāzī’s name gives information on formal aspects of his identity
that would have been intelligible to anyone with knowledge of Arabic in
Mamluk Cairo, but tells little about how he functioned within the specific
social and cultural environments there.
The year of al-Ḥijāzī’s birth, 790/1388, was an eventful time in Cairo.
Chroniclers recorded widespread pestilence, extreme weather patterns
and an imperial project to remove poor and disabled people from the
streets of Cairo. In Rabīʿ I/March 1388, high winds blew through Egypt,
37

stirring up so much dirt and sand that women walking in the streets were
nearly blinded. Sound ophthalmic health was a rare physical condition in
Mamluk Cairo. The soundness of one’s body and one’s health emerges
as salient preoccupations in travel writing and in the chronicles of native
Egyptians, reflecting to some degree the visibility of illness and the
centrality of human bodies in reconstructing cityscapes for an audience.
A fierce plague also struck Egypt in this month and lasted three full
months, claiming close to 300 victims daily.6 It would have been perceived
as a minor miracle that al-Ḥijāzī’s mother survived the plague to give birth
to her son on 27 Shaʿbān 790/20 August 1388.7 Pregnant women and
young children were considered particularly susceptible to the ravages of
the plague. Al-Maqrīzī attested that, when the plague first struck Cairo in
this year, scholars read portions of religious texts in the city’s mosques in
order to request God’s mercy; and, at one such public reading in al-Azhar,
the audience was composed entirely of children and orphans.8
Plague viruses spread quickly and frequently through the urban centres
of the Mamluk sultanate, usually with devastating effect, though the effects
were less severe than in rural areas. Still, in cities, the disposal of masses
of human remains in a timely manner sometimes proved difficult, thereby
posing threats to public health and sanitation. Were a city’s water supply
to become polluted, the entire urban population would be exposed to the
contagion. Even survivors of earlier plague epidemics did not necessarily
escape unscathed. Children and the elderly were easy victims, though the
virus afflicted all segments of society. Entire families were destroyed or
weakened by the plague, and the plague-afflicted person was a ubiquitous
figure. Those individuals infected with the plague virus may have suffered
from swollen necks, armpits and groins, but were most readily identified
by the characteristic pustules that erupted on their bodies and, if they
survived, could permanently mar their skin or disfigure body parts. The
image of plague affliction was apparently so ubiquitous and recognisable
in 8th/14th-century Mamluk lands that al-Ṣafadī, who himself died of the
plague in Damascus in 764/1363, wrote at least one epigram about a male
beloved who had contracted the plague:
Plague boils (damāmil) broke out on my beloved’s leg,
But far be it for adversity to overshadow his grace.
So I said to our critics, ‘There is nothing new in this, for have you ever seen
The dawn unaccompanied by the bright gleam of morning?’9
These verses capture the mundanity of illness (‘there is nothing new in

this’), while also suggesting that the process of habituating oneself to the
physical effects of disease opens spaces for aestheticising these diseased
38

bodies. And their beauty seems as natural as a sunrise. Just as dawn and
morning are inseparable phases of the day, the beauty of the beloved is
inseparable from grace and thus impervious to blights.
Blighted Bodies on Display in Mamluk Cairo

The devastations of plague certainly affected the perspectives of individu-
als dwelling in Mamluk cities and also led to concerted efforts by sultans
to eradicate these blighted bodies from public urban spaces. Imperial
projects of removing the visible blight of beggars and disabled people
from the urban landscape began before al-Ḥijāzī’s birth and continued
during his lifetime.10 The first Mamluk sultan to initiate such a project of
exclusion was al-Ẓāhir Baybars I, who in 664/1265 or 1266 assembled ahl
al-ʿāhāt in the Khān Sabīl and then ordered their transfer to al-Fayyūm, a
province approximately 80 km south-west of Cairo, where he had estab-
lished a separate living area for them. Although the basic needs of ahl
al-ʿāhāt were provided for, many of them returned to Cairo shortly after
this forced exile.11 The designation of al-Fayyūm, a Coptic Christian oasis
settlement with many monasteries, as a suitable place of exile is never
explained. Perhaps Baybars I thought that the Christian monastic popula-
tion would show greater sympathy to the plight of ahl al-ʿāhāt. Whatever
his reasons, more than half a century later, on 16 Dhū al-Qaʿda 730/31
August 1330, Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad decreed that all lepers (min
al-jadhmāʾ wa’l-burṣān) living in Cairo and Old Cairo must move to an
unspecified location in al-Fayyūm.12 In Shawwāl 794/September 1392,
Sultan al-Ẓāhir Barqūq also ordered all lepers (al-burṣān wa’l-jadhmāʾ)
to leave Cairo and its surrounding areas under penalty of death. The exile
was short-lived, as the lepers were soon invited back to the city.13 None of
the chroniclers speculated on the sultans’ reasons for these forced remov-
als, suggesting that their audiences would have known of wider debates
about the desirability of ahl al-ʿāhāt as a visible social class. In an inter-
esting turn, in Shawwāl 841/April 1438, Sultan al-Ẓāhir Barsbāy ordered
able-bodied mendicants off the streets, leaving only ‘chronically ill, blind
and blighted people’ (al-zamanī wa’l-ʿumyān wa-arbāb al-ʿāhāt) to beg
publicly.14 Ibn Taghrībirdī explained that the sultan’s order was occa-
sioned by the mistreatment of his royal envoy who was distributing alms
to the poor. A crowd of alms-seekers encircled him as he sat on his horse,
and managed to pull him off it. The sultan forced professional beggars off
the streets, leaving only disabled poor to beg in public spaces.15
Official reactions to ahl al-ʿāhāt dovetailed with Mamluk chroni-
clers’ general characterisations of disabled people as socially marginal,
39

undesirable, desperately poor people who may manipulate public good-

will by seeking handouts and alms. (This attitude may have led to judges
and sultans manipulating the category of mental illness by ascribing it
wantonly to those who threatened social order. Boaz Shoshan has dis-
cussed the extent to which ‘mentally ill’ individuals, who were all inciden-
tally embroiled in ‘religious scandals’, in Cairo were ordered by judges or
sultans into hospitals and subjected to harsh curative measures.16) Some
ahl al-ʿāhāt, on the other hand, emerged publicly of their own agency to
seek cures and healing from saints and blessed sites. In Ṣafar 854/March
1450, during the reign of Jaqmaq, a black freedman named Saʿdallāh or
Saʿdān, who was revered for his piety, publicly cursed the ustādār, or
royal majordomo, Zayn al-Dīn Yaḥyá b. ʿAbd al-Razzāq (d. 874/1469),
and accused him of seizing his deceased master’s property.17 Zayn al-Dīn
sent messengers to arrest Saʿdān, but they were unable to approach him,
either through a magical spell or because of physical force. Realising that
he could not subdue his opponent, Zayn al-Dīn returned what he had taken.
Upon learning of Saʿdān’s victory, a group of commoners (al-ʿawāmm)
to whom he had taught piety hurried to ‘visit him and seek his blessing’.18
His defiance of authority and his virtuous reputation made him a living
saint. Al-Sakhāwī described the blessing-seekers as a large mob that
included Turks and women and grew to include local princes, officials
and jurisprudents. Many of the blessing-seekers were ‘chronically ill,
blighted and sick people’.19 Ibn Iyās also recorded this event, but omitted
any descriptions of the crowds that thronged Saʿdān.20 His charismatic
leadership and brave defiance of the Mamluk power structure imbued his
claims of piety with an authority that appealed to a major cross-section
of Cairenes. If figures of piety held particular attractiveness for people
of blights, then histories of cemeteries, shrines and saints’ tombs should
offer windows onto the religious lives of disabled Muslims in the Middle
Ages. The archaeologist Bogdan Zurawski has excavated a 1,300-year-old
Nubian church whose walls bear witness to the disabled and ill pilgrims
who sought succour there. The image of one visitor, a visually impaired
Muslim man who carries a cane and seems to have unsure footing, is
painted on a wall. The painting is captioned in Arabic ‘Ḍayf ʿAlī’, which
means ‘ʿAlī the guest’, suggesting that the visitor arrived after the Muslim
conquest of Egypt in the 2nd/7th century.21
So, it was in this milieu of pestilence, public restrictions on the visibil-
ity of disabled people and, consequently, an acute awareness of marked
bodies that al-Ḥijāzī lived. He was born in 790/1388 – during the reign
of Sultan al-Ẓāhir Barqūq (r. 784–91, 792–801/1382–9, 1390–9) – in
the old Fatimid capital of Cairo near the Baybarsiyya madrasa-khānqāh
40

complex. When al-Ḥijāzī was only seven days old, his father carried
him to holy sites in the city, seeking blessings for his infant son.22 What
little more is known of his early life has been mostly related by friends
and associates. He was born on Yellow Lane (Al-Darb al-aṣfar), a side
street that linked al-Baybarsiyya to Bayn al-Qaṣrayn Street (Shāriʿ Bayn
al-Qaṣrayn), a major thoroughfare reserved for royal processions and
public ceremonies. Amirs and royal women who wanted to construct
visible religious institutions tended to build on streets feeding into Bayn
al-Qaṣrayn Street.23 In 684/1285, Tidhkārbāy Khātūn, the daughter of
Baybars I, built Ribāṭ al-Baghdādiyya, a women’s religious convent,
on Yellow Lane.24 This ribāṭ dominated the street architecturally until
706/1307 or 1308, when the Mamluk amir Baybars al-Jāshankirī (later
known as Baybars II when he became sultan) began construction on the
Baybarsiyya compound. It was finally completed in 709/1310 during his
year-long reign as sultan. The Baybarsiyya was constructed on Festival
Gate Street (Shāriʿ Bāb al-ʿĪd) on the site of the Fatimid palace of
the viziers and consisted of a Sufi lodge, hospice, mausoleum for the
founder and a minaret, and it benefited from considerable funding and
support.25 This institution would remain a significant one in the lives
of Shihāb al-Dīn and his father, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ḥijāzī, a
Qur’an-reciter renowned for ‘the tenderness of his voice and the beauty
of his inflections’.26 Shihāb al-Dīn later became a Qur’an-reciter at
the Baybarsiyya and was recognised as ‘one of the notables in Qur’an
recitation’.27 There, he also delved into the Sufi way of life, eventually
receiving the Sufi cloak from Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nāṣiḥ (d. 804/1402), a
respected Sufi shaykh in Cairo, and learning dhikr from al-Ḥāfī.28 Shihāb
al-Dīn b. Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (773–852/1372–1449), who is most often
recognised for his scholarly contributions to Islamic studies and his posi-
tion as the Shāfiʿī chief justice of Egypt, was intermittently nāẓir (direc-
tor) and grand shaykh of the Baybarsiyya from 813/1410 until his death
thirty-nine years later. At some point during his tenure there, al-Ḥijāzī
heard hadith from this master. They cultivated a close teacher–student
relationship that developed into a friendship based in part on their shared
interests in writing poetry, composing riddles and exchanging personal
letters. Teachers and students often described their relationships in
terms of love, physical attachment and friendship. Although ‘lecturing,
reading, writing, reproducing texts, debating, discipleship, and scholarly
friendship seem so widespread as to be marginal to the interests of social
historians’, analysing friendship invites access to how certain ideas were
communicated. The history of sentiment possesses the potential to make
everyday experience accessible to the historian.29
41

The friendship of these two men endured until Ibn Ḥajar’s death
in 852/1449 following a two-month illness. On this solemn occasion,
al-Ḥijāzī wrote a lengthy, touching eulogy for him, the last of many
expressions of love, sympathy and warmth for his friend and teacher.30
Al-Sakhāwī said that, of the many poets who eulogised Ibn Ḥajar, al-Ḥijāzī
presented the best tribute.31 A crowd of thousands gathered in the rain to
watch the funeral cortege carry Ibn Ḥajar’s bier through the streets of
Cairo to the Qarāfa cemetery, south-east of the city.32 Various scholars and
political dignitaries, including Sultan al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq (r. 842–57/1438–
53), numbered among the elite processioners. After witnessing this event,
the poet Shihāb al-Dīn al-Manṣūrī (d. 887/1482) honoured Ibn Ḥajar with
this couplet: ‘Clouds wept rain on the chief judge, / Demolishing the pillar
strengthened by the stone [ḥajar]’.33 Before this final illness, Ibn Ḥajar
had suffered other setbacks to his health, about which his friends wrote
poems. After he had been cured of ophthalmia (ramad), an ocular inflam-
mation thought to be caused by sand blowing into the eye, al-Ḥijāzī wrote
two verses for him during his convalescence:
You are not embarrassed by ophthalmia and you are not afraid
Of an envious person holding grains of sand.
May God protect you from the enemy’s sand.
Yes, may He turn you from the evil of the eye.34
The date of composition is not mentioned, but Ibn Ḥajar must have suf-
fered from ophthalmia at least twice. The poet al-Shihāb b. Ṣāliḥ also
wrote two poems for Ibn Ḥajar about his ophthalmia, and in the second
one, he mentions that he is writing about a reoccurrence of the affliction.
Ibn Ḥajar’s illness must not have progressed to blindness in either or
both of his eyes, as al-Sakhāwī described him as a man ‘sound of hearing
and sight’.35 Otherwise, he may have been asked to relinquish his post as
supervisor, as Amir Baybars al-Jāshankirī stipulated in the pious endow-
ment deed (waqfiyya) that ‘anyone whose body or clothing contradicted
the perfect and sacred Islamic law’ could not serve as administrator.36
Leonor Fernandes interprets this clause as a restriction on people with
disabilities or blights, among other groups, from assuming these high
positions.37 This stipulation is also curious given the fact that Baybars
deposed al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, a popular sultan whose lameness figured as
a large part of his public image. A song of political support for al-Nāṣir
Muḥammad included the line ‘Bring us the lame one!’ – a reference to the
Egyptian people’s beloved leader. The two men’s contest for the sultanate
was fierce, especially after it was revealed that al-Nāṣir Muḥammad had
plotted to overthrow his rivals in 708/1308, just as Baybars was beginning
42

construction on the Baybarsiyya complex.38 There is insufficient evidence

to conclude that this intense political experience embittered him against
placing physically blighted people in positions of power, though the
timing of these events is suggestive.
Another possible explanation for the inclusion of such language is
the prevalence of disease – particularly ophthalmic disorders – in Egypt.
The visibility of blights made it a particularly salient category in late
Mamluk Cairo. In keeping with the deed’s emphasis on administrators’
possessing ideal bodies, an eye doctor (kaḥḥāl ṭabaʾiʿī) was resident in
the Baybarsiyya.39 Still, in one respect, the deed’s restriction provides
evidence that al-Shāfiʿī’s denigrating remarks against ahl al-ʿāhāt were
accepted as authentic legal doctrine, especially as Shāfiʿīs are the only
ones who fully accept the leadership of a blind imam; Shiʿis, Ḥanbalīs
and Ḥanafīs deem leadership of a blind man reprehensible, and Mālikīs
find the situation acceptable, but not preferable to a sighted imam.40 The
endowment deed specifically invokes Islamic law as the moral system that
forbids blighted people from participating equally in religious offices – not
the Qur’an or sunna.
Although people with certain physical disabilities were prevented from
assuming high positions of power at the Baybarsiyya, the institution’s
charitable care of sick and dependent people resonated with the values
of Ibn Ḥajar and his wife Uns Khātūn. They both took time to tend to
the unwell. Ibn Ḥajar ‘was dedicated to visiting the sick and attending
funerals, especially those who depended on him (man yalūdhu bihi). And
for those who were suffering acutely, he would visit the person bearing
a gift’. Al-Sakhāwī attested that one time when he himself was sick, Ibn
Ḥajar charitably sent al-Shihāb b. Yaʿqūb, a close friend of his, to look
after him.41 Uns Khātūn also kept company with widows and ‘women who
depended on leaders and others’ (yaludhna bi’l-ruʾasāʾ wa-ghayrihim)
for material support.42 Living near al-Ribāṭ al-Baghdādiyya, a religious
convent that only accepted unsupported women and female heads of
households (divorcées, widows, abandoned wives, single mothers) as resi-
dents, Uns Khātūn likely devoted time and energy there. Evidently, caring
for sick and dependent people constituted a firm and shared priority in Ibn
Ḥajar’s household.
Baybars II, a passionately religious man, intended his madrasa to have
a Shāfiʿī character. The actual endowment deed (waqfiyya) stipulates
that a Shāfiʿī and a Ḥanafī imam must be resident at the Baybarsiyya,
though the Shāfiʿī imam would receive a higher stipend that could be as
much as forty additional dirhams every month.43 Having dual heads at the
Baybarsiyya was a political move to ensure peace between the dominant
43

Shāfiʿī school and the increasingly numerous Ḥanafīs, who belonged

to the madhhab officially supported by the Mamluk sultanate. ‘One of
the remarkable aspects of the Mamluk society was the sharp cleavage
between the Shafiʿites and the Hanafites. The cleavage became as serious
as the Shiʿa and the Sunni feuds in the past centuries. From Baybars [II]’s
time this feud went on increasing and during the 15th century it reached
a climax.’44 The Egyptian historian Ibn Duqmāq (d. 809/1407) identified
the Baybarsiyya as an establishment shared by Shāfiʿīs and Mālikīs, but
al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) designated it a Shāfiʿī institution.45 Although
the endowment deed authenticates the founder’s intended legal character
for the institution, the remarks of these contemporary observers suggest
that the affiliation changed under different leadership or due to internal or
external pressures. However, all the sources agree that the Baybarsiyya
catered, at least in part, to a Shāfiʿī constituency.
Returning to al-Ḥijāzī’s education, his father Shams al-Dīn also taught
his son prosody and music.46 Shams al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī died in 809/1406
when his son was 18 years old; and, according to al-Sakhāwī, Shihāb
al-Dīn related so many stories to him about his father’s life that he came
to feel that he had actually studied with Shams al-Dīn. As al-Sakhāwī
expressed this connection, ‘he was my shaykh indirectly’.47 Shihāb
al-Dīn’s loyalty to his family impressed another of his close friends, who
claimed that ‘he loved . . . his family and honoured them. He neither
talked about them in a backbiting manner (bi-ghība) nor with slander nor
condescension.’48
In addition to al-Ḥijāzī’s early education in Sufism, he memorised
al-Ḥarīrī’s grammatical treatise Mulḥat al-iʿrāb and recited it to his
teacher Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī (d. 806/1403) when he was only seven years
old.49 Acquiring such knowledge and performing it publicly constituted
a common rite of passage for seven-year-old boys. According to an
8th/14th-century Cairene manual on morals and market inspection, ‘when
a boy is seven years old the teacher must order him to say his prayers with
the congregation’.50 Even if such feats of memorisation were expected
of young boys, al-Ḥijāzī must still have impressed his teacher in legal
studies, because, by the time he was 16 years old, al-ʿIrāqī had quali-
fied him to teach hadith to others. Al-Ḥijāzī also counted Ibn Abī Majid,
al-Tanūkhī, Ibn Kuwayk and al-Nūr al-Fawī among his hadith instructors.
He also pursued studies of jurisprudence, methodologies of jurisprudence
and Arabic with al-Shams al-Suyūṭī, al-Shihāb al-Maghrāwī, al-Nāṣir
b. Anas and al-ʿIzz b. Jamāʿa (d. 819/1416). Having studied with such
scholarly luminaries, it is unsurprising that al-Ḥijāzī gained a reputation
as a capable and eager student. Al-Sakhāwī, a biographer and student of
44

al-Ḥijāzī’s, praised his prodigious memory and related the following story
about his quest to memorise increasingly more.51
He continued to be foremost in intelligence and skilful in memorisation until
he started taking anacardium nut (ḥabb al-balādhur). He took so much that his
health became irregular. He said, ‘Thereupon, I was only able to memorise with
enormous strain. This happened to me the year after a burning broke out on my
body. More than 100 boils (miʾah dummal) reddened and stayed on my body,
and every little one afflicted me.’52
In Mamluk Cairo, Muslim and Jewish scholars partook of balādhur to

excel in their studies, which centred on memorising and reciting lengthy
texts.53 This episode influenced al-Ḥijāzī so deeply that he related to a
friend his personal experience with physical blightedness, and he also
composed poetry dedicated to others like himself who had been impaired
bodily and disabled socially because of their blights.
Balādhur
According to the medieval medical model of the body, memory loss arises
from an excess of coldness or moisture of the brain. To restore memory,
one could ingest substances, like balādhur, with dry and hot qualities.
Balādhur is a nut that has been used in the Middle East as a memory-
enhancing substance since at least the 3rd/9th century.54 (It appears that
Galen and Hippocrates were unaware of this drug.) Between its outer wall
and its pericarp lies an amber-coloured, inky, sticky, pungent sap that
when mixed with honey or another sweet substance was used to treat a
predominantly cold humour, languor following an illness, forgetfulness
and a diminished ability to memorise. Smoking anacardium was even said
to cure haemorrhoids.55 Because the nut itself possessed a hot quality,
medieval pharmacologists cautioned young people and others with pre-
dominantly hot humours to avoid the drug, since it heats the blood and
could lead to tuberculoid and lepromatous leprosy (baraṣ and judhām),
itching (saḥj), hearing the voice of the devil (waswās), stupidity (ḥumq),
rotting flesh (ʿafn) and even early death. Today, anacardium is known as
‘marking nut’ because its sap is used to stain linens and paper, and it can
also mark bodies as a tattooing ink. The anacardium extract is so abrasive
that it is equally effective in removing tattoos.56
The Bundahishn, a 3rd/9th-century Zoroastrian creation myth, men-
tioned balātur in Pahlavi, and a commentary on an Avestan text referenced
the contradictory medicinal properties of anacardium nut, warning that
‘sometimes in curing by poison [it] kill[s] the man’.57 The 3rd/9th-century
45

Persian physician ʿAlī b. Sahl Rabbān al-Ṭabarī described an electuary

of balādhur that would relieve stomach pain, memory loss and forgetful-
ness.58 The Jewish pharmacist Abū Naṣr al-ʿAṭṭār al-Isrāʾīlī (d. 658/1260)
provided recipes for both a minor and a major balādhur electuary, with the
latter being attributed to Galen. ‘The minor balādhur electuary increases
memory and drives away forgetfulness and works against paralysis . . .
and various other illnesses owing to an excess of cold complexion.’59 Ibn
al-Bayṭār (d. 646/1248) compiled descriptions and commentaries on this
plant from a host of 4th/10th- and 5th/11th-century physicians and phar-
macologists.60 By the 11th/17th century, ideas of balādhur had not much
changed. According to the medical botanist Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim
al-Ghassānī (d. 1019/1610), balādhur was natively grown in China,
where it was used to dye hair black, in India and on Sicily’s Mount Etna.
Al-Ghassānī saw this nut, which resembled a chestnut in colour and was
shaped like a bird’s heart, for sale in the Sūq al-ʿAṭṭārīn (Drug and Perfume
Market) in Fez. It was so acrid that al-Ghassānī warned that it ‘burned the
user’s tongue, as though it were wine made from mountain grapes’.61
The anacardium nut was also useful for calming the nerves. An anec-
dote, probably apocryphal, attributed to al-Jāḥiẓ illustrates the potential
for developing a dependency on balādhur to regulate one’s mood. The
famous writer allegedly said: ‘Balādhur never overpowered me, and I
only ever argued with someone when I stopped feeling its effects. It is
good for the nerves. You know what they say: “It is important people who
are really bad for the nerves’”!62 Such a claim suggests a tenuous line
between benignly benefiting from its tranquillising effects and depending
on it to such an extent that one becomes accustomed to the drug-induced
state – in this case, calmness.63 The concept of addiction certainly existed
in 8th/14th- and 9th/15th-century Egypt. The Shāfiʿī jurist al-Zarkashī
(d. 794/1392) said of hashish: ‘Among the greatest physical harm caused
by it is the fact that habitual users of it are hardly ever able to repent of it
because of the effect it has upon their temper’. The Cairene poet al-Badrī,
to whose work Chapter 3 will be devoted, noted that ‘one of the properties
of hashish is that its user cannot give it up’.64 Tellingly, the Andalusian
scholar Ibn Daqqāq (d. 380/990 or 991) and the North African jurist Ibn
Jummah (d. 470/1077 or 1078) used so much balādhur that they became
irascible.65 However, these observed behavioural changes may have had
less to do with use or overuse of the drug and more to do with withdrawal
symptoms experienced from not using it.
Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282) reported that Ibn Shaddād (d. 632/1234)
saw four or five jurists gathered at Madrasat al-Niẓāmiyya in Baghdad to
discuss appropriate dosages for anacardium.
46

Because it strengthens one’s memory and comprehension, they had gathered

with one of the physicians. They asked him about the amount of it that humans
can use and about how to use it. Then they bought the amount that the physician
had told them and drank it somewhere outside the school. Insanity overtook
them. They dispersed and they did not know what had come over them. After
some days, one of them – a tall fellow – came to the madrasa. He was naked,
and wore nothing to cover his genitals. On his head was a large turban (biqyār
kabīr) with a long piece of it hanging down, which was not custom. He threw
it [the piece] behind him, and it reached his ankles. He was silent, exuding
peace and dignity, not talking, not joking. One of the jurists present approached
him and asked him about his condition. He said to them: ‘We gathered together
and drank the balādhur nut. My friends became crazy and I was the only one
to escape. My mind grew strong and clear.’ The people mock him, and he is
unaware of it. He firmly believes that he has escaped what afflicted his friends.66
The calming effect of balādhur is evidenced in this anecdote and in the

one about al-Jāḥiẓ, though the above story also illustrates the known
side-effect of insanity, which the narrator perceptively defined as simply
shameless flouting of cultural norms. Reports of the serious harm suffered
after taking balādhur circulated in anecdotes and biographies throughout
the Mediterranean and in the Middle East. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Mahdī
(d. 198/813) and Abū Dāwud al-Ṭayālisī (d. 203 or 204/819 or 820) were
companions in Basra and colleagues in hadith-transmission who report-
edly drank balādhur to improve their memories. Al-ʿIjlī (d. 261/874)
claimed that ‘ʿAbd al-Raḥmān [b. Mahdī] drank balādhur then developed
tuberculoid leprosy (baraṣ), and Abū Dāwud [al-Ṭayālisī ] drank it and
developed lepromatous leprosy (judhām)’.67 Al-Ṭayālisī apparently suf-
fered even beyond the onset of this illness, as he reportedly died at the age
of 70 ‘after drinking a medicine made of the semecarpus anacardium nut’;68
and the grandfather of the historian al-Balādhurī apparently ‘died mentally
deranged through inadvertent use of balādhur . . ., a drug believed benefi-
cial for one’s mind and memory’.69 This last man’s accidental overdose and
the attendant dementia came to mark the entire family in name. Ibn al-Jawzī
(d. 597/1201) suffered far less dramatically from his use of the drug, as his
beard thinned in patches. Though not a dire health concern, the cultural
association of thin-beardedness and emasculation would have made such
a condition rather embarrassing.70 The Granadan poet Abū Isḥāq al-Sāḥilī
(d. 747/1346) lost mental stability for a short time after ingesting balādhur
and started claiming that he was a prophet.71 The 10th/16th-century Jewish
physician Judah Aryeh of Modena, in northern Italy, warned against the
overuse of anacardium because he had ‘seen and known many people who
because of a frequent use of [different] oils and because of the eating of
47

all kinds of balādhur lost their mind and went crazy, or got sick and died
before their time and were not remembered any more’.72
In the Middle Ages, dementia was so widely recognised as a side-
effect of taking balādhur that some people manipulated public goodwill
through deception. Al-Bayhaqī (d. early 4th/10th century) described a
band of 3rd/9th-century beggars who, in a manipulative display, rubbed
clay all over their bodies and feigned eating balādhur, so as to appear
insane.73 The Syrian author al-Jawbarī (d. after 619/1222) speculated that
Jewish physicians provided duplicitous women with balādhur so that they
would administer it to their husbands to render them passive, lethargic and
confused.74
Al-Ḥijāzī’s Overdose on Balādhur

Al-Ḥijāzī was narrowly spared death and lived another fifty years, but
he was one of the unfortunate ones who lost his mind for an unspecified
period of time in his early twenties, then regained mental stability, though
he ultimately lost some cognitive power, preventing him from memorising
as before.75 No longer able to perform at the same level, he was forced to
leave his religious studies behind and began to pursue literary studies full
time. His loss of memory was not the only side-effect of his overindulgence
in anacardium nut. According to a modern Indian pharmacological work,
an overdose of the drug can lead to the eruption of red, inflamed sores
that itch and burn.76 Al-Ḥijāzī’s outbreak of boils in Ramaḍān 815/1412
or 1413 was so excruciating that he found himself unable to sleep for ten
days. On the tenth day of sleeplessness, he wrote to his friend Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn
al-Asyūṭī (d. 859/1455) about the harrowing experience that became a test
of patience. The letter is in rhymed prose (sajʿ) with some interspersed
verses. Following an ornately rhetorical opening, al-Ḥijāzī wrote:
Praise unto God. May He take me into account in whatever He wills. There is
no strength except through God. ‘Truly, the steadfast will be paid their reward
without measure’ [Qur’an 13: 39] . . .
I have spent ten nights without being refreshed by sleep, and I have had
nothing to eat. So here, in this holy month I am fasting both night and day.
The fire of this boil has covered up my heart’s good fortune as though it were a
salamander/phoenix [samandal]. And why should it not be this way since it too
is alive inside the fire?
Night grew long, and through it a boil afflicted me.
It kept me from falling asleep, and I could not bear it.
It felt as though knowing the time were a temptation, so here I am
Keeping an eye on the night stars, waiting for the dawn.77
48

In classical Arabic, samandal can mean either ‘salamander’ or ‘phoenix’.

The connection between the two meanings stems from the belief that
the salamander cannot be killed by fire; in fact, the animal’s cold body
temperature was said to extinguish flames.78 This belief even appears in
contemporary Arabic, where one term for ‘amphibian’ (amphi = both,
bio = life) is a direct translation from the Greek – dhāt ʿumrayn, meaning
‘having two lives’. By drawing a comparison between surviving his fiery
boils and a salamander’s surviving a fire, al-Ḥijāzī may have led his friend
to conjure associations with balādhur, the source of his suffering, since
balādhur was commonly prescribed as an antidote to the lethal effects of
the salamander’s cold humour.79 The narrator al-Suyūṭī interjects after the
above epigram that al-Ḥijāzī ‘then lost his mind from a boil whose burning
bore a hole in his skin like a live coal’.80 While a known side-effect of
balādhur was dementia or insanity, al-Suyūṭī may have felt obliged
by friendship or professional loyalty to attribute his teacher’s mental
decline to a physical condition rather than to overuse of a dangerous drug.
Al-Ḥijāzī himself never mentions balādhur in the letter, but the connec-
tion between his drug use, the boils and his loss of reason is made explicit
in al-Sakhāwī’s obituary notice.
The letter continues with details of his suffering and eventual
despondency, with the writer likening the boils
to an ordinary horseman who makes life hateful to me, attacking my soul again
and again. I did not find a way out of practising patience . . . This difficult
ordeal has made death easy for me . . . I gave up all hope of health . . . but I did
not perish. Tears flowed from my eyes, as there was an obstacle between me
and sleep . . . A night of worry about the boil followed without interruption . . .
I bore it stoutly until the dawn overcame the night . . . My body wasted away in
these ten days and nights from lack of food and sleep. Unfortunately, the truth
is that crying did not make me fatter or spare me from hunger. But I swear by
the dawn and the ten days and nights that my heart has already broken this fast.
Though I was cut off from anything ruling over me and I was cast a long way
off, my spirit has soared. I am greater than someone who has not known suffer-
ing or who does not know the difference between convalescence and illness.81
Being afflicted with boils taught al-Ḥijāzī piety, patience and perspective.
Illness and suffering elevated him above the fray of ordinary believers,
and he gained a renewed appreciation for life.
Khabar al-jism: Sharing ‘A Story about the Body’

Al-Ḥijāzī once told his friend al-Biqāʿī: ‘Strange things have happened to
me in my life’, then proceeded to recount for him humorous stories about
49

nearly suffocating from a headlong fall into a melon when he was just a
boy, nearly drowning in an enormous water jug at the Baybarsiyya when
he was a man, and having a new suit of clothes become progressively
dirtier from blood splattered during a slaughter, the sticky juice of water-
melon rinds and various other substances while walking through Cairo
one day. After finishing these tales, al-Ḥijāzī confided in his friend: ‘ “A
lot of people think that I fabricate many of the things that happen to me”,
but he swore by God that all of it had happened to him and that he had not
contrived any of it’.82 The improbability of al-Ḥijāzī’s experiences and
stories gave his contemporaries reason to doubt their veracity; and certain
elements of this letter suggest that it was not composed spontaneously
during his period of deep suffering, but were deliberately composed later.
Portions are written in rhymed prose (sajʿ), and metred verses are inter-
spersed throughout the prose. Though it is unlikely that this letter, which
was reproduced by al-Suyūṭī, is an authentic, verbatim rendering of the
original, the circumstances detailed within it have been substantiated by
such reputable sources as al-Sakhāwī, al-Suyūṭī and al-Asyūṭī.
The recipient of this letter, al-Asyūṭī, replied to his friend with a
sympathetic message. After an ornate rhetorical address, he reminded
al-Ḥijāzī of the Prophet’s affirmation that ‘there is no type of illness or
pain that afflicts a believer without it becoming a penance for his sins’.83
These brief remarks are the only portion of the text addressed directly to
al-Ḥijāzī. Following this section, al-Asyūṭī characterised the letter as ‘an
honoured composition that contained a complaint about the pain of boils
[that] has reached me from our lord, a man who holds the reins of explica-
tion and is pointed at with the fingertips [a gesture suggesting a person’s
fame]’. The letter itself is described as more than simply a complaint
letter, for al-Ḥijāzī has ‘expressed a story about the body using dissimi-
larity and substitutions (bi’l-taghayyur wa’l-abdāl), giving insight on the
particularities of illness (ḥurūf al-iʿtilāl) after he had lost all remembrance
of good health’.84 Al-Asyūṭī recognised the spiritual significance of his
friend’s ordeal, but is quite clear in describing it as khabar al-jism, ‘a story
about the body’.
Since patient histories from Mamluk Cairo have not been recovered,
and Arabic auto-narratives of illness are a rare genre, this letter represents
a rare instance of individual self-expression of physical suffering. While
al-Ḥijāzī’s letter is not a formal narrative of symptoms and complaint, his
prose and poetry offer a view of one man’s construction of his ill body and
his fury at the circumstances.
Here, a portrait of illness is so starkly rendered that al-Asyūṭī wonders
who could possibly read al-Ḥijāzī’s words unmoved, and marvels at his
50

endurance during such an extraordinary physical trial. Al-Ḥijāzī con-

nected with an unidentified mamluk who had experienced a similar bout
of agony.
His pain and sleeplessness persisted during the hottest part of the day. The
carcasses of animals surrounded him, many of which had turned to stone. He
sought refuge from the sun under rocks, though the stones had cracked open in
the heat. The deaf man (al-aṣamm) is he who does not pity someone painfully
afflicted, and the mute man (al-abkam) is he who does not open his mouth
though his body has something to say. I remained silent about a symptom until
it was manifested on my body, about a physical anomaly until I stood up and
collapsed on the ground, about something found on the heart until it was found
in the eye.85
In early 9th/15th-century Cairo, the Mamluk military corps consisted of

mostly Turkic-speaking male slaves and their children (awlād al-nās),
who were of Kurdish, Circassian and Turkish descent, and therefore lin-
guistically and culturally isolated from the Arabic-speaking residents of
the city. Since Mamluk sultans were drawn from either the pool of active
mamluks or their sons, the mamluk soldiers had a more immediate identi-
fication with the power structure than with the masses. A culture of distrust
characterised the relationship between the two groups. Arabic-speaking
and mamluk social networks had few overlaps, so the communion of the
mamluk and al-Ḥijāzī over their shared physical experiences and conse-
quent social isolation is especially remarkable.86 Al-Asyūṭī reports that the
mamluk had suffered much (‘his pain was long’) and had been abandoned
by his friends. His suffering was lightened when al-Ḥijāzī shared with him
‘a symptom (ʿard) of the body. Their souls suddenly came to know each
other, and their spirits intermingled. Their bodies were associated with
each other in good times, and their body parts were attracted to each other
for their shared misfortunes.’87 Their bodies formed the common grounds
for companionship.
Al-Ḥijāzī’s Literary Training and Production

‘I am he whose literature the blind saw and whose words the deaf heard.’
Al-Mutanabbī88
Al-Ḥijāzī’s literary training included studies of Ibn Rashīq’s treatise on
literary composition titled al-ʿUmdah, the Qur’an, Nūr al-ʿuyūn (Light
of the Eyes), al-Tanbīh (Allusions) and Ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt, ‘except for the
insignificant ones among them’.89 Among his own literary works are a
seventy-volume work on the art of composition entitled Tadhkira fī al-adīb
51

and an examination of poetic metre in the Qur’an (Qalāʾid al-nuḥūr

min jawāhir), which his contemporary Shihāb al-Dīn b. ʿArabshāh
al-Dimashqī (791–854/1389–1450) recited to him. Al-Ḥijāzī apparently
judged his recitation satisfactory and authorised Ibn ʿArabshāh to teach
it to others.90 Our al-Ḥijāzī also wrote works of literary commentary (Al-
Qawāʿid fī al-maqāmāt, Sharḥ al-muʿallaqāt) and anthologies of poetry
(Kitāb rawḍ al-ādāb, Al-Lumaʿ al-shihābiyya min al-burūq al-ḥijāziyya)
that his students updated with his later verses. An autograph copy of his
275-folio dīwān at the Escorial Library in Spain includes samples of his
poems in many genres.91 On 17 Muḥarram 826/9 January 1422, al-Ḥijāzī
completed Kitāb Rawḍ al-ādāb (Book of the Garden of Civilities), a com-
pilation of Arabic ‘verse, prose, love poems, praise poems, riddles, liter-
ary debates, oral strophic poems, muwashshaḥāt, anecdotes, among other
genres’ from the pre-Islamic era through his own lifetime, even including
some of his own work.92 He also anthologised a diverse collection of
anecdotes into a volume titled Nawādir al-akhbār wa-ẓarāʾif al-ashʿār
(Anecdotal Reports and Charming Poetry).93
He was widely praised for his literary gifts. Al-Sakhāwī described him
as the ‘master littérateur of the age’; and, as befits someone with that title,
his poetry enjoyed considerable popularity and a wide circulation.94 One
finds a sample of his verses in ‘The Story of the Two Viziers: Nūr al-Dīn
ʿAlī al-Miṣrī and Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan al-Baṣrī’ in a 17th- or 18th-century
Egyptian manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights.
Say thou to skin ‘Be soft,’ to face ‘Be fair,’

And gaze, nor shall they blame howso thou stare:
Fine nose in Beauty’s list is high esteemed;
Nor less an eye full, bright and debonair:
Eke did they well to laud the lovely lips
(Which e’en the sleep of me will never spare);
A winning tongue, a stature tall and straight;
A seemly union of gifts rarest rare:
But Beauty’s acme in the hair one views it;
So hear my strain and with some few excuse it!95
The same story in the earliest known manuscript of the Nights, an

8th/14th-century Syrian text in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
omits this poem and includes no discussion of the aesthetic merits of
hair nor any mention of al-Ḥijāzī. These textual differences support the
scholarly opinion that the Nights was largely amended in late Mamluk
Cairo, and it is this form that has been transmitted to modern audiences.96
Patrice Coussonnet, for instance, has analysed specific elements of this
52

story across the various editions and manuscripts and has concluded that
the final recension is actually from early 9th/15th-century Cairo, placing
its completion just at the apex of al-Ḥijāzī’s literary career.97
Along with representing the heights of Cairo’s literary culture, al-Ḥijāzī
was also a dedicated observer of current events. On occasion, histori-
ans cited verses that he had composed as social commentaries, as will
be seen.98 But he has also been recognised for the meticulous records
he assembled of the Nile’s water levels between the years 1/622 and
874/1470 and for his detailed descriptions of the Nile and the Nilometer,
which had pre-Islamic origins.99
Al-Ḥijāzī’s status as a writer was sufficiently strong that sometime
between 815/1412 or 1413 and 852/1449 he was named one of the seven
best poets living in Cairo. Because all seven poets were named Shihāb
al-Dīn, an honorific meaning ‘shooting star of the faith’, they were known
collectively as the ‘Seven Shihābs’, meaning ‘Seven Shooting Stars’.100
Al-Ḥijāzī composed twin collections of romantic epigrams: Al-Kunnas
al-jawārī fī al-ḥisān min al-jawārī (Retrograde Running Stars [Q 81:
16]: On Beautiful Young Women), a compendium of muʾannathāt, or
love poetry addressed to women; and Jannat al-wildān fī al-ḥisān min
al-ghilmān (The Paradise of Youths: On Beautiful Young Men), an
anthology of mudhakkarāt, or love poetry addressed to men. The latter
work represents one of many contemporary books on this same subject.101
Al-Ṣafadī’s Al-Ḥusn al-ṣarīḥ has already been mentioned, but ʿUmar
b. al-Wardī’s Al-Kalām ʿalá miʾat ghulām (Musings on One Hundred
Young Men), Muḥammad al-Nawājī’s Marātiʿ al-ghizlān fī al-ḥisān min
al-ghilmān (Pastures of Gazelles: On Beautiful Young Men) and Aḥmad
b. al-Mullā’s (d. 1003/1594 or 1595) ʿUqūd al-jumān fī waṣf nubdha min
al-ghilmān (Pearl Necklaces: A Description of a Few Young Men) are
additional poetry collections on male beauties. Al-Nawājī’s work served
as a model for al-Ḥijāzī’s complementary collections Al-Kunnas al-jawārī
and Jannat al-wildān.102 These two anthologies, like his Kitāb rawḍ
al-ādāb, feature epigrams to bakers, hunters, flautists and other men and
women of professions.103 His Kunnas al-jawārī includes epigrams about
women who are bald (qurʿāʾ), mentally ill, blind or deaf, who cast harmful
spells with their eyes and who have the speech impediment of switching
the letters ‫( ﻙ‬a ‘k’ sound) and ‫( ء‬a glottal stop). His Jannat al-wildān
contains epigrams about men who are mentally ill, deaf, blind, one-eyed,
ophthalmic (armad) or feverish (maḥmūm) or who have the power to kill
others with a glance, and those who confuse the letters ‫( ﺱ‬a soft ‘s’ sound)
with ‫( ﺙ‬a soft ‘th’ sound) and ‫( ﺭ‬an ‘r’ sound) with ‫( ﻉ‬a voiced pharyngeal
fricative).104
53

The challenge of writing an effective epigram lies in condensing

emotion and sometimes wit into only two lines of verse. In al-Ḥijāzī’s
verses, the symbols of beauty, seduction and sexual attractiveness are
inverted. Rather than deploying the standard trope of love as a wounding
force, he worked in the well-established Arab literary tradition of taghay-
yur, or praising the undesirable and demeaning the beautiful, evoking
unexpected emotions on mundane topics. Al-Ḥijāzī masterfully evoked
the playful seduction of a mentally ill (majnūn) woman. The Arabic term
for mental illness, junūn, derives from the word for demon or invisible
spirit (jinn), because the illness was sometimes equated with demonic
possession. So, al-Ḥijāzī describes a man’s love for a woman so enchant-
ingly beautiful that even the jinn fell in love with her, possessing her body
and driving her to illness. No human or spirit could resist her charms, no
matter what her mental state.
I was concerned about the woman who went mad,
And I started to waste away over her.
By reason she has captivated a man,
As she continued to enchant the jinn.105
Similarly, in portraying love for a mentally ill man, it is the afflicted one
who maintains control of the courtship. The speaker is ‘shackled by his
love’, and when he ‘recite[s] poetry for him sweetly, he plunged me into
his mind’.106 In a reversal of the archetype of the lover ill from the fervour
of his love, here it is the beloved who suffers from a mental illness as a
result of a jinn’s obsession with her.
Another theme in these poems is that of the person with the blighted
body being shielded from hearing, seeing or understanding the pain that
people with unmarked bodies encounter. In these epigrams, al-Ḥijāzī
employs the standard motif of two lovers weathering the mockery, gossip
and/or reproach of their detractors. Of a deaf man, he writes:
My reproachers have found fault with a beloved who has become
Deaf. I said, ‘Speak censure.
It can cause no harm, because he
Is deaf and cannot hear the slanderers’ words.’107
And, regarding two deaf women, he muses about communicating through

sign language and becoming figuratively deaf:
I was infatuated with a young lady who could not hear
The words of slanderers when obscene language increased.
You make my heart skip when you are joined to me
And you deafen my mind with your absence.108
54

I became very attached to a deaf woman

Whose face is to me like a halo around a full moon.
Because of her deafness, I say, ‘Beware the detractors’,
Though I conveyed my speech to her through gestures.109
Deafness affords a particular protection for the male lover, who can
remain blissfully oblivious of the turmoil that their relationship is causing
in the community.110 In the case of the female beloved, her lover does
not attempt to shield her from public reactions to their courtship, even
using sign language to communicate this fact to her. In an oral society
like Mamluk Cairo, deafness would have been considered a distinct and
significant social disadvantage. As such, eroticising or privileging deaf-
ness may have had a stronger impact on a contemporary reader or lector
of these verses than on a modern one. Still, the imagery is striking; and
the motif of a disability or blight protecting someone from the undesirable
aspects of the world sometimes reappears in modern literature.111
Other verses raise questions about the speaker’s gaze. The following
epigram about a bald woman seems fairly straightforward, as unrequited
love was a common poetic theme.
There is a young lady who has no hair on her head,
But in her eyes is languor.
What pleasure her desire would give me.
I am dying of grief, and she knows nothing of it.112
Is the speaker referencing a figurative baldness, wherein the traditional
veil covers the hair, creating the appearance of hairlessness? Or does the
speaker, in fact, mean a woman with ‘no hair on her head’? This latter pos-
sibility raises many questions of the male speaker’s access to the woman
in question. In a culture where respectable Muslim women are veiled in
public spaces and when they are around men who are not close family
members, an unknown man peering beneath the veil suggests a violation
of privacy through subterfuge, class difference or surveillance. Other pos-
sibilities are that the bald woman is a slave, a non-Muslim or both. Perhaps
he happened to feel her head and determined that there was no loose hair
or knotted bun on her head.
Lastly, illness or blights can also serve to increase the desirability of
the love object, inverting social and literary expectations of a physically
whole and healthy beloved. On a man stricken with fever, he mused:
Like a rose, his fever has returned
Doubly strong to the cheek of my beloved.
God has augmented his beauty
With this illness. Now diminish the fever!113
55

Rosy cheeks were a widely recognised mark of beauty for men and women
in Mamluk Cairo, but an accentuation of this feature through illness
probably marks a departure from archetypal representations of beauty.
In all these verses, the symbols of beauty, seduction and sexual attrac-
tiveness are inverted, representing an antinomian approach to body nor-
matives. Al-Ḥijāzī has advanced an alternative vision of devotion, dignity
and desirability here, departing from predominant writings of sexual
culture that valorised ideal standards of beauty. There exists a well-estab-
lished Arab literary tradition of praising the undesirable and demeaning
the beautiful – an exercise known as taghayyur.114 A mark of a writer’s
technical agility and skill was his ability to evoke unexpected emotions
on mundane topics. Al-Thaʿālibī compiled an anthology on this subject
called Ṭaḥsīn al-qabīḥ wa-taqbīḥ al-ḥasan (Beautifying the Ugly and
Uglifying the Beautiful). Geert Jan van Gelder has found antecedents of
this tradition in ancient Greek practices, and considers poems of the type
that al-Ḥijāzī wrote representative of taghayyur. He attributes al-Jāḥiẓ’s
essay on blacks and whites to his interest in this technique;115 and, while
this may be part of al-Jāḥiẓ’s motivation, it cannot account for all of it.
Al-Jāḥiẓ’s subjectivity, the zeitgeist of the medieval Middle East and
evidence of black discontent at the time (for example, black slave revolts
in lower Iraq) are elided in this evaluation, but bringing in a historical per-
spective illuminates how al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistle is relevant to period concerns.
Likewise, identifying aspects of al-Ḥijāzī’s life makes his writings on
blighted and disabled bodies more than just a literary exercise. As skilful
as he is at taghayyur, he is even more skilful at de-stigmatising the gaze of
unblighted people towards blighted ones and acknowledging the sexuality
and desirability of marked people.
Friendships
The eldest of the seven Shihābs was the esteemed Shihāb al-Dīn b. Ḥajar
al-ʿAsqalānī, who is largely remembered today for his theological and
legal writings and activities. Aside from being popularly known for his
poetry, Ibn Ḥajar himself appears to have been rather proud of his work,
even though he reportedly stopped composing poems by 816/1413 or
1414.116 ‘The importance that Ibn Ḥajar assigned to his own poetic pro-
duction is shown by the fact that he himself composed three different
recensions of his Dīwān,117 a work that includes verses about the Prophet,
panegyrics to caliphs, princes and other elites, and love poems. The fol-
lowing love poem is even dedicated to a one-eyed male youth, whose
afflicted eye is as dark as an eclipsed sun:
56

My lover has been afflicted in the centre of this beauty

In the eye of perfection, just as when the sun passes through an eclipse.
Scorching fires have ruined his eye. Still, I ask detractors:
Is a piece of paper ever rejected for the fault of a single letter?
His face is public beauty, and his first beard growth resembles
Rows of handwriting. This eye (ʿayn) is a letter that has lost its lustre.118
By rejecting the equation of sexual attractiveness with physical perfection,
the poem’s speaker is realigning beauty norms, allowing one to find beauty
among the ‘ruins’ of an afflicted eye. The poem also shows how physical
difference can be acknowledged for what it is without sensationalising or
denigrating it. This sentiment was not for Ibn Ḥajar simply a poetic conceit.
While teaching at al-Azhar mosque, he once had a cross-eyed student who
attended his lectures. One day, another student wrote on the wall next to
the cross-eyed boy’s seat: ‘There is no power or strength except with God’
(lā ḥawla wa-lā quwwata illā billāhi). In Arabic, the second word could
also be read ḥawala, meaning ‘cross eyes’. The cross-eyed student read the
graffiti as a taunt about his physical condition. Embarrassed and upset, the
student sought a legal opinion on the matter from his teacher, expecting
him to censure the graffiti-writer. Instead of condemning the perpetrator,
Ibn Ḥajar wrote a legal opinion consisting of the same words as the graf-
fito message: lā ḥawla/ḥawala wa lā quwwata illā billāhi. Ibn Ḥajar does
not explain whether he intends the second word to read ‘power’ or ‘cross
eyes’, because either interpretation would be acceptable. Either one, he
wrote, can be considered ‘one of the treasures of heaven’.119
The other five men who shared this name were Shihāb al-Dīn b.
al-Shāb al-Tāʾib (d. 832/1429), Shihāb al-Dīn b. Ṣāliḥ (d. 861/1456 or
1457), Shihāb al-Dīn b. Mubārak Shāh al-Dimashqī (d. 862/1458), Shihāb
al-Dīn b. Abī al-Saʿūd (d. 868/1464 or 870/1466) and Shihāb al-Dīn
al-Manṣūrī (d. 887/1482).120 The designation of this literary group as the
Seven Shooting Stars was an identity that they all readily assumed, and
their bonds of friendship appear to have been rather firm.121 They com-
posed verses to console each other about illnesses, eulogies to commemo-
rate their lives, commentaries on current events that personally affected
them and friendly letters on a host of subjects. Their shared name engen-
dered a number of puns. Once, four of them – Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī,
al-Ḥijāzī, Ibn Ṣāliḥ and Ibn Abī al-Saʿūd – wrote scathing reviews for an
epigram that one Walī al-Dīn had composed about the strength of a man
whose tooth had been pulled because of an illness. Ibn Ḥajar, for one, felt
that the poet had ‘shitted out this short poem’, and Cairenes joked that
Walī al-Dīn had been hit by four shooting stars.122 The Shihābs banded
together in a firm display of solidarity.
57

Al-Ḥijāzī had certainly meditated on the obligations and meaning

of friendship in Nawādir al-akhbār. Dedicating an entire section to the
subject, he cited a number of earlier Muslim thinkers who voiced con-
tradictory opinions. Al-Ḥijāzī himself concluded that neither distance
nor adversity should separate friends, as this bond was too precious to
go unnurtured. One of his close friends, al-Ṣayrafī, described him as ‘an
excellent man who behaves humbly and affectionately to his friends and
avidly desires visits from them’.123 These two men spent many days and
nights together at al-Ṣayrafī’s home.
Another group of seven Shihābs exhibited similar dynamics of identi-
fying intensely with the group. Al-Sakhāwī related an anecdote about this
particular group of men:
One time our shaykh [Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī] was sitting with al-Shihāb b.
Taqī, al-Shihāb al-Shayrajī [sic], al-Shihāb al-Rīshī, al-Shihāb al-Ḥijāzī, and
another al-Shihāb. So along with the subject of this biography, there were seven
people. Al-Ḥijāzī said, ‘O Mawlānā, you (m. pl.) have named your comets
“The Seven Planets”, who are gathered here today’. Then our shaykh said sud-
denly, ‘Whoever comes among the comets will be consumed in the fire’. How
excellent is the speaker! Whoever claims knowledge of what he does not know
lies about what he knows. What do you think of someone who is unbearable to
everyone?124
Although two of the members of ‘The Seven Shooting Stars’ were also
named as part of ‘The Seven Planets’, the groups were distinct from
each other through their different collective foci. The former group
shared literary interests, and the latter centred their religious lives around
the Baybarsiyya. Al-Shihāb al-Rīshī was an astronomer (muwaqqit) at
al-Muʾayyad mosque sometime after 812/1410. Al-Shihāb b. Yaʿqūb was
Ibn Ḥajar’s naqīb (deputy) and was frequently in his teacher’s company.125
Al-Ḥijāzī told al-Sakhāwī that one day he was reciting the Qur’an to a
large group while standing by a window at the Baybarsiyya, as was his
duty. This position was a respected one at the Baybarsiyya, and recit-
ers earned thirty dirhams monthly. The institution’s endowment deed
stipulated that the Qur’an be read before one of the five lower windows
in the vestibule of the mausoleum, all of which faced al-Darb al-Aṣfar.
One window had even been brought from one of the Abbasid palaces
in Baghdad, a forceful reminder of the intersections of royal power and
religious life in Mamluk Cairo.126 Suddenly, Ibn Ḥajar and al-Shihāb b.
Yaʿqūb came by, just as the group was reciting Qur’an 4: 6: ‘He will
teach you the interpretation of sayings, and make His favour complete to
you and the children of Yaʿqūb’. Ibn Ḥajar took notice of this recitation
58

and met with al-Ḥijāzī afterwards to ask whether the recitation had been
deliberate or accidental. Al-Ḥijāzī swore to him that it was accidental, and
Ibn Ḥajar was encouraged by this omen.127 Whether al-Shihāb b. Yaʿqūb
had been appointed naqīb before or after this event is unclear, but evi-
dently these three men all had some ties to the Baybarsiyya. Of course,
this was not necessarily an exclusive affiliation. Later in his life, al-Ḥijāzī
spent most days at majālis at the Qarāsunquriyya madrasa, an institution
next door to the Baybarsiyya that even shared with it a nearly contiguous
façade, and in the evenings he would retire to the home of his friend Qāḍī
Muwaffaq al-Dīn (d. 877/1472 or 1473) at Birkat al-Raṭl.128 The length of
time that al-Ḥijāzī spent at al-Qarāsunquriyya is unknown, as the available
sources are sparsely distributed, but al-Ḥijāzī’s affiliation with this par-
ticular madrasa extended over decades. Al-Biqāʿī had a conversation with
al-Ḥijāzī on 14 Dhū al-Qaʿda 837/22 June 1434, at the Qarāsunquriyya,
and he also once remarked that al-Ḥijāzī was a resident there in Jumādā I
864/February 1460.129
As for the six eminent poets whom he called friends, his affection for
them is most obviously evidenced in his poetry and letters. He composed
two verses after a fire raged in Būlāq in 862/1457 destroying more than
300 housing units:
My grief is for Old Cairo (miṣr) and her residents

And a tear for her has been freed from my eye
For her who witnessed the crowds of the dead and its horrors, and
Who suffered sorrowfully through the agony of the fire.130
The fire broke out just before the death of his fellow poet Shihāb al-Dīn
b. Mubārak Shāh al-Dimashqī; so, if he composed these verses after his
friend’s death, the sorrow expressed in the poem could have had double
resonances.
As for these friends showing support and love for one another, we have
the example of al-Manṣūrī dedicating two verses to al-Ḥijāzī upon hearing
of what would be his final illness:
People say that al-Shihāb is ailing, and I say, ‘What a pity!

What does Aḥmad think about not being free of illness (ʿilal)?’
The measure of the spiritual link between man and God comes from the
sacrifice that releases the bond,
And its distinguishing mark is in the arts of learning and of labour.131
In a thematic echo of al-Ḥijāzī’s letter to al-Asyūṭī, al-Manṣūrī has con-

structed sickness as a form of pious suffering, making al-Ḥijāzī an object
59

of sacrifice who demonstrates his love of God through pursuits of learn-

ing and the poetic craft. The illness that claimed al-Ḥijāzī’s life was a
long and intense gastrointestinal disease, and his companions stayed with
him through it.132 Taqī al-Dīn Abū Bakr al-Badrī, a friend and pupil of
al-Ḥijāzī, who will also be the subject of Chapter 3, said that he ‘watched
closely over him in the illness that carried him to his grave’.133 Al-Ḥijāzī
certainly considered his legacy after his death, and wrote:
They say: ‘When a dead man has not left behind any memories,
He is forgotten’. So I say to them: ‘In some of my poems,
My friends will remember me after death
Through what I leave of my thoughts’.134
After this long illness, al-Ḥijāzī died on Wednesday, 7 Ramaḍān 875/28
February 1471, in his home, which was located near Sultan Barqūq’s (d.
801/1399) tomb in the Qarāfa cemetery.135 The poet al-Shihāb al-Manṣūrī
eulogised al-Ḥijāzī in thirteen lines of poetry that begin: ‘The loss I feel
for al-Ḥijāzī has grown and plunged me into sadness’.136
After the sixth Shihāb of their group died, the last remaining member,
al-Manṣūrī, composed fifteen lines eulogising all six of them. In his
estimation, Cairo’s literary scene had just suffered a devastating blow,
marking a decline in the poetry of the era. ‘The heavens of style have been
deprived of the radiance of the shooting stars (shuhub) / And now, the
horizons of poetry and literature have darkened’.137 Al-Manṣūrī’s experi-
ences with this close-knit group of friends imbue these brief lines with a
depth that aptly commemorates the love and respect he felt for them and
gives dimension to intimate aspects of everyday life.
Notes
1. Ibn Ḥibbān (d. 354/965) related a weak hadith on the authority of ʿĀʾisha
that the Prophet declared blue eyes a sign of good luck.
2. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Thaʿālibī, Al-Jawāhir al-ḥisān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān
(Exquisite Jewels: On Quran’ic Exegesis), ed. ʿAmmār al-Ṭālbanī (Algiers:
Al-Muʾassasat al-waṭaniyya li’l-kitāb, 1985), 3:61.
3. Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar al-Biqāʿī, Naẓm al-durar fī tanāsub al-āyāt
wa-suwar (Pearl Necklace: On the Link between Qurʾanic Verses and
Chapters) (Hyderabad: Maṭbaʿa majlis dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya,
2006) 5:45.
4. Andreas Tietze, Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s Description of Cairo of 1599: Text,
Transliteration, Translation, Notes (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975), p. 42.
5. Al-Suyūṭī was the only biographer to have recorded al-Ḥijāzī’s great-
60

grandfather’s name as Ḥusayn, rather than Ḥasan. See Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī,
Naẓm al-ʿiqyān fī aʿyān al-aʿyān, ed. Philip K. Hitti (New York: Syrian-
American Press, 1927), p. 63.
6. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr bi-anbāʾ al-ʿumr,
ed. Ḥasan al-Ḥabashī (Cairo: s.n., 1969), 1:350.
7. Of al-Ḥijāzī’s dozens of biographers, Ibn Khalīl (d. 920/1514) is the only
one to give his birth year as 795/1392. See his Nayl al-amal fī dhayl al-
duwal, ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām Tadmurī (Ṣaydā/Beirut: Al-Maktabat
al-ʿaṣriyya, 2002), 6:438.
8. Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-sulūk li-maʿrifat duwal al-mulūk
(The Guide to the Knowledge of Royal Dynasties), ed. Muḥammad Muṣṭafá
Ziyāda and Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-ʿAshūr (Cairo: Lajnat al-taʾlīf wa’l-
tarjama wa’l-nashr, 1934), 3:577.
9. Al-Badrī, Ghurrat, fo. 158b. Because of the popularity of intercrural sex
between men in this period, men’s thighs often served as a focus of erotic
interest in male homoerotic literature.
10. It is worth noting that ‘the 11th-century geographer al-Bakri . . . reported
that the people in northern Morocco did not allow the physically defec-
tive to dwell in their country because it corrupted their progeny’. Cited in
Shoshan, ‘The State’, p. 336.
11. Rukn al-Dīn Baybars al-Manṣūrī al-Dawādar, Zubdat al-fikra fī taʾrīkh al-
hijra, ed. Donald S. Richards (Beirut: Al-Sharikat al-muttaḥida li’l-tawzīʿ,
1998), p. 106; Badr al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-ʿAynī, ʿIqd al-jumān fī taʾrīkh ahl
al-zamān, ed. Muḥammad Muḥammad Amīn (Cairo: Hayʾat al-miṣriyya
al-ʿāmma li’l-kitāb, 1987), 1:428. The accounts by these authors are identi-
cal, suggesting an earlier common source or al-ʿAynī’s direct borrowing of
Baybars al-Manṣūrī’s words.
Susan M. Schweik has investigated a similar phenomenon in United
States history in her The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York:
New York University Press, 2009). In the 19th and 20th centuries, laws
were passed in urban centres such as Chicago, Philadelphia and New York
that forced disabled mendicants off the streets because of their supposed
unsightliness.
12. Al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-sulūk [repr. 1956], 2:322–3.
13. Ibid., 3:772; Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Ibn al-Furāt, Tāʾrīkh Ibn
al-Furāt, ed. Constantine Zurayq (Beirut: Al-Maṭbaʿa al-amīrkāniyya,
1936–), 9:310–11; Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Ḥanafī Ibn Iyās, Badāʾiʿ
al-zuhūr fī waqāʾīʿ al-duhūr, ed. Muḥammad Muṣṭafá (Cairo: s.n., 1960),
1.2:454; Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ [1969], 3:121. In reading these
same passages, Adam Sabra has understood jadhmāʾ, which can mean
‘amputees’, to indicate ‘thieves whose hands had been amputated in pun-
ishment’. See his Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt,
1250–1517 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 60. On the
meaning of jadhmāʾ as ‘lepers’, see EI 2, s.v. ‘Djudhām’.
61

14. ʿAlī b. Dāwūd al-Ṣayrafī, Nuzhat al-nufūs wa’l-abdān fī tawārīkh al-zamān

(The Recreation of Bodies and Souls: On Histories of the Period), ed. Ḥasan
Ḥabashī (Cairo: Wizārat al-thaqāfa, markaz taḥqīq al-turāth, 1970–94),
3:408–9. The figure of the able-bodied beggar who played on public sym-
pathies by feigning mental and physical illnesses occupied a prominent
place in Arabic literatures. In his shadow play ʿAjīb wa-gharīb, Ibn Dāniyāl
(d. 710/1310) humorously described one swindling beggar’s application of
sticky ointments to his eyes to appear blind.
15. Ibn Taghrībirdī, Al-Nujūm al-ẓāhira fī mulūk miṣr wa’l-qāhira (The Shining
Stars: On the Kings of Egypt and Cairo) (Cairo: s.n., 1929), 14:359.
16. Shoshan, ‘The State’, pp. 337–8.
17. Al-Sakhāwī, Kitāb al-tibr al-masbūk fī tawārīkh al-mulūk (Cairo: Maktabat
al-kulliyāt al-azhariyya, 1972), p. 302. Ibn Taghrībirdī gave his name as
Saʿdān and described him as a black slave. For an analysis of the various
tellings of the Saʿdallāh affair in Mamluk chronicles, see Shaun Marmon,
‘Black Slaves in Mamlūk Narratives: Representations of Transgression’,
Al-Qanṭara 28.2 (2007), pp. 452–6.
18. Al-Sakhāwī, Kitāb al-tibr, p. 302.
19. Ibid., p. 302 (wa-fīhim al-kathīr min al-zamanī wa-dhawī al-ʿāhāt wa’l-
amrāḍ); Ibn Taghrībirdī (d. 874/1470), Ḥawādith al-duhūr fī madá al-ayyām
wa’l-shuhūr (Cairo: Lajnat iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-islāmī, 1990), 1:200–1, 203;
Ibn Taghrībirdī, Al-Nujūm, 15:406–7.
20. Ibn Iyās, Badāʾiʿ, 2.5:2, 253.
21. Owen Jarus, ‘Long Pilgrimages Revealed in Ancient Sudan Art’, Live
Science, 3 November 2011. <http://www.livescience.com/16854-sudan-
yields-medieval-art-signs-long-pilgrimages.html>. This article is a synopsis
of Bogdan Zurawski’s lecture ‘Kings and Pilgrims: Excavating the Holy
Sites of Banganarti and Selib’ on 25 September 2011 at the Royal Ontario
Museum in Canada.
22. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ (Beirut: Dār maktabat
al-hayāt, 1966), 2:147. Muslim infants customarily have their heads shorn
when they are one week old, and the weight of the hair in silver is donated
to charity. Though not explicitly mentioned, it is likely that Shihāb al-Dīn
underwent this ritual on this day.
23. Susan Jane Staffa, Conquest and Fusion: The Social Evolution of Cairo,
A.D. 642–1850 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), pp. 111–12; Nasser O. Rabbat,
The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), p. 238.
24. Al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-khiṭaṭ al-maqrīziyya (Cairo: s.n., 1959), 2:427–8.
25. For more images and architectural details about the Baybarsiyya, see K. A.
C. Creswell, The Muslim Architecture of Egypt (New York: Hacker Art
Books, 1979), 2:249–53 + plates 95–8, 112–13, 121; Henri Stierlin and
Anne Stierlin, Splendours of an Islamic World: Mamluk Art in Cairo,
1250–1517 (New York: Tauris Parke Books, 1997), pp. 26–9.
62

26. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 8:179.

27. ʿAlī b. Dāwūd al-Ṣayrafī, Inbāʾ al-haṣr bi-anbāʾ al-ʿaṣr, ed. Ḥasan Ḥabashī
(Cairo: Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, 1970), p. 258.
28. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:147–8.
29. Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval
Damascus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 7, 114.
30. Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Fahd al-Hāshimī, Laḥẓ al-alḥāẓ bi-dhayl ṭabaqāt al-ḥuffāẓ
(Beirut: Dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, s.d.), pp. 339–45; Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan
al-Biqāʿī, ʿInwān al-zamān bi-tarājim al-shuyūkh wa’l-aqrān, ed. Ḥasan
Ḥabashī (Cairo: Dār al-kutub wa’l-wathāʾiq al-qawmiyya, 2001), 1:131–2;
Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 1:317, 428–31.
31. Al-Sakhāwī, Kitāb al-tibr, p. 233.
32. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 1:317.
33. Aftab Aḥmad Raḥmānī, The Life and Works of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani
(Bangladesh: Islamic Foundation Bangladesh, 2000), p. 109.
34. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 1:428. It is also cited in al-Badrī, Al-Durr, 1:188.
It is likely that the reference to the eye (ʿayn) in the final hemistich is a
subtle attack on one of al-ʿAsqalānī’s chief rivals, the scholar Badr al-Dīn
Muḥammad al-ʿAynī (d. 855/1451), so named because he was a native of
ʿAyntāb, a city in eastern Anatolia. The convention of placing a double
entendre at the end of a poetic line is known as tawriyya. Cf. a sample
of al-ʿAsqalānī’s poetry in Raḥmānī, Life, p. 209. For more on these two
scholars, see Anne Broadbridge’s rich portrait of scholarly social net-
works, ‘Academic Rivalry and the Patronage System in Fifteenth-Century
Egypt: Al-ʿAyni, Al-Maqrizi, and Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani’, MSR 3 (1999),
pp. 85–107; and Al-Badrī, Al-Durr, 1:187.
35. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 3:1,053.
36. My translation of Leonor Fernandes, ‘The Foundation of Baybars al-
Jashankir: Its Waqf, History, and Architecture’, Muqarnas 4 (1987), p. 39,
column 2, lines 31–2. Additionally, appointees to military and bureau-
cratic posts may have been subject to similar restrictions. David Ayalon
has cited numerous instances in which Mamluk amirs were dismissed
for illness or advanced age in his ‘Discharges from Service, Banishments
and Imprisonments in Mamlūk Society’, Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972),
p. 26, fn. 9. The author of an 11th/17th-century Andalusian text on cannon
noted that only men of sound health were permitted to operate the cannon.
They could not be ‘deaf nor weak nor paralyzed nor one-eyed nor drunk’.
See Nabil Matar, ‘Confronting Decline in Early Modern Arabic Thought’,
Journal of Early Modern History 9.1–2 (2005), p. 68.
37. Ayalon, ‘Discharges’, p. 27.
38. Boaz Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), pp. 52–3.
39. Fernandes, ‘Foundation’, p. 27.
40. Rispler-Chaim, Disability, p. 25.
63


42. Ibid., 3:1,212. Aftab Aḥmad Raḥmānī understands this passage to mean that
Uns Khātūn cared for disabled people. See Raḥmānī, Life, p. 95.
43. Fernandes, ‘Foundation’, p. 25.
44. Raḥmānī, Life, p. 43.
45. Cited in K. A. C. Creswell, Muslim Architecture, 2:253.
46. Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan al-Biqāʿī,ʿUnwān al-ʿunwān bi-tajrīd asmāʾ al-shuyūkh
wa-baʿḍ al-talāmidha wa’l-aqrān (Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 2002),
p. 36; Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:147.
48. Al-Ṣayrafī, Inbāʾ, p. 259.
49. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:148; ʿUmar Ibn Fahd al-Hāshimī, Muʿjam
al-shuyūkh, ed. Muḥammad al-Zāhī (Riyadh: Manshūrāt Dār al-Yamāma
li’l-baḥth wa’l-tarjama wa’l-nashr, 1982), p. 345.
50. Ibn al-Ukhuwwa (d. 729/1329), The Maʿālim al-Qurba fī Aḥkām al-Ḥisba
of Ḍiyaʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Qurashī al-Shāfiʿī, known
as Ibn al-Ukhuwwa, ed. and trans. Reuben Levy (London: Luzac & Co.,
1938), p. 60.
51. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:147–9.
52. Ibid., 2:148. Ibn Hishām al-Lakhmī (d. 577/1182) noted in his book on
provincial Arabic expressions that Andalusians pronounced this word
balādhūr. See his Madkhal ilá taqwīm al-lisān wa-taʿlīm al-bayān, ed.
Maʾmūn b. Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Jannān (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya,
1995), p. 201.
53. Ignaz Goldziher, ‘Muhammedanischer Aberglaube über Gedächtniskraft
und Vergesslichkeit, mit Parallelen aus der jüdischen Litteratur’, in
Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage A. Berliners (Frankfurt am Main:
J. Kauffmann, 1903), pp. 131–55; Gerrit Bos, ‘Jewish Traditions on
Strengthening Memory and Leone Modena’s Evaluation’, Jewish Studies
Quarterly (1995), pp. 39–58.
54. Gerrit Bos, ‘Balādhur (Marking-Nut): A Popular Medieval Drug for
Strengthening Memory’, BSOAS 59.2 (1996), pp. 229–36.
55. Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim al-Ghassānī, Ḥadīqat al-azhār fī māhiyyat
al-ʿushb wa’l-ʿaqqār (Flower Gardens: The Essence of Herbs and Drugs),
ed. Muḥammad al-ʿArabī al-Khaṭṭābī (Beirut: Dār al-gharb al-islāmī,
1985), p. 65.
56. A 31-year-old man was treated in Burnley, England, for ‘redness, itching
and blistering [on his forearm] followed by skin necrosis’ after having
applied marking-nut extract to the area in order to remove a tattoo. A friend
had procured the extract from Pakistan. After treating the eczema, the der-
matologists found the man’s arm had healed ‘without scarring, any visible
remnants of the tattoo, or the need for debridement’. See A. Hafejee et al.,
‘Traditional Tattoo Treatment Trauma’, British Journal of Dermatology
153, suppl. 1 (2006), p. 62.
64

57. H. W. Bailey, Zoroastrian Problems in the Ninth-Century Books (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1943), p. 81.
58. ʿAlī b. Sahl Rabbān al-Ṭabarī, Firdaws al-ḥikma fī al-ṭibb (Paradise of
Wisdom on Medicine), ed. Muḥammad Zubayr al-Ṣiddīqī (Berlin: Maṭbaʿ
Āftāb, 1928), p. 456.
59. Abū Naṣr al-ʿAṭṭār al-Isrāʾīlī (d. 658/1260), Kitāb minhāj al-dukkān
wa-dustūr al-aʿyān fī aʿmāl wa-tarkīb al-adawiyya al-nāfiʿa li’l-abdān,
ed. Ḥasan Zaghla (Frankfurt: Maʿhad Taʾrīkh al-Ulūm al-ʿArabiyya wa’l-
Islāmīyah fī iṭār Jāmiʿat Frānkfūrt, 1997), pp. 36, 154.
60. See Ibn al-Bayṭār, Kitāb al-jāmiʿ li-mufradāt al-adwiyya wa’l-aghdhiyya
(Beirut: Dār al-Madīna, s.d.), 1.1:113.
61. al-Ghassānī, Ḥadīqat, p. 65; Staph, ‘Dell’anacardio’, trans. Giuseppe
Belluomini, Annali di medicina omiopatica per la Sicilia 4 (1838), pp.
318–60.
62. Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), Rabīʿ
al-abrār fī nuṣūṣ al-akhbār (Vernal Gardens for the Virtuous and Texts of
Anecdotes), ed. ʿAbd al-Amīr Mihnā (Beirut: Muʾassassat al-aʿlamī li’l-
maṭbūʿāt, 1992), 5:55. This anecdote is found in chapter 77, which is titled
‘On illnesses, diseases, physical blights (ʿāhāt), medicine, drugs, caring for
the sick and the like’.
63. As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, schoolboys in northern Yemen were
using balādhur as a study aid, and the broader Yemeni community regarded
it as an addictive substance. Moshe Piamenta, A Dictionary of Post-classical
Yemeni Arabic (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 1:38.
64. Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), p. 97.
65. Ibn Bashkuwāl (d. 578/1183), Kitāb al-ṣilah fī taʾrīkh aʾimmat al-andalus
wa-ʿulamāʾihim wa-muḥaddithīhim wa-fuqahāʾihim wa-udabāʾihim, ed.
Francisco Codera y Zaidin (Madrid: Rojas, 1882), 1:287. Halima Ferhat,
in her rush to depict these scholars as dangerous and dishonourable, asserts
that balādhur made these men violent, without considering the possibility of
withdrawal symptoms creating their harsh tempers. Furthermore, the editor
offers an alternative reading of the Ibn Bashkuwāl passage, which would
make it read ‘It is said that he drank balādhur for his memory, and it ben-
efitted him. It sharpened his memory.’ In the other version, the last sentence
reads: ‘It caused a violent disposition’. See her Le Maghreb aux XIIIème
siècles: les siècles de la foi (Casablanca: s.n., 1993), pp. 32–3.
66. Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān, ed. Iḥsān
ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār ṣādir, 1968–77), 7:94.
67. Al-Dhahabī, Kitāb tadhkirat al-ḥuffāẓ (Hyderabad: Maṭbāʿa dāʾirat
al-maʿārif al-niẓāmiyya, 1914–15), 1:331.
68. EI 2, s.v. ‘Al-Ṭayālisī’.
69. EI 2, s.v. ‘Al-Balādhurī’.
70. Al-Dhahabī, Kitāb tadhkirat, 4:140; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad Ibn Rajab
65

(d. 795/1392 or 1393), Al-Dhayl ʿalá ṭabaqāt al-ḥanābila (Continuation

of Ṭabaqāt al-ḥanābila), ed. Muḥammad Ḥamīd al-Faqī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat
al-sunna al-muḥammadiyya, 1952–3), 1:413. I am grateful to Mr Maxim
Romanov of the University of Michigan for this second reference.
71. Ismāʿīl b. Yūsuf Ibn al-Aḥmar al-Naṣrī (d. 807/1404 or 810/1407), Nathīr
farāʾid al-jumān fī Naẓm fuḥūl al-zamān (Beirut: Dār al-thaqāfa li’l-ṭibāʿa
wa’l-nashr wa’l-tawzīʿ, 1967), pp. 308–9. Cited in John O. Hunwick,
‘An Andalusian in Mali: A Contribution to the Biography of Abū Isḥāq
al-Sāḥilī, c. 1290–1346’, Paideuma 36 (1990), pp. 59–60.
72. Quoted in Bos, ‘Balādhur’, p. 234.
73. C. E. Bosworth, The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld: The Banū Sāsān in
Arabic Society and Literature (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 1:46–7.
74. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jawbarī, Mukhtār kashf al-asrār wa-hatk al-astār
(Select Work on the Uncovering of Secrets and the Tearing Away of Veils)
(Beirut: Dār taḍmūn, 1992), pp. 56, 122.
75. Al-Ṣayrafī, one of al-Ḥijāzī’s close friends, wrote an obituary in which
he claimed that al-Ḥijāzī possessed ‘clarity of mind, lightness of spirit
and sweetness of memory’, ascribing a sunnier legacy to his friend. See
al-Ṣayrafī, Inbāʾ, p. 258.
76. Bos, ‘Balādhur’, p. 234.
77. Al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm, pp. 65–6.
78. For the magical properties of the salamander, see Ibn Waḥshiyya (d. 3rd/9th
c.), Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The Book of Poisons of Ibn Waḥshiyya
and Its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts, trans. Martin Levey
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1966), pp. 56–8. For the
salamander as Ottoman poetic motif, see Walter Andrews and Mehmet
Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern
Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005), p. 96, fn. b, and p. 972.
79. Ibn Waḥshiyya, Book of Poisons, p. 58.
80. Al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm, p. 66.
81. Ibid., pp. 66–7.
82. Al-Biqāʿī, ʿInwān, 1:220–2.
83. Al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm, p. 68. Variations of this hadith are found in Ṣaḥīḥ
al-Bukhārī, vol. 7, nos 545, 551 and 571.
85. Ibid., Naẓm, p. 69.
86. David Ayalon, ‘The Muslim City and the Mamluk Military Aristocracy’,
Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2 (1968),
p. 323.
88. For more about this verse, and the blind poet Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s
(d. 419/1057) application of it to himself, see Franz Rosenthal, ‘“Blurbs”
(taqrîẓ) from Fourteenth-Century Egypt’, Oriens 27 (1981), p. 195, fn. 35.
66


90. Ibid., 2:148. Ibn ʿArabshāh was taken prisoner by the Mongols during
their siege of Damascus in 803/1401. The experience of captivity remained
with him for a long time, and he eventually wrote a scathing biography of
Timur-e Lang (Tamerlane).
91. J. R. Smart, ‘The Muwaššaḥāt of al-Šihāb al-Ḥijāzī’, in Federico Corriente
and Angel Sáenz-Badillos (eds), Poesía estrófica; actas del Primer
Congreso Internacional sobre Paralelos Romances (Madrid, diciembre
de 1989) (Madrid: Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Arabe, 1991),
pp. 347–56.
92. The colophon of Leiden Cod. Or. 423 has this completion date. Al-Biqāʿī,
ʿInwān, 1:220.
93. Abdul Qayyum, ‘Al-Ḥijāzī, the Author of Nawādir al-akhbār’, Islamic
Culture 18 (July 1944), pp. 257, 260–1.
94. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 3:1,082; al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 11:197;
al-Sakhāwī, Al-Dhayl al-tām ʿalá Duwal al-islām li’l-Dhahabī, ed. Ḥasan
Ismāʾīl Marwa (Beirut: Dār Ibn al-ʿImād, 1992–), 2:246; al-Sakhāwī,
Wajīz al-kalām fī al-Dhayl ʿalá Duwal al-islām, ed. Bashār Maʿrūf (Beirut:
Muʾassassat al-risāla, 1995), 2:824.
95. Richard F. Burton (trans.), The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night:
A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainment
(London: The Burton Club, 1900). See also Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand
and One Nights (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), p. 124.
96. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (New York: Routledge,
1994).
97. Patrice Coussonet, ‘Pour une lecture historique des “Mille et Une Nuits”:
Essai d’analyse du conte des deux vizirs égyptiens’, Institut des Belles
Lettres Arabes (1985), pp. 85–115.
98. Al-Sakhāwī, Kitāb al-tibr, pp. 267–8.
99. See his Nayl al-rā’id fī al-nīl al-zā’id, Bankipore Public Library, Bankipore,
India, MS. 1069. For examples of modern scientific and historical citations,
see Mamdouh M. A. Shahin, Hydrology and Water Resources of Africa
(New York: Springer, 2002), p. 294, and Paul P. Howell and John A. Allan,
The Nile: Sharing a Scarce Resource: A Historical and Technical Review
of Water Management and of Economical and Legal Issues (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 37.
100. Ibn Iyās, Badāʿīʾ 3:58; Al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm, p. 36. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Manṣūrī
is identified as one of the seven Shihābs (aḥad al-shuhub al-sabiʿa) in Ibn
al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī (d. 1003/1595), Mutʿat al-adhhān min al-Tammatuʿ
bi’l-iqrān bayna tarājim al-shuyūkh wa’l-aqrān [= extracts from Ibn
Ṭūlūn’s Al-Tammatuʿ bi’l-iqrān bayna tarājim al-shuyūkh wa’l-aqrān],
ed. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Khalīl al-Shaybānī al-Mawṣilī (Beirut: Dār ṣādir, 1999),
2:873.
101. The editor worked from Muḥammad Amīn al-Kutubī’s 1908 edition, which
67

was rife with diacritical and orthographic errors, of three of al-Ḥijāzī’s short
treatises. In addition to the two that ʿAkkāwī edited, there was another enti-
tled Qalāʾid al-nuḥūr min jawāhir al-buḥūr. See Rajāb ʿAkkāwī, ‘ʿAmalnā
fī risālatayn’, in Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, Al-Kunnas al-jawārī fī al-ḥisān
min al-jawārī, wa-bi-dhaylihi, Jannat al-wuldān fī al-ḥisān min al-ghilmān,
ed. Rajāb ʿAkkāwī (Beirut: Dār al-ḥarf al-ʿarabī, 1998), p. 18.
102. Thomas Bauer, ‘Mamluk Literature: Misunderstandings and New
Approaches’, MSR 9.2 (2005), p. 123.
103. For more on the types of workers featured in Kitāb rawḍ al-ādāb, see
Joseph Sadan, ‘Kings and Craftsmen, a Pattern of Contrasts: On the History
of a Medieval Arabic Humoristic Form (Part I)’, SI 56 (1982), p. 33. Cf. also
the shahrangiz poetic genre in Persian, Turkish and Urdu literatures, which
praises male beauties of various crafts and professions.
104. Ibn Sūdūn al-Bashbughāwī (810–68/1407–64)’s play ‘Narrative of the
Baghdadi Hunchback’ spoofs a similar phenomenon, the tendency in
Baghdadi Arabic to replace ‫ ﺭ‬with ‫ﻍ‬. See Arnoud Vrolijk, Bringing a Laugh
to a Scowling Face: a study and critical edition of the “Nuzhat al-nufūs
wa-muḍḥik al-ʿabūs” by ʿAlī Ibn Sūdūn al-Bashbughāwī (Cairo 810/1407
– Damascus 868/1464) (Leiden: Research School CNWS, School of Asian,
African, and Amerindian Studies, 1998), p. 141 of the English commentary
and pp. ۱٥۸–۱٥٥ of the Arabic edition.
105. Al-Ḥijāzī, Kunnas, p. 29.
106. Ibid., p. 125.
107. Ibid., p. 125.
108. Ibid., p. 30.
109. Ibid., pp. 30–1.
110. The scholar Maḥmūd b. al-Baylūnī (d. 1599) remarked to his biographer
al-Ghazzī that his being hard-of-hearing was a gift from God, as it permit-
ted him to ignore idle gossip and to listen only to recitations of the Qur’an.
See Sara Scalenghe, ‘Being Different: Intersexuality, Blindness, Deafness,
and Madness in Ottoman Syria’, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University,
2006, pp. 168–9.
111. A similar sentiment is found in this Egyptian short-story excerpt: ‘Ali can
talk himself into believing that it is a hundred times better to be blind than
sighted. It is better to be blind because a blind man can love through his
ears. His hearing is sharpened and he packs his memory with smells and
delicate sounds . . . A blind man – in Ali’s analysis – has only the injuries
he might incur bumping into an iron railing, tripping over a stone or brick,
or a careless movement from the razor to worry about. The injuries of a
sighted man, on the other hand, consist in the consciousness of his own
feebleness every time he looks at the stone or hole that tripped him despite
being in perfect physical health.’ From Ashraf Abdelshafy, ‘Imagination of
the Blind’, Banipal 25 (Spring 2006), pp. 105–6.
112. Al-Ḥijāzī, Kunnas, p. 31.
68

113. Ibid., p. 130.

114. Renaissance English writers of prose, poetry and drama praised the
‘deformed mistress’ in works that ‘appear to reappraise aesthetic norms and
the constraints they place upon women, arguing for the appeal and value of
features generally considered ugly. [Rather,] this form of writing ironically
works to confirm the ugliness of the female body further, once again locat-
ing beauty in male art rather than in female nature.’ See Naomi Baker, Plain
Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 139.
115. Geert Jan van Gelder, ‘Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful:
The Paradox in Classical Arabic Literature’, Journal of Semitic Studies 48.2
(2003), p. 339.
116. Sabri Khalid Kawash, ‘Ibn Ḥajar al-Asqalānī (1372–1449 A.D.): A Study of
the Background, Education, and Career of a ʿĀlim in Egypt’, PhD disserta-
tion, Princeton University, 1969, p. 214.
117. Thomas Bauer, ‘Ibn Ḥajar and the Arabic Ghazal of the Mamluk Age’, in
Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth (eds), Ghazal as World Literature
(Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2005), 1:35.
118. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Dīwān Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, ed.
Firdaws Nūr ʿAlī Ḥusayn (Cairo: Dār al-faḍīla, 2000), p. 262. The Arabic
word for eye (ʿayn) and the 18th letter of the Arabic alphabet (ʿayn) are
homonyms.
120. Ibn Iyās, Badāʿīʾ, 3:58. For Ibn al-Shāb al-Tāʾib, who was also a Sufi and
a khāṭib, see Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1943–), 2:147ff.; Ibn al-ʿImād, Shadharāt al-dhahab
fī akhbār man dhahab (Damascus/Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1986–), 7:198.
For a description of Ibn Abī al-Saʿūd as muwaswis (mumbling to himself
and obsessed by demonic delusions), see al-Biqāʿī, Iẓhār al-ʿaṣr li-asrār
ahl al-ʿaṣr: tāʾrīkh al-Biqāʿī, ed. Muḥammad Sālim b. Shadīd al-ʿAwfī
(Giza: Hajar li’l-ṭibāʿa wa’l-nashr wa’l-tawzī, 1992–), 1:208; and also
al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm, p. 36, where he is referred to as Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b.
Ismāʿīl al-Saʿūdī and is explicitly named as one of the seven Shihābs. For
al-Manṣūrī, who moved to Cairo from Manṣūra in 825/1422 and remained
there until his death, see al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:150–1; al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm,
p. 77; Brockelmann, GAL Supplement (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1943–), 2:12; and
Fuʾād Afrām al-Bustānī (ed.), Dāʾirat al-maʿārif: qāmūs ʿāmm li-kull fann
wa-maṭlab, (Beirut: s.n., 1956), 4:116.
121. Modes of social configuration in Mamluk and early Ottoman academic
circles are interesting sites of friendship analysis, especially as they relate to
categories of physical difference. Bonds were formed according to profes-
sional guilds, fraternal orders, clans and tribes, among other group identi-
fiers, but social clusters were occasionally based on physical characteristics
or nicknames. Ibrāhīm al-Kharīzātī al-Ṣāliḥī al-Uṭrūsh (d. 15 Rabīʿ II
69

933/18 January 1527) is identified by one biographer as ‘one of the partially

deaf anecdotalists (aḥad al-mudṭaʿīn al-uṭrūsh)’. He eventually lost his
mind and fell into ruin, taking his meals at the Salīmiyya hospice. See Ibn
al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:248. Samer M. Ali mentioned that the only
deaf littérateur he had encountered in the sources was Muḥammad b. Saʿīd
al-Aṣamm. Though Ali wonders how he could possibly have heard, recited
or narrated anecdotes, it is possible to imagine a writer using gestures, sign
language or lip-reading to communicate. See his Arabic Literary Salons in
the Islamic Middle Ages: Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation
of the Past (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), pp. 45 and
223, fn. 44.
For 10th/16th-century Syrian uses of the word uṭrūsh, see Muḥammad
b. Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Ḥanbalī (d. 971/1563), Baḥr al-ʿawwām fīmā aṣāba fīhi
al-ʿawāmm (Cairo: Dār al-thaqāfat al-ʿarabiyya, 1990), p. 255.
122. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 2:883.
123. Al-Ḥijāzī, Nawādir al-akhbār wa-ẓarāʾif al-ashʿār, Panjab University
Library, India, fos 7a–10a; Al-Ṣayrafī, Inbā’, p. 258.
124. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 2:883. For al-Shihāb b. Taqī’s (d. 844/1440) biog-
raphy, see Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 1:229–30, 2:78–80. The name ‘al-Shihāb
al-Shayrajī’ should read ‘al-Shihāb al-Sayrajī’. This man was a friend of
Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī. He was born in 778/1376 and died in Muḥarram
862/November 1457. For his biography, see al-Suyūṭī, al-Naẓm, pp. 90–2;
Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:249. Al-Shihāb al-Rīshī was born in the Egyptian
village of Kūm Rīshī in 775/1373 or 1374. He died in Cairo on 11 Muḥarram
852/17 March 1448, four years before his son Muḥammad was led to prison
in chains (Al-Biqāʿī, Iẓhār, 1:245). For al-Shihāb al-Rīshī’s biography, see
Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:2; Al-Biqāʿī, ʿUnwān, pp. 20–1; and Al-Biqāʿī,
ʿInwān, 1:58, fn. 105.
125. Al-Biqāʿī wrote biographical notices for both al-Shihāb b. Yaʿqūb and his
wife Zaynab bint ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm, the daugh-
ter of al-Zayn al-ʿIrāqī, for which see hisʿUnwān, pp. 42–3, 82.
126. Leonor Fernandes, The Evolution of a Sufi Institution in Mamluk Egypt: The
Khanqah (Berlin: K. Schwartz, 1988), p. 27.
127. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Jawāhir, 2:651, 3:1,041.
128. Al-Ṣayrafī, Inbāʾ, 259; Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 5:4.
129. Al-Biqāʿī, ʿInwān, 1:221; Al-Biqāʿī, Iẓhār, 3:221.
130. Al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm, p. 77. Ibn Taghrībirdī wrote of this fire in his Al-Manhal
al-ṣāfī wa’l-mustawfā baʿda al-wāfī.
131. Ibn Iyās, Badāʿīʾ, 3:57. In the 1894 edition (2:126), the poem’s third line
reads: ‘the sacrifice that permits the bond’. Al-Manṣūrī also wrote a poem
about his own long bout with hemiplegia ( fālij), which immobilised him
and confined him to his home, where he was entirely dependent on a male
servant (Badāʿīʾ, 2:213–14).
132. Al-Ṣayrafī, Inbāʾ, pp. 258–9; Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn al-Ḥimṣī
70

(d. 934/1527), Ḥawādith al-zamān wa-wafayyāt al-shuyūkh wa’l-aqrān,

ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām Tadmurī (Ṣaydā/Beirut: Al-Maktabat al-ʿaṣriyya,
1999), 1:195.
133. Al-Badrī, Al-Durr, 2:281. This is an edited version of a lithograph of a 23
Rajab 1276/24 January 1860 manuscript printed in Cairo under the title
Kitāb siḥr al-ʿuyūn. The author’s and copyist’s names are not found in this
manuscript, and the colophon indicates that it was copied for the Egyptian
writer ʿAbd al-Hādī Najā al-Ibyārī (d. 1305/1888).
134. Ibid.; Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 2:148.
135. Al-Biqāʿī,ʿUnwān, p. 36.
136. Ibn Iyās, Badāʿīʾ, 3:57–8. In the 1894 edition (2:126), only the first eight
lines are included.
137. Ibid., 3:58–9. In the 1894 edition (2:126), only the first five lines are
included.
71

3
Recollecting and Reconfiguring Afflicted

Literary Bodies
The adab anthology (majmūʿa), such as proliferated in the Mamluk era,

challenges modern literary historians’ conceptions of authorship, autho-
rial style and originality. Abdelfattah Kilito has argued that, in classical
Arabic literature, ‘individual style hardly exists. Instead, each genre pos-
sesses its own “composition”, a set of recurrent features common to a
number of works. Given these features, the reader can easily determine
the genre to which a given text belongs and move from that text to the
consideration of related texts.’1 In the Mamluk period, anthologies incor-
porated various organisational, structural and schematic features. Thomas
Bauer, in a thorough investigation of available sources, has identified four
typologies of the Mamluk anthology:
1. the anthology organised around a single theme, as in al-Ṣafadī’s anthology

of epigrams about skin moles, titled Kashf al-ḥāl fī waṣf al-khāl;
2. the anthology structured as a commentary on another work, as in
al-Ṣafadī’s Ghayth al-musajjam fī sharḥ Lāmiyyat al-ʿajam, which is a com-
mentary on Muʾayyad al-Dīn al-Ṭughrāʾī’s (d. 515/1121) poem Lāmiyyat
al-ʿajam;
3. the anthology of an author’s works, as in a dīwān of poetry;
4. and the anthology that blends two or more of these characteristics, result-
ing in works that are not easily classifiable or are notable exceptions to the
above three categories.2
In all of these types of anthologies, the conceptual work of the anthologist

lies mostly in his mode of composition – collecting and reorganising liter-
ary fragments – as this process created new spatial and temporal contexts
in which to appreciate literature. This trend of reorganising and recon-
figuring known information and texts came to characterise other literary
forms of the period. In fact, after reviewing Arabic-language Mamluk and
Ottoman literary works, one modern scholar concluded that they mostly
consisted of ‘ “literature of recollection”: dictionaries, commentaries upon
literature, manuals of administrative practice, above all historiography
72

Recollecting and Reconfiguring
and geography’.3 Genres of writing that centred on collecting information

and organising it according to a scheme (thematic or alphabetical, say), in
order to preserve them for posterity, became hallmarks of the age. In this
way, remembrance and the reordering of knowledge for public consump-
tion formed a significant basis of scholarly production. When one speaks
of ‘literatures of recollection’, one is referring to works based on memory,
introspection and reminiscence. However, the term ‘recollection’ means
more than just ‘remembrance’, as it can also be defined as ‘reassemblage’
or ‘re-membering’, which captures the sense of reordering information
to inform audience reactions to it. In this chapter, the friendly and pro-
fessional ties binding Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī to his pupil Taqī al-Dīn
al-Badrī al-Dimashqī (d. 894/1489) will be reconstructed, and their roles
in generating a particular discourse on marked bodies explored.4 First, the
formative influence of al-Ḥijāzī is rather apparent in portions of al-Badrī’s
two anthologies Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ fī waṣf al-wujūh al-ṣibāḥ (The Shining
Dawn: On the Description of Fair Faces) and Al-Durr al-maṣūn, al-
musammá bi-Siḥr al-ʿuyūn (The Guarded Pearl, also known as The Magic
of the Eyes); and al-Badrī masterfully integrates past and contemporary
voices into a canon of literature about blighted bodies.5 In al-Badrī’s
Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ, an anthology of romantic and erotic verses addressed
to men, afflicted male bodies are framed as beautiful, seductive and sym-
pathetic, offering a novel, aestheticised portrait of physical difference.
Al-Durr al-maṣūn exemplifies the process of fashioning literary canons on
particular themes – in this case, body parts.
Historical Context
Although al-Badrī enjoyed a strong reputation as an author of liter-
ary and historical works, his biography was not as widely recorded as
al-Ḥijāzī’s, so, in a departure from Chapter 2, this chapter will be con-
structed less as a close entanglement of biography and a particular histori-
cal moment and more as an investigation of the shared intellectual life of
this particular teacher and student through a close reading of al-Badrī’s
anthologies.
Situating the anthology Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ in the context of al-Badrī’s
professional and personal biographies illuminates several influences for
its composition. Al-Badrī was born in Rabīʿ I 847/1443 in Damascus and
grew up there. Al-Badrī visited Cairo many times with his father, but did
not stay there long enough to set up a home. He moved between the two
cities, working intermittently in Egypt and Syria as a copyist and a pro-
fessional witness. The instability and lack of prestige in his professional
73

life suggest humble origins. To reinforce this impression, his biographers

do not mention any shaykhs with whom he studied as a youth, or masters
who authorised him as a young man to teach, which was an uncommon
gap in a scholar’s intellectual biography. What has been recorded of his
formal education took place when he was in his forties. Al-Badrī forged
his own professional path as an adolescent, operating just outside the tra-
ditional elite process of inheriting social connections from one’s family.
His adolescence was distinguished by a lack of access to the best teachers
and no affiliation with elite religious institutions. What is known is that
he married young and became a widower while still a teenager. Although
his wife left him an ample inheritance, he found himself impoverished
for a time after her death. He then put his affairs in order, travelled to
Mecca and later moved to Syria, where he wrote Kitāb rāḥat al-arwāḥ
fī al-ḥashīsh wa’l-rāḥ (The Book of Comfort of Souls: On Hashish and
Wine), the most extensive Arabic-language treatise on the history and
uses of hashish and wine in the Middle East.6 This book was probably his
earliest one, which he claimed to have written in 867/1462–3 at the age of
20; and, with its publication, he established himself as a formidable liter-
ary presence in Cairo. He cited al-Ḥijāzī’s poetry and direct reports of his
anecdotes in various sections of this work, which suggests that the two
writers met during al-Badrī’s late adolescence.7 His Kitāb rāḥat al-arwāḥ
defined his career and legacy; and, a decade later in his topographical
treatise Nuzhat al-anām fī maḥāsin al-shām (The Recreation of Mankind:
On the Beauties of Damascus), he still referred to it as a relevant text.8
He also wrote Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ fī waṣf al-wujūh al-ṣibāḥ (The Shining
Dawn: On the Description of Fair Faces) in Damascus, telling al-Sakhāwī
that it was completed around 865/1460 or 1461; but Franz Rosenthal has
challenged the accuracy of al-Sakhāwī’s report. Based on clues within
the text, he argues that it was composed between 868/1464 and 871/1467,
when al-Badrī would have been between the ages of 24 and 27.9 However,
Rosenthal’s dating cannot be completely accurate, as al-Bāʿūnī, who
penned a blurb for this book, died in 870/1465.
In addition to these works, Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 953/1546) described him as the
author of ‘a well-known poetry collection and a history entitled Tabṣirat
ūlī al-abṣār fī inqirāḍ al-ʿumariyyin bi’l-layl wa’l-nahār’, as well as of
at least eleven other books on such subjects as Damascene topography
and agriculture, moon phases, local history, contemporary literary tastes,
caliphs, table companions and close friends.10
The emergence of his writing career from unconventional beginnings
set the tone for the rest of his career. Al-Badrī wrote books in a number of
genres, including history, geography, poetry and prose, but the intertextu-
74

ality within his corpus of works created generic overlaps. In addition to

referencing his past writings, he tended to quote the same authors in all
of his works, like Ibn Qalāqis (d. 567/1172), Ibn Nubātah (d. 768/1366),
Ibn Makānis (d. 822/1419) and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449).
Drawing from a fixed corpus of writers did not limit his literary production
or his choice of subjects. What contacts al-Badrī did make in this period
must have been hard won. The Cairene poet Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī was
probably his first real connection to elite scholarship, and this association
gave him access to a wide set of influential intellectuals. Among his more
famous teachers were Shihāb al-Dīn al-Manṣūrī, the last living member of
Cairo’s seven Shihābs, al-Samhūdī (d. 912/1506) and al-Sakhāwī. Rather
than having followed the typical scholar’s path of studying under them in
his youth, he only met the latter two in the final two or three years of his
life.
Mamluk Cairo and Damascus

The Mamluk capital cities of Cairo and Damascus were administratively,
economically, militarily and culturally significant in the sultanate, even
more so than the Hijaz, which, although the site of Islam’s two holiest
cities, was semi-autonomous. As such, Cairo and Damascus served
as twin academic pillars that were closely identified with the Mamluk
sultanate. Cairo functioned as al-Badrī’s intellectual centre, although
Damascus was his birthplace, and the dual importance of these locales
in his life moved him to take both cities’ names into his own nisba.
Even in his topographical work on Syria, he made references to and
comparisons with Cairo.11 His hybrid identity was not an unusual one,
as itinerancy and interregional movement characterised many scholars’
lives. The early Mamluk poet Ibn Nubātah himself took advantage of
his ties to Cairene and Damascene intellectual circles to meld two of
their literary forms into a new hybrid school of literary practice. Known
as the School of Licit Magic (madrasat al-siḥr al-ḥalāl), its hallmark
was blending the Egyptian and Syrian forms of tawriyya (double enten-
dre). Among his students and adherents were Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī
(d. 749/1349), al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363), who himself wrote a treatise on
tawriyya, and Burhān al-Dīn al-Qīrāṭī (d. 781/1379).12 Of this school,
‘the “seven Shihābs” were its most prominent students’.13 The influence
of this school of thought and of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, one of the seven
Shihābs, on al-Badrī’s Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ is evident, as al-Badrī frequently
cites therein the works of these older poets. Al-Badrī even gives promi-
nence to al-Ḥijāzī’s verse. More indicative of al-Ḥijāzī’s influence than
75

these citations is his generously worded blurb for Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ,

which will be examined in the following section.
Al-Badrī was in Cairo in Ramadan 875/February 1471 at the time of
al-Ḥijāzī’s death, caring for him in his final days.14 There is some evidence
that he remained in the region of Egypt and Syria until at least 25 Dhū
al-Ḥijja 876/3 June 1472, when Shah Suwwār b. Dhī al-Qādir, a rebellious
vassal to the Egyptian Mamluk sultanate, was captured by Mamluk forces
at his fortress in Zamantu, a city on Anatolia’s south-eastern border with
Syria. On 18 Rabiʿ I 877/23 August 1472, Shah Suwwār and his sixteen-
person entourage were led into Cairo. All but one of them were strung up
on hooks on Bāb Zuwayla, the southern gate of the old Fatimid city. Their
bodies were left suspended there for a day and a half. Al-Badrī composed
a couplet about the event, which he wrote from the perspective of the
deceased Shah Suwwar, suggesting that al-Badrī witnessed the gruesome
punishment. He wrote: ‘the angels who thrust the damned into Hell are
at Bāb Zuwayla, and they have seized my life with hooks’.15 The public
spectacle of capital punishment was a frequent and well-attended occur-
rence in Mamluk Cairo, and Bāb Zuwayla was the official site where the
bodies of captives and political prisoners were paraded and was also the
location where sultans entered and exited the city. Displaying flayed and
mutilated bodies reminded the sultan’s subjects of the ruler’s power and
the corporeal consequences of disobedience. That al-Badrī could assume
in his poetry the voice of a disgraced, deceased political dissident indicates
an ability to imagine and/or appropriate other men’s pain and life experi-
ences. This window into al-Badrī’s historical writing shows his willing-
ness to insert his own voice into the historical record and even manipulate
the voices of deceased actors by imagining their words. Whether moti-
vated by the literary challenge, by social conscience, by empathy or by
something else entirely, his responses to suffering bodies are echoed in a
chapter in Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ about afflicted body parts.
In Rabīʿ II 877/September 1472, just one month after the incident at
Bāb Zuwayla, Shams al-Dīn al-ʿAynṭābī al-Amshāṭī (d. 902/1496) was
appointed chief Ḥanafī judge of Cairo, replacing the venerable Muḥibb
al-Dīn b. al-Shiḥna, whom Sultan Qāytbāy had summarily dismissed after
disagreeing with one of his rulings. Al-Badrī composed verses to mark the
occasion – and, given his allegiance to the Shiḥna clan, they were prob-
ably openly critical of Ibn al-Shiḥna’s removal and implicitly critical of
the new appointee. These verses did not come to al-Amshāṭī’s attention
until al-Badrī spoke ill of ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Yūsuf al-Qibṭī (d. 896/1491),
al-Amshāṭī’s housemate (nazīl) at al-Barqūqiyya Sufi lodge, by accus-
ing him of ‘a hideous thing’.16 Al-Sakhāwī refrained from specifying the
76

allegation in al-Badrī’s biographical entry, averring that ‘God knows best’

about this affair, but he did write in al-Qibṭī’s own entry that
al-Amshāṭī . . . was highly revered until he had him [al-Qibṭī] live with him in
one of the two rooms for shaykhs in al-Barqūqiyya. Things happened to him
that may have been false or true. These allegations caused him to turn away
from carrying out his office. His outward asceticism, piety and modesty were
accused of being shams and exaggerations.17
Al-Amshāṭī was so outraged by this affront that he moved quickly to
have al-Badrī brought to him; but he was nowhere to be found. He then
declared al-Badrī unable to serve as a witness, but this prohibition only
lasted a short time. Soon thereafter, one of al-Badrī’s wives died, leaving
him a large inheritance. In due time, he lost all his money. He travelled
to Mecca, then lived in Syria, then moved to Medina in 892/1486–7. In
Medina, he copied the works of al-Samhūdī, a blind religious scholar who
had moved to the city the same time as he. Al-Badrī remained in Medina
for less than one year, and by 893/1487 or 1488 had moved to Mecca
to hear hadith from al-Sakhāwī. He wrote the following in praise of his
teacher:18
judda lī sarīʿan bi’l-ḥadīthi ijāzatan
yā kāmilan dum wāfiru al-iʿṭāʾi
He toiled long and fast so I could have an ijāza for hadith.
O, my cup runneth over from this award!
This praise poem is cleverly constructed in metre, if not in message. Three
poetic metres are named in the poem: sarīʿ, kāmil and wāfir. A fourth
metre, rajaz, is not named, though an allusion is made to it with the word
ijāza – a near rhyme. The phrase judda lī sarīʿan roughly scans as sarīʿ;
bi’l-ḥadīthi ijāzatan scans as rajaz. But bi’l-ḥadīthi ijāzatan / yā kāmilan
scans as kāmil. Finally, dum wāfiru al-iʿṭāʾi scans as wāfir.
He worked as a merchant in Mecca; and in Dhū al-Ḥijja 893/November
1488, the final month of the hijri calendar and also the month of Muslim
pilgrimage, he may have been working in a ḥānūṭ, a room beneath a reli-
gious building that merchants rented as shops, warehouses or stand-alone
stores. The rented rooms funded building upkeep in Mecca during the
pilgrimage festivities. Al-Badrī fell ill in Mecca that month and travelled
from the city in this weakened state. He was aboard a vessel sailing on
the Red Sea at the beginning of Muḥarram 894/December 1489. He had
disembarked at Al-Ṭūr port on the Sinai peninsula and had reached the
city of Gaza when death overcame him in Jumādā I or II, at the age of 47.
Two or more children and maybe his father survived him.19 The news only
reached al-Sakhāwī four or five months later, in the month of Shawwāl.
77

Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ fī waṣf al-wujūh al-ṣibāḥ

The British Library holds the sole surviving manuscript of Ghurrat
al-ṣabāḥ, a copy dated 5 Dhū al-Ḥijja 875/25 May 1471 – mere months
after the death of al-Ḥijāzī.20 It is a compilation of mostly Ayyubid and
Mamluk mudhakkarāt (romantic or erotic verses addressed to men),
though several earlier poets, like Imām al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), ʿAlī b.
al-Jahm (d. 249/863) and al-Waʾwāʾ (d. c. 385/995), are also notably
included. The anthology itself is prefaced by endorsements (taqāriẓ, sing.
taqrīẓ) from five of al-Badrī’s contemporaries, some of whose poems
appear in this anthology:
1. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, whose blurb is dated 16 Jumādā II 871/23 January
1467;
2. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Manṣūrī (d. 887/1482);
3. ʿAbd al-Barr b. al-Shiḥna (d. 921/1515 or 1516);
4. Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. ʿUmar b. al-Naṣībī (d. 916/1510); and
5. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Awtārī (d. after 878/1473).
Al-Sakhāwī mentioned five other eminent writers who had also written
blurbs for al-Badrī’s collection, including Burhān al-Dīn al-Bāʿūnī
(d. 870/1465), al-Bāʿūnī’s two unidentified brothers, Shams al-Dīn
Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Qādirī (b. 824/1421, death date unknown) and
the historian-poet Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Qurqmās al-Sayfī al-ʿAlāʾī
(d. 942/1535). Al-Sakhāwī himself was also asked to compose a taqrīẓ
(alt. taqrīḍ) for the collection; and he claimed to have produced a lovely
one, but this text has not been recovered.21 Although none of these latter
five endorsements appears in the London manuscript, they may have been
appended to other versions of the work or published together as a separate
pamphlet. Certainly, all of the blurbs offered uniform praise using stock
imagery for al-Badrī and his anthology, so they are not useful for assess-
ing the literary value of the work or the ability of the author. Rather, as
Rosenthal has remarked, the blurb
tells us something about literary habits and modes of thought, and it has
the potential to add to our knowledge of the organisation of past intellec-
tual life and the relationships among intellectuals and their role in society.
The medieval Arabic ‘blurb’ sheds some light on the social motivations
behind literary activity and the development of ways to propagate literary
products.22
The blurbs for Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ offer insight into hierarchies within
al-Badrī’s professional networks. As for the preserved taqāriẓ, Al-Ḥijāzī’s
was written earliest and would have carried a lot of weight in Mamluk
78

literary circles. Because he had already written Jannat al-wildān, a well-

received collection of love poems addressed to male youths, his endorse-
ment of a similarly themed work carried considerable authority. The two
men’s shared interests in homoeroticism has led Franz Rosenthal to raise
the question of who influenced whom, ultimately concluding that ‘the
possibility that al-Ḥijāzī could have conceived the idea for his work upon
hearing about al-Badrī’s project can safely be excluded; more likely, it
was he who suggested the project to al-Badrī’.23 Another source of possi-
ble inspiration was al-Nawājī’s anthology of homoerotic poems. Al-Badrī
himself acknowledged no forebears or contemporaries who influenced
or inspired his work, though he did remark in the foreword that ‘one
of the elites . . . asked me to compile a unique anthology for him about
young boys’. However, he was so taken aback by the moral implications
of writing about the subject that he needed time to reflect. ‘I responded
to his question after it had occurred to me that I had a duty to obey his
example. So I gathered together for him these jewels and stars, luminous
and splendid.’24
In the spirit of a mentor eminently proud of his pupil’s achievements,
al-Ḥijāzī used ornate rhetoric and hyperbole to describe the scope of
al-Badrī’s composition, situating it as a strong contribution to literature
that would have deeply impressed past writers:
If Ibn Qalāqis [d. 567/1172] had heard al-Badrī’s composition, then he

would have lowered his head shamefully and been humbled. If Ibn al-Khaṭīb
[d. 776/1374] had seen the grandeur of his minaret (manār), then he
would have said that this man is an unparalleled compiler. If Ibn Mammātī
[d. 606/1209] had beheld his collection, he would have been revived. Would
that he had had food (al-mammāt)!25
Comparing the current author to past luminaries was a generic convention

among writers of such endorsements in 8th/14th- and 9th/15th-century
Cairo, and in 795/1393 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī even employed a similar
‘allusion to a shared literary heritage’ in a blurb for Ibn Damāmīnī’s
(d. 827/1424) Nuzūl al-ghayth (The Rainfall).26 Al-Ḥijāzī’s endorsement
carried such force because it depicted Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ as a composition
that had the power to humble, embarrass, impress and even spare past lit-
erary giants from fatal illnesses. By invoking the memory of these literary
predecessors, al-Ḥijāzī amplified the worth of this individual work. The
reading and listening publics were not the only intended audiences for
al-Ḥijāzī’s writings. The compiler himself, al-Badrī, paid close attention
to his teacher’s comments about Ibn Qalāqis, later echoing his teacher’s
language in the conclusion of his circa 893/1487 anthology Al-Durr
79

al-maṣūn, but inverted the imagery about Ibn Qalāqis.27 Writing nearly
twenty-one years after al-Ḥijāzī had completed his endorsement, al-Badrī
concluded the lengthy work thus: ‘Let us content ourselves, in this book
of ours, with Ibn Qalāqis’s words that made heads bow to him. According
to what the pen has recorded [that is, historical records], people pointed
to him with their fingertips [indicating that he was a famous, remarkable
man].’28 Al-Ḥijāzī deeply admired Ibn Qalāqis’s poetry and included
numerous samples of his verse in his anthology Rawḍ al-ādāb.29 Al-Badrī,
too, felt an attachment to Ibn Qalāqis and paid homage to him and, by
extension, to al-Ḥijāzī’s mentorship.
Following the endorsements and al-Badrī’s foreword comes the anthol-
ogy itself, Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ, which is arranged in seventeen thematic
chapters:30
1. Men’s names
2. Adjectives deriving from the names of locations, religions etc.
3. Clothes and jewellery
4. Political elites
5. Soldiers
6. Archers and hunters
7. Public officials
8. Merchants and jewellers
9. Labourers and porters
10. Petty merchants and those who eke out a living
11. Sellers of fruits and flowers
12. Artisans and merchants
13. Laudable physical attributes
14. Afflicted limbs and body parts
15. Miscellanea
16. Beauty moles
17. Beard down.
Chapter 14, titled ‘Those with Afflicted Limbs and Body Parts’, com-
prises twenty-five folios and approximately 160 poems, ranging in length
from one to four lines. The title words focus attention to the body part
bearing the blight, thereby constructing bodily organs and limbs as aes-
thetic subjects; and each epigram stunningly reconfigures each afflicted
part as beautiful. How does writing the body in parts alter the boundaries
of the discursive body, and what critical work is done in aestheticising
body parts?
Among the earliest poets featured are Imām al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820) and
ʿAlī b. al-Jahm (d. 249/863), who appear alongside some of al-Badrī’s
contemporaries, like al-Ḥijāzī. Additionally, the authors come from all
80

over the Arabic-speaking world. In fact, the three authors just mentioned
hail from Baghdad, Basra and Cairo respectively. Some of them had
afflicted and missing body parts themselves. In 812/1409, the Mamluk
sultan al-Nāṣir Faraj accused the Damascene poet Aḥmad b. Yūsuf
al-Zuʿayfarīnī (d. 830/1426) of treason and ordered the removal of a
portion of his tongue and all of the fingers of his right hand. Al-Maʿarrī,
who only has one poem featured in this chapter, was blinded at the age of
four after suffering complications from smallpox.31
The Mamluk era ushered in a flood of literature related to blighted
bodies, distinguished from Abbasid lists, anecdotes and occasional poetry
by its inclusion in new genres. Al-Ṣafadī’s Nakt al-himyān ʿalá nukat
al-ʿumyān consists of 313 biographical entries about prominent blind
men, and his much later Al-Shuʿūr bi’l-ʿūr consists of entries about one-
eyed men and women. According to al-Sakhāwī, al-Ṣafadī wrote as yet
unrecovered histories about weak-sighted and hunchbacked people.32 One
of al-Ṣafadī’s poems that al-Badrī included in his collection is emblematic
of the most pervasive literary impulse in Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ – a reconfigu-
ration of normative body aesthetics and an inversion of the standard trope
in love poetry of a healthy beloved and the lover whose intense affections
make him ill. Al-Ṣafadī wrote:
As for the lame man, I could not free myself from his love.
How much the reproachers censured me for it and aggravated the situation.
So I answered their reproaches, ‘What is the shame in the matter?
Rather, this angel’s very beauty is that he is lame.’33
Al-Badrī’s method of compilation innovatively gives these poems new

significances. Writing about early modern and modern English antholo-
gies, Anne Ferry has noted that ‘the unique role and presence of the
anthologist can give a different direction to the experience of reading a
poem than if it were read elsewhere’.34 Selecting and splicing together
material from different genres, periods and places are liberties uniquely
accorded to the anthologist; and al-Badrī in this capacity was able to create
a new context and moment in which to appreciate the verses. Ghurrat
al-ṣabāḥ effectively obliterates the historical, social and literary contexts
in which these verses were originally written. At times, the effect is carried
into individual poems, where it is difficult to place the bodies described in
any social context. The experience of reading a single poem on blights in
a poet’s dīwān differs significantly from reading the same poem alongside
similarly themed works by other authors. With anthologies, the process
of extracting and reassembling is essential to the genre. So, what can one
learn from the material he chose to include?
81

In an epigram or short poem, an author can only present a succinct and

sometimes partially developed scene or idea. These literary snippets allow
his audiences to absorb the material quickly. In one example, al-Badrī
included the following verse: ‘I asked him about his hand, asked him what
had caused it pain. / He said, “My hand is broken”, and I responded, “So
is my heart”.’35 Terribly moved by the suffering of the unnamed man,
the speaker reveals empathy, solidarity and compassion in a single line
of verse. With such brief poems as this one, more text fits onto a single
folio, giving a visual sense of copious, easy-to-digest poetic samples. In
this way, anthologies influence audience responses to the material at hand.
Al-Badrī’s work had the potential to create new associations with stand-
ard texts by reconfiguring their spatial arrangements. These new sites of
analysis make possible an innovative presentation of blighted bodies, as
al-Badrī has rendered past utterances about blights legible to his 9th/15th-
century audience. Poetic traditions are re-archived, informing the ways
in which their particular subjects are remembered. While anthologising
does not necessitate the creation of original material, the opportunity to
fashion new canons, thereby establishing new sites of collective memory,
stands as a rather broad project with major social, political and literary
significance. Indeed, al-Badrī’s reassembly of this set of poems presents a
sense of continuity, as he has constructed a quasi-narrative about the cycle
of life, illness and death. From beginning to end, chapter 14 follows a
teleological arch of illness, opening with poems praising medical workers
who treat afflicted patients, moving then to men with various afflictions,
sufferers of declining health, death, burial and men visiting their belov-
eds’ tombs. The author’s conceptualisation of illness follows the model
for progression of disease in Prophetic medicine (al-ṭibb al-nabawī).
Al-Badrī wrote in al-Durr al-maṣūn, an anthology he later composed
about the eye: ‘Every illness shifts, and it has four stages: onset, increase,
end and decline’.36 The associations from poem to poem are not always
thematic. Most often, each successive verse was chosen either for its
thematic relevance to the previous one or for its having been written by
the same author as the previous one. Rosenthal found this organisational
principle somewhat disruptive, remarking that ‘the decision as to where to
put some of the epigrams seems at time to have caused a small problem
for him’.37 The chapter’s final poems praise young boys who have been
orphaned by illness and who, in their isolation, seek solace with the
poems’ male speakers. The attention of the adult speakers on the now
extremely vulnerable boys represents a striking and haunting end to the
chapter. In one such poem, the speaker remarks on the ‘blessed water’
coursing down the orphan’s face around his cheek moles, compares his
82

front teeth to ‘stringed pearls’, claims to be wasting away from his affec-
tion for him and is ultimately moved to ‘cry in solitude over an orphan’.
The death of ill bodies creates new focus on young, isolated, vital bodies.
Throughout this anthology, the reassembly of poems about bodies and
their body parts comes together to create a hybrid corpus of work and a
composite human body that is the sum of its individual diseased parts. The
technique is reminiscent of that of ancient Greek sculptors who chose
the best parts of various models in order to produce an image so beautiful that
it could not exist in nature: They would take the form from one, the small of
the back from another, the face from a third, and so on. In this way a sculpted
or painted body was a kind of compendium, a collection of parts which, taken
together, created an ideal impression.38
Al-Badrī gamely adapted this visual conceit to his literary project; he

has not only reassembled a set of poems, but also re-membered a seg-
mented human body into an idealised composite whole. This act of
‘textual fragmentation of the body’, to borrow Terry Wilfong’s phrase,
is gendered male in this anthology, but al-Ḥijāzī and other authors wrote
about women’s blighted body parts too.39 In Wilfong’s study of Coptic
communities in Egypt from 400 to 1000 CE, he read isolated body parts
to understand how they were differently valorised in magical, medical,
religious, poetic, visual and historical sources and in the confined spaces
of convents, monasteries and homes. The variance of constructions of
segmented male and female bodies and the impossibility of deriving a
single unitary theory of the body arise from Wilfong’s study. In much the
same way, al-Badrī has not advanced a unified vision of disability aesthet-
ics or male-male homoerotics in this period, but has produced a worthy
contribution to the genre of literature about body parts, like al-Nawājī’s
(d. 859/1455) study of birthmarks, and literary traditions about blights.
Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ resituated knowledge about blighted bodies. By
focusing on the literary body, al-Badrī heightened the abilities, identities,
cultural and aesthetic ascriptions and fetishes of individual body parts; and
the technique works to tremendously strong effect in the literary construc-
tion of a wholly diseased male body and also for the entire anthology. In
Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ, illnesses and afflictions play out over every inch of
the human body; and, in the end, every part of this wholly afflicted body
dies. The multi-layered, seductive and symbolic forces of body parts find
expression in this miscellany dedicated to male homoerotics of blighted
bodies.
Here is an outline of chapter 14 of al-Badrī’s Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ, ‘Those
with Afflicted Limbs and Body Parts’:
83

Folio Subject of poem Poet

152b Doctor Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. 749/1349)
Doctor Daftarkhwān (d. 7th/13th century)
153a Doctor Jamāl al-Dīn b. Maṭrūḥ (d. 649/1251)
Medical student Jamāl al-Dīn b. Maṭrūḥ (d. 649/1251)
Eye doctor Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Eye doctor Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Eye doctor Daftarkhwān (d. 7th/13th century)
One who performs cupping ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī
Barber Ibn al-Faḍl b. Abī Wafāʾ
53b Student of bloodletting Ibn al-Faḍl b. Abī Wafāʾ
Sub-chapter entitled ‘The Afflicted’
Hunchback Unattributed
Hunchback Maḥāsin al-Shawā (d. 635/1237)
Hunchback Ibn al-Mazīz
Flat-nosed Unattributed
Blind Zayn al-Dīn b. Labbaykum
Blind ʿAlā al-Dīn al-Wadaʿī
154a Blind Ibn Nubātah (d.768/1366)
Blind Unattributed
One-eyed Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. 749/1349)
One-eyed Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. 749/1349)
One-eyed Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī (d. 875/1471);
see also Kunnas, p. 129
One-eyed Ibn Abī Ḥajala (d. 766/1375)
One-eyed Ibn al-ʿAfīf al-Tilimsānī (d. 688/1289)
154b Eye Burhān al-Dīn al-Qīrāṭī (d. 781/1379)
Jaundice Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk (d. 609/1211)
Cross-eyed Unattributed
Cross-eyed Ṣadr al-Dīn b. al-Wakīl (d. 716/1316)
Close-set eyes40 Abū al-Ḥasan al-Muqrī (d. 402/1011)
Having a contorted eye Abū al-Ḥasan al-Muqrī (d. 402/1011)
Deaf (atrash) Abū al-Ḥasan al-Muqrī (d. 402/1011)
155a Deaf (dhā ṣamam) Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī (d. 875/1471);
see also Kunnas, p. 125
Deaf (aṣamm) Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449)
Deaf (aṣamm) Zayn al-Dīn b. Labbaykum
Who fell off a roof and hit Unattributed
the ground
Stutterer Unattributed
With a chipped front tooth Shihāb al-Dīn al-Thaqafī
84

Stutterer Unattributed
155b Stutterer Sarī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Barr b. al-Shiḥna
al-Ḥanafī (d. 921/1515)
Lisp (althaʿ) Sarī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Barr b. al-Shiḥna
al-Ḥanafī (d. 921/1515)
Lisp Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, direct
transmission (d. 875/1471); see also
Kunnas, p. 126
Lisp Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār (d. 749/1348)
Lisp Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. 749/1349)
Lisp Daftarkhwān (d. 7th/13th century)
Lisp Al-Qayyim al-Fākhūrī
156a Lisp Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. 749/1349)
Lameness Unattributed
Lameness Abū al-Barakāt al-Andalusī
Lameness Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Lameness Ibn Dāniyāl (d. 710/1310)
Ophthalmia Unattributed
156b Ophthalmia Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 296/908)
Ophthalmia Ibn Dāniyāl (d. 710/1310)
Ophthalmia Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 777/1375)
Ophthalmia Jamāl al-Dīn al-Nabulusī
Eye reddened from Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, direct
ophthalmia transmission (d. 875/1471); see also
Kunnas, p. 130
Eye reddened from Al-Armawī
ophthalmia
Who complains about his eye Unattributed
157a Veiny eyes from ophthalmia Unattributed
Swollen eye Majd al-Dīn b. Makānis (d. 822/1419)
Broken tooth Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Zuraʿī
Freckle-faced Ibn ʿArabī (d. 656/1258)
Freckle-faced Al-Nāṣir b. al-Naqīb (d. c. 687/1288)
Freckle-faced Zayn al-Dīn b. Labbaykum
Halitosis Ibn ʿArabī (d. 656/1258)
157b Measles Al-Sirāj ʿUmar al-Warrāq (d. 695/1296)
Measles Majd al-Dīn b. Makānis (d. 822/1419)
Leprosy (bahaq) Shihāb al-Dīn b. Yusuf al-Zuʿayfarīnī
(d. 830/1426)
Mange Unattributed
Itching skin eruption Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 777/1375)
85

Smallpox Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. 749/1349)

Smallpox Majd al-Dīn b. Makānis (d. 822/1419)
158a Adolescent acne Ibn Luʾluʾ al-Dhahabī (d. 680/1281)
Adolescent acne Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Bump on cheek Majd al-Dīn b. Makānis (d. 822/1419)
Bump on cheek Ibn al-ʿAfīf al-Tilimsānī (d. 688/1289)
Bump on lip Al-Badr Ḥasan al-Ghazzī al-Zuʿarī (b.
1306, death date unknown)
(bi-khaddihi al-ʿatash) Unattributed
Smallpox Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Wounded mouth Unattributed
158b Plague boils on the leg Al-Ṣalāḥ al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Plague boils on the leg Al-Ṣalāḥ al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Stung by scorpion Jamāl al-Dīn b. Maṭrūḥ (d. 649/1251)
Bee-stung lips Al-ʿAlāʾ al-*m*di
Enchanted (masḥūr) Maḥāsin al-Shawā (d. 635/1237)
Demon possession/mental Maḥāsin al-Shawā (d. 635/1237)
illness
Demon possession/mental Muḥammad al-Azharī
illness
Satan Majd al-Dīn b. Makānis (d. 822/1419)
159a Crucified Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Aḥṭar
Crucified ʿAmarah al-Yamanī, cited from
al-Murqiṣ wa’l-muṭrib41
Broken hand Unattributed
Broken hand Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. 749/1349)
Mute Shihāb al-Dīn b. Yūsuf al-Zuʿayfarīnī
(d. 830/1426)
Whose leg was cupped Unattributed
Who underwent cupping Unattributed
Who underwent cupping Zayn al-Dīn b. Labbaykum
159b Bloodletting Al-Qayyim al-Fākhūrī
Whose forearm was cupped Unattributed
Whose arm was cupped Unattributed
Attempted cupping Unattributed
Felt pain in his limbs Unattributed
Whose broken bones were set Majd al-Dīn b. Makānis (d. 822/1419)
160a Slashes on cheek Unattributed
Fractured forehead Muḥyī al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d.
692/1292)
Bite on cheek Unattributed
86

Wounded cheek Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)

Wounded cheek Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Wounded cheek Ibn Aybak al-Dimashqī (d. 801/1398)
160b Wounded by brother Ibn al-Muraḥḥal (d. 699/1300)
Cut open his palm Ibn al-ʿAfīf al-Tilimsānī (d. 688/1289)
Burned his hand in a fire Nāṣir al-Dīn b. al-Naqīb (d. c.
687/1288)
Wounded forehead Ibn Ḥabīb al-Ḥalabī (d. 779/1377)
Cauterised temple Al-Badrī (d. 894/1489)
Skin incision42 Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
161a Skin incision Ibn Nubātah (d. 768/1366)
Skin incision Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 777/1375)
Skin incision Maḥāsin al-Shawā (d. 635/1237)
Molar pain Unattributed
Broken tooth Al-Badrī (d. 894/1489)
Pulled out tooth Safī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349)
Pulled out tooth Daftarkhwān (d. 7th/13th century)
Leprous or slain? Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Ghassānī
(muqaʿṭal)43 al-Waʾwāʾ al-Dimashqī (d. c. 385/
995)
161b Violent shaking and diarrhoea Al-Sirāj al-Maḥḥār (d. 711/1311)
Fever Unattributed
Fever Ibn Ḥabīb al-Ḥalabī (d. 779/1377)
Fever Al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Fāḍil (d.
596/1200)
Fever Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk (d. 609/1211)
162a Fever Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥājibī
Fever Same as preceding poem with a
different speaker
Fever Najm al-Dīn b. Isrāʾil (d. 667/1268)
Fever Al-Sirāj ʿUmar al-Warrāq (d. 695/
1296)
Fever Daftarkhwān (d. 7th/13th century)
Whom a doctor visited and Unattributed
treated
162b Who fell ill from something Unattributed
he ate
Fever Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 296/908)
Healer (?) Unattributed
Sick (or healing?) Imām al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820)
Who regained health Unattributed
87

Speaker honours lover Burhān al-Dīn b. Shajāʿ

through breaking fast, not
through fasting
Who drank medicine Unattributed
163a Who drank medicine Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad
b. Muẓaffar
Who drank medicine Ibn Nubātah (d. 768/1366)
Who drank medicine Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 777/1375)
Cauterised hand Najm al-Dīn b. Isrāʾil (d. 667/
1268)
Cauterised hand Tāj al-Dīn al-Naqīb
Cauterised hand Jamāl al-Dīn Mūsá b. Yaghmūr
(d. 664/1265)
Whose health improved, Unattributed
then declined
163b Whose health improved, ʿAlī b. al-Jahm (d. 249/863)
then declined
Ill (ʿalīl) Unattributed
Sick (marīḍ) Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk (d. 609/1211)
Ailing (saqīm) Abū al-Faḍl b. al-Amīn, direct
transmission
Visiting a sick lover Shams al-Dīn al-Qādirī (b. 824/1421,
death date unknown)
In the throes of death Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, direct
transmission (d. 894/1471)
Who was near death Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 777/1375)
164a Who embraced his dying Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
lover
A man turned towards the Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
qiblah
Eulogising a dead man Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, direct
Eulogising a dead man Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār (d. 749/1348)
Crying for his love and Unattributed
devotion
Beautiful black man crying Maḥāsin al-Shawā (d. 635/1237)
behind a bier
88

164b Whom the earth took Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, direct

Whom the earth took Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, direct
Whom the earth took Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī, direct
Someone addressing his Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
beloved’s grave
Qur’an-reciter (muqrī)44 Ibn al-ʿAfīf al-Tilimsānī (d. 688/1289)
On two lovers who visit Unattributed
their beloveds’ tombs
165a Whose grave sprouts a flower Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Whose grave sprouts a flower Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Orphan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363)
Orphan Fakhr al-Dīn b. Makānis (d. 794/1392)45
Al-Durr al-maṣūn
Al-Badrī’s choice of the eye as the subject of the anthology al-Durr
al-maṣūn may reflect the pre-eminence of the field of ophthalmology in
the medieval Islamicate world; the medical advancements achieved in this
time surpassed the knowledge of neighbouring civilisations in both scope
and depth. Arabs were renowned for their pre-eminence and expertise in
the sciences of the eye, so al-Badrī had a wealth of information at his dis-
posal and recourse to earlier works in the field when he began composing
his own work. His massive anthology about the eye has been characterised
as ‘a synthesis of ophthalmological observations and poetry emulating
al-Ṣafadī’s Ṣarf al-ʿayn’.46 Al-Ṣafadī’s large anthology comprises materi-
als on Islamic jurisprudence, Arabic language, literature and alphabeti-
cally arranged selections of poetry, and al-Badrī’s collection comprises
much more than just eye-related medical information and verse. Historical
anecdotes, prophetic hadith, Qur’anic scripture, fables, legal debates,
letter magic, aphorisms and literary references to eyes round out Al-Durr
al-maṣūn. Compiled between 893/1487 and 894/1488, towards the end of
his life, the sum of the influence of al-Badrī’s mentors is prominent in this
text. A veiled reference to al-Ṣafadī appears in the opening pages of the
book: ‘I named this work Siḥr al-ʿuyūn because the essence of a thing is its
name, and by my life, it is known to literary critics and arbiters of refined
literary taste who understand what there is of utility, double entendre, elo-
quence and harmony in this name’.47 The reference to utility and double
entendre mirrors the language of the title of al-Ṣafadī’s treatise on double
89

entendre and its uses as a poetic device – another subtle reference to the
value that al-Badrī assigned to al-Ṣafadī and the School of Licit Magic.
If chapter 14 of Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ represents a uniquely ordered selec-
tion of homoerotic poetry praising blighted bodies, then al-Durr al-maṣūn
is its counterpart rooted in historically normative practices of writing
about eyes, blighted or otherwise. Blights among the ashrāf are explored
in traditional fashion as lists of names or partially narrativised lists. Here,
al-Badrī explores etymologies, definitions and grammatical variations of
blight-related terms. All in all, it is an expansive exploration of eyes from
many perspectives – that of medical workers, jurists, religious scholars,
men and women of letters, practitioners and believers of magic, and histo-
rians. Due to the range of viewpoints incorporated into this work, popular
and elite registers of voices find representation in his compendium.
The first chapter of al-Durr centres on ‘the power of vision’, or the
agency of the eye. Magical tables, incantations and diagrams of the
magical properties of the eye concretise popular beliefs about the eye’s
ability to influence the physical world. The chapter closes with a story of
violence against Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, a blue-eyed woman from the central
Arabian region of al-Yamāma, who could see three days into the future
and used her ability to protect her clan from surprise attacks. Interestingly,
her rare ability is constructed not as supernatural foresight but rather as
the result of vision so acute that ‘she could spot a white hair in milk’.48
One day, she claimed to see trees approaching their settlement to attack,
and the people of al-Yamāma roundly denounced her as feeble-minded
and insane. She was also accused of lying, then was seized and had her
eyes gouged out. It turned out that the enemy horsemen had covered them-
selves and their riding animals with leaves to disguise their advance and,
as a result, successfully ambushed the settlement and handily defeated the
settlers.
This story raises a number of questions about the nature of the Blue-
Eyed Woman’s ability. The pairing of sharply piercing sight with clair-
voyance may be a hyperbolic statement or an indication of how sight was
configured. Relatedly, common Arab lore credited blind individuals with
greater ‘vision of the heart’ or the ability to discern feelings and to access
piety with greater ease. Figurative conceptions of sight (through time and
space, and with organs other than the eyes) bespeak a view of the body that
rejects neat compartmentalisations and boundaries of physical abilities.
The heart can see, and the eye can discern the future. Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma’s
eyes had agency and possessed abilities that belonged solely to the eyes.
The blue colour of her eyes only heightened the ‘otherness’ of her abilities.
A reinforced sense of her difference contributed to the violent reactions of
90

her peers to her suspected lies. The punishment of removing offending

body parts is rooted in Islamic jurisprudence, and the amputation of limbs
was essentially an order of death for the body part that had transgressed
moral order. No judge, however, ordered this woman’s punishment;
and her fellow tribespeople exacted this gruesome sentence as a form of
impromptu justice against a woman who threatened their peace and their
sense of honour and who transgressed physical and sexual norms. In later
sections about the magical properties of the eye, women figure as the
main possessors of these abilities. Even when they are shown to use ‘licit
magic’, they are accused of being, or are found to be, treacherous.
The second chapter turns to the legal implications of evil eyes and
includes various discussions on determining the blood price (diya) for
injuries caused by evil eyes. In chapter 3 al-Badrī discusses eye-related
illnesses and mentions descendants of the Prophet who were one-eyed and
blind, as well as anecdotes about the Followers who were blind. Chapter 4
is about ophthalmology and cures of eye diseases.
In the fifth chapter, al-Badrī describes different parts of the eye, empha-
sising that even units of a whole can be particularised and divided into
even smaller units. The eye is not a unitary organ, and many of its smaller
components find recognition in this chapter. Indeed, al-Badrī writes about
the inner corner of the eye, as well as the follicles on the eyelids from
which eyelashes grow. Ibn Nubātah praised these follicles as the best part
of a woman’s eye.49 The enchanting capabilities of women’s eyes, which
reference the book title, are detailed in random places throughout these
volumes. In another instance, a man encounters a slave woman with eyes
so beautiful that they compel him to pay 40,000 dirhams for her.50 The
sixth chapter features jokes and anecdotes about eyes, and the concluding
chapters feature mostly love poetry about eyes.
The restoration of historical performances by anthologising multi-
ple performances changes their original meanings and significations.
Al-Badrī’s anthologies resituated knowledge about blighted bodies. By
focusing on the literary body, al-Badrī heightens the abilities, identities,
cultural and aesthetic ascriptions and fetishes of individual body parts.
When treated singly as subjects, limbs and organs transform into liter-
ary or historical subjects with agency and identity, calling into question
the notion of a person’s control over his or her own body. Control is an
illusion when the constitutive parts of a body possess identities and wills.
Ascribing agency to one part of the human body creates a particular
relationship of the part to the whole, and the technique works to differ-
ent effect in each anthology. In Ghurrat al-ṣabāḥ, illnesses play out over
every inch of the human body; and, in the end, every part of this wholly
91

afflicted body dies. In al-Durr al-maṣūn, the seductive, coercive, symbolic

and magical forces of the eye find expression in this miscellany dedicated
to this singular organ – the eye.
Notes
1. Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic
Culture, trans. Michael Cooperson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2001), p. 2.
2. Thomas Bauer, ‘Literarische Anthologien der Mamlūkenzeit’, in Stephan
Conermann and Anja Pistor-Hatam (eds), Die Mamluken. Studien zu ihrer
Geschichte und Kultur. Zum Gedenken an Ulrich Haarmann (1942–1999)
(Schenefeld: EB-Verlag, 2003), pp. 73–9. For more on Mamluk anthologies,
see chapter 4 (‘An Anthology as a Mirror of Literary Tastes’) of Vrolijk’s
Bringing a Laugh to a Scowling Face.
3. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991), p. 200.
4. Brockelmann incorrectly listed his death date as 909/1503 in GAL 2:132 and
GAL Supplement 2:163. Al-Sakhāwī, one of al-Badrī’s teachers, rendered
his full name Abū Bakr b. ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh
Taqī al-Dīn b. al-Jamāl al-Dimashqī al-Qāhirī al-Shāfiʿī al-Shāʿir al-Wafāʾī,
noting additionally that he was known as Ibn al-Badrī and that his kunya was
Abū al-Tuqā (Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʿ, 11:41). For additional notes on various
versions of this author’s name, see Charles Rieu and W. Cureton (eds),
Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum orientalium qui in Museo Britannico
asservantur Pars secunda, codices arabicos amplectens (London: British
Museum, 1846–71), pp. 478–9.
5. Although I am unaware of contemporary Arabic anthologies of disability
poetry, the genre is gaining prominence in the contemporary USA. See, for
instance, Jennifer Bartlett et al. (eds), Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry
of Disability (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos, 2011), and the recently founded
Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry.
6. For more on Kitāb rāḥat al-arwāḥ, see Rosenthal, Herb, pp. 13–15;
Indalecio Lozano Cámara, ‘Un Fragmento del Kitāb rāḥat al-arwāḥ fī
al-hašiš wa al-rāḥ’, Miscelanea de Estudios Arabes y Hebraicos 38 (1989–
90), pp. 163–83; and idem, ‘Un Nuevo Fragmento del Kitāb rāḥat al-arwāḥ
fī l-hašiš wa-l-rāḥ de Taqī al-Dīn al-Badrī’, BEO 49 (1997), pp. 235–48;
Fabio Zanello, Hashish e Islam: tradizione e consumo, visioni e prescrizioni
nella poesia, nella letteratura e nelle leggi (Rome: Cooper and Castelvecchi,
2003). Zanello’s study derives mostly from Rosenthal’s work, rather than
from primary sources. Even though much of the material is borrowed, the
study includes many inaccuracies. Zanello states, for instance, that al-Badrī
is ‘presumably Egyptian’, (p. 42, fn. 17).
92

7. Lozano Cámara, ‘Fragmento’, p. 174.

8. Taqī al-Dīn al-Badrī, Nuzhat al-anām fī maḥāsin al-shām (Cairo: Al-Maṭbaʿat
al-salafiyya, 1922–3), p. 62. In al-Badrī’s autograph manuscript, which is
catalogued as History MS no. 1642 in Cairo’s Dār al-Kutub, the completion
date is given as 877/1472.
9. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 11:41; Franz Rosenthal, ‘Male and Female: Described
and Compared’, in J. W. Wright and Everett K. Rowson (eds), Homoeroticism
in Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), pp. 50–1, fn. 45.
10. Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:229. For a list of al-Badrī’s works, see
al-Badrī, Al-Durr, 1:9; Brockelmann, GAL 2:132 and GAL Supplement
2:163.
11. Al-Badrī, Nuzhat, p. 74. Al-Ḥijāzī probably would not have approved of
the comparison, as he himself wrote a poem in which he proudly declared:
‘I would not exchange my city for Damascus, / Because its flowers and
almonds are not my land’. Poem cited in Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Maqqarī
(d. 1041/1631 or 1632), Al-Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-andalus al-raṭīb (The
Sweet Fragrance from the Green Bough of Andalusia), ed. Iḥsan ʿAbbās
(Beirut: Dār ṣādir, 1968), 2:405.
12. See al-Ṣafadī, Faḍḍ al-khitām ʿan al-tawriyya wa’l-istikhdām (Breaking the
Seal on Double Entendre and Metalepsis), ed. al-Muḥammadī ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz
al-Ḥinnāwī (Cairo: s.n., 1979); and Seeger A. Bonebakker, Some Early
Definitions of the Tawriya and Ṣafadī’s Fadd al-Xitam ʿan at-Tawriya wa-l-
Istixdam (The Hague: Moulton & Co., 1966).
13. Aḥmad Ṣādiq al-Jammāl, Al-Adab al-ʿāmmī fī miṣr fī al-ʿaṣr al-mamlūkī
(Cairo: Al-Dār al-qawmiyya, 1966), p. 59.
14. Al-Badrī, Al-Durr, 2:281.
15. Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:229, citing al-Badrī’s Tabṣirat ūlī
al-abṣār fī inqirāḍ al-ʿumariyyin bi’l-layl wa’l-nahār, an unrecovered
chronicle.
17. Ibid., Al-Ḍawʾ, 4:196.
18. Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:230–1.
19. Al-Sakhāwī , Al-Ḍawʾ, 11:42.
20. A detailed description of this manuscript (British Library MS 1423, add.
23,445) is to be found in Rieu and Cureton (eds), Catalogus, 2:654–5, and
Rosenthal, ‘Male’, p. 50, fn. 45.
21. Al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 11:41. For taqrīẓ and its alternative spellings in the
late medieval Arabic world, see Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, Baḥr, p. 221, and Rudolf
Vesely, ‘Das Taqrīẓ in der arabischen Literatur’, in Conermann and Pistor-
Hatam (eds), Die Mamluken, pp. 379–85. Also, Franz Rosenthal has noted in
‘ “Blurbs”’, p. 178: ‘Arabic lexicographers tried to restrict qarraẓa to “praise
of the living”. There was no real basis for this restriction, and it was not gen-
erally accepted. Nor was there any consensus as to whether the roots qarraẓa
93

and qarraḍa were to be kept apart. To the Semitist, no original distinction

seems to exist between [the roots] qrṣ, qrḍ, and qrẓ.’
22. Rosenthal, ‘ “Blurbs”’, p. 189.
23. Rosenthal, ‘Male’, p. 33.
24. Al-Badrī, Ghurrat, fo. 7b.
25. Al-Badrī, Ghurrat, fo. 4b. Ibn Mammātī died impoverished and starving in
Aleppo. His patronymic was purportedly inherited from his grandfather, who
was known for his charitable donations of food to the poor.
26. Rosenthal, ‘ “Blurbs” ’, pp. 189, 195.
27. Dating the text is possible because, within the text, al-Badrī reported the
death of al-Salāmī b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh in 893/1487
or 1488, and al-Badrī himself died the following year in 894/1489. See
al-Badrī, Al-Durr, 2:197.
29. Muḥammad Zakariyya ʿInānī, Al-Nuṣūṣ al-ṣiqilliyya min shiʿr Ibn Qalāqis
al-Iskandarī (567 AH) wa-āthārihi al-nathriyya (Sicilian Texts in the Poetry
of Ibn Qalāqis al-Iskandarī [d. AH 567] and His Prose Works) (Cairo: Dār
al-maʿārif, 1982), p. 11.
30. The bulk of these chapters’ verses addresses men of professions, a common
motif in Middle Eastern literatures, as evidenced in the shahrangiz poetic
genre in Persian, Turkish and Urdu literatures, which praises male beauties
of various crafts and professions.
31. Taha Thalji Tarawneh, The Province of Damascus during the Second
Mamluk Period (784/1382–922/1516) (Jordan: Publications of the Deanship
of Research and Graduate Studies, Muʾtah University, 1994), p. 176.
32. Rosenthal, History, p. 432.
33. Al-Badrī, Ghurrat, fo. 156a. Cf. Qur’an 70: 4, ‘the angels ascend’ (taʿruju
al-malāʾikatu). Al-Ṣafadī’s Al-Ḥusn al-sarīḥ fī miʾat malīḥ includes even
more love verses addressed to physically different men.
34. Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 7.
35. Al-Badrī, Ghurrat, fo. 159a.
36. Al-Badrī, Al-Durr, 1:91. The third term, which literally translates as ‘end’,
may have referred to what we today would call a ‘peak in illness’.
37. Rosenthal, ‘Male’, p. 34.
38. Françoise Barbe-Gall, How to Read a Painting (London: Francis Lincoln
Ltd, 2010), p. 142.
39. Terry Wilfong, ‘Reading the Disjointed Body in Coptic: From Physical
Modification to Textual Fragmentation’, in Dominic Montserrat (ed.),
Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in
Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 118.
40. In al-Muqrī’s lifetime, close-set eyes would have still been perceived as
physically undesirable, in contrast to the large eyes that were commonly
praised in Arab poetry. A Mamluk-era poem on close-set eyes, such as
94

those written by Ibn Nubātah or Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir, would not
have suggested physical aberration, as beauty norms were shifting in this
period. According to Aḥmad Ṣādiq al-Jammāl, ‘We know that Arabic lit-
erature is filled with descriptions of young boys, women and large eyes, but
customs changed here [in early Mamluk Egypt] as poets started compos-
ing love poems about close-set eyes . . . We see that the ethnic heritage of
the Mamluks left its traces in Egyptian poetry’ through the celebration of
hallmarks of Turkish beauty (close-set eyes) and through the use of Turkish
words. See al-Jammāl, Al-Adab, pp. 46–7.
41. The copyist rendered the title Al-Murqiṣ wa’l-muṭrib, but this title by Ibn
Saʿīd (d. after 683/1284) has also been transmitted as ʿUnwān al-murqiṣāt
wa’l-muṭribāt and Al-murqiṣāt wa’l-muṭribāt.
42. In this series of poems about skin incisions, the beloved is doing the cutting.
43. Muqaʿṭāl was the collective noun form of two types of leprosy, baraṣ and
judhām. See Michael Dols, ‘Leprosy in Medieval Arabic Medicine’, Journal
of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 34.3 (July 1979), p. 321. The
German scholar G. J. Wetzstein postulates that this euphemism for leprosy
derived from an assumption that lepers were punished (qatala) by God: see
‘Aus einem briefe des Herrn Consul Wetzstein an Prof. Fleischer’, ZDMG 23
(1869), pp. 310–11.
44. ‘Muqri’s often exhibited a physical handicap associated with their profes-
sion: blindness. Not all muqri’s were without sight, but individuals who had
suffered the misfortune and who had retentive powers were often encour-
aged to find their vocation in the recitation of scripture.’ See Carl F. Petry,
The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981), p. 263.
45. On this author, see Brockelmann, GAL vol. 2, 15 no. 3a; Supplement vol. 2,
7 no. 3a.
46. Andras Hamori and Thomas Bauer, ‘Anthologies’, in EI 3, ed. Gudrun
Krämer et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008). Brill Online, University of Michigan-
Ann Arbor. <http://www.encislam.brill.nl.proxy.lib.umich.edu/subscriber/
entry?entry=ei3_COM-0031>. Last accessed on 13 March 2008. Bauer also
briefly describes Al-Durr al-maṣūn in his ‘Literarische Anthologien der
Mamlukenzeit’, p. 119.
48. Ibid., 1:59. On Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, see Sahar Amer, ‘Medieval Arab
Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2
(2009), pp. 218–19.
50. Ibid., 2:9.
95

4
Transgressive Bodies, Transgressive Hadith
Anthony Grafton argues that ‘to the inexpert, footnotes look like deep root
systems, solid and fixed; to the connoisseur, however, they reveal them-
selves as anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity’.1
The classical Arabic equivalent of the footnote was the isnād, or chain
of transmitters that preceded texts of Arabic literary anecdotes, histori-
cal reports and excerpted speech in medieval texts. The isnād functioned
essentially to authenticate narratives and speech through oral testimo-
nies of learned figures, rather than through reference to written records.
Although manuscript production was robust in the Islamicate Middle
Ages, ‘a book could not adequately substitute for the authority of learned
gifted personalities’, who embodied knowledge and transmitted it through
personal contact.2 The isnād, like the footnote, often carried subtle signifi-
cations, so that, before such knowledgeable audiences as hadith specialists
or historians, the isnād could entertain, subtly polemicise, discredit, taint
or authenticate a report.
The Shāfiʿī historian ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī (d. 623/1226) certainly
understood the potential for entertainment in a well-crafted isnād. Among
the various hadith he compiled, one report is gamely introduced as follows:
Abū Dharr [d. 32/652] heard from Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad b. ʿUbayd Allāh
b. Sulūqā, who said: ‘[A hadith] was related to me by the stooped man, who
narrated from the cold-sufferer, who narrated from the ill man, who narrated
from the hemiplegic man, who narrated from the gap-toothed man, who nar-
rated from the hunchbacked man, who narrated from the deaf man, who nar-
rated from the blind man [al-ḍarīr], who narrated from the bleary-eyed man,
who narrated from the one-eyed man, who narrated from the lame man, who
narrated from the blind man [al-ʿamá], who said: “The Prophet performed
ablution by washing only once” ’.
The combination of the twelve ambiguously identified transmitters, the

emphasis on the physical defects of these men and the staid, uncontro-
versial hadith that appears in several canonical hadith collections makes a
confused impression.
In the very next sentence, al-Rafiʿī identified each man thus: ‘The
96

stooped man is Abū ʿAlī b. Abī al-Ḥusayn al-Iṣbahānī; the cold-sufferer,

Abū ʿAlī al-Ṣūlī; the sick man, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Sulaymān; the
hemiplegic, Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Ṭūsī; the gap-
toothed, al-Ḥasan b. Mihrān; the hunchback, ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ḥusayn Qāḍī
al-Maṣīṣa; the deaf, ʿAbdallāh b. Naṣr al-Anṭākī; the blind, Abū Muʿāwiya
(d. 195/810); the bleary-eyed, Sulaymān b. Mihrān (d. 148/765); the one-
eyed, Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī (d. c. 69/717); the lame, al-Ḥakam b. Mihrān;
and the blind, ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAbbās (d. 68/688)’.3 All twelve men were
regarded as trustworthy narrators of hadith, as evidenced by their biog-
raphies and their inclusion in works praising sound hadith specialists.
This hadith on ablution is also considered sound, appearing as it does in
al-Bukhārī’s collection of hadith, which Sunnis regard as reliable. The
reliability of the named men and the wide acceptance of this hadith serve
as foils to the foregrounding of the transmitters’ afflicted bodies, forcing
readers to realign their professional expectations of disabled hadith-
transmitters and to acknowledge the inclusion of disabled men among the
ranks of prestigious scholars.
The Life of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī

Ibn al-Mubarrad (sometimes rendered Ibn al-Mibrad) was the patronymic
for Jamāl al-Dīn Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Hādī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 909/1503), a his-
torian and legal scholar who was born in Damascus in 840 or 841/1437.
When Ibn Ṭūlūn asked him about the origins of this patronymic, which
means ‘the son of the man with a handsome face’, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
claimed that his grandfather Aḥmad’s paternal uncle gave him this name
as a show of respect.4 Our Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī grew up in al-Ṣāliḥiyya, a
village just outside the city walls of Damascus and situated on the slope of
Mount Qāsiyūn. (Today, the city’s boundaries have expanded to include
al-Ṣāliḥiyya as a quarter within Damascus proper.) The community was
established by the Banū Qudāma, a clan that fled Palestine during the
Crusades, and the Banū ʿAbd al-Hādī were among the more prominent
families of the Ṣāliḥiyya quarter. When the Banū Qudāma first arrived,
they lived temporarily in the Abū Ṣāliḥ mosque. To honour the signifi-
cance of this shelter, the neighbourhood was named after the mosque. Ibn
Ṭūlūn presented an alternative possibility for the origins of the quarter’s
name: its founder was a man named Ṣilāḥ.5 Whatever the origins of the
name, the area soon gained a reputation as a scholarly community with
Ḥanbalī leanings. Of the six men profiled in this study, the only non-
Shāfiʿīs are the two from al-Ṣāliḥiyya – Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī and Ibn Ṭūlūn,
who were both Ḥanbalīs. The neighbourhood also acquired strong pious
97

and Sufi associations. Notably, the important Sufi figure Muḥyī al-Dīn
b. ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) is buried at the Jāmiʿ Salīmiyya/Sulaymiyya
there. According to our al-Badrī, al-Ṣāliḥiyya was ‘filled with Sufi lodges
(zawāyā), tombs and Qur’anic schools’.6 This neighbourhood also boasted
numerous gardens, markets and mosques. For both men, Damascus and
its environs were their intellectual centres, and Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s iden-
tification with the quarter was such that he composed poetry about the
splendours of al-Ṣāliḥiyya and wrote a local history of the quarter entitled
Taʾrīkh al-Ṣāliḥiyya (The History of al-Ṣāliḥiyya).7 His influence on the
historical writings of Ibn Ṭūlūn was tremendous8 and is seen, in part, in
Ibn Ṭūlūn’s continuation of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s local history, which he
titled Qalāʾid al-jawhariyya fī taʾrīkh al-Ṣāliḥiyya (Jewelled Necklaces:
On the History of al-Ṣāliḥiyya).9 What has survived of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s
text is found in this work by Ibn Ṭūlūn and in Ibn Kinnān’s (d. 1153/1740)
Al-Murūj al-sundusiyya al-fasīḥa fi talkhīs Taʾrīkh al-Ṣāliḥiyya (Vast
Silken Fields: A Summary of the History of al-Ṣāliḥiyya). Both books
focus on the neighbourhood’s origins, mosques, markets, Qur’an schools,
Sufi lodges, prominent clans and notable residents. In addition to repre-
senting his native quarter textually, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī was even elected
neighbourhood spokesperson by his fellow residents, making him the
political embodiment of the people of al-Ṣāliḥiyya.
There is considerable evidence that Ṣāliḥīs considered themselves
a rarified corner of the Mamluk Empire. For one, in 903/1497, armed
rebels representing the governor of the province of Damascus and amir
Āqbirdī al-Dawādār requested that the residents of al-Ṣāliḥiyya abandon
support for the Mamluk sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad. That their allegiance
was sought indicates the politically strategic importance of the quarter in
the province of Damascus. Ultimately, the populace refused to form an
allegiance with the rebels.10
Male and female inhabitants of al-Ṣāliḥiyya often adopted strong ties
to the neighbourhood, taking the nisbas of al-Ṣāliḥī and al-Ṣāliḥiyya
respectively, in addition to or instead of al-Dimashqī or al-Dimashqiyya.
This practice of naming probably ‘reflects the awakening consciousness
of the inhabitants to their quarter’ and its relationship to the metropolis.11
A separate identity was being asserted here that situated them in a very
distinct and distinguished physical, social and intellectual space. Mikhail
Bakhtin famously observed that ‘the most intense and productive life of
culture takes place on the boundaries’.12 Here, in a liminal geographic and
social space along an urban border, a new awareness of the constitution
of the body politic led to novel appreciations for bodies on the margins.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī grew up in al-Ṣāliḥiyya under the guidance and support
98

of his father Badr al-Dīn and his paternal grandfather Shihāb al-Dīn. He
transmitted hadith to Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Shuwaykī (d. 939/1532),
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kutubī (d. 932/1525), Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
al-Mardāwī (d. 909/1503), Najm al-Dīn al-Mātānī (d. 960/1552) and the
famous historian Ibn Ṭūlūn. He also taught his own children, grandchil-
dren, wives, concubines, clients and relatives and his children’s wives and
concubines.13 In a book about the forty masters who helped to direct his
intellectual career, Ibn Ṭūlūn noted that our Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī had
certified Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī to teach hadith.14 Although most of al-Ḥijāzī’s
students were of Cairene origin, he did attract students from all over the
central Islamic lands, including Mesopotamia, Syria, the Hijaz and rural
Egypt.15 Mamluk and early Ottoman scholars recognised al-Ḥijāzī’s con-
tributions to hadith studies and other fields of Islamic studies, as he was
frequently cited as instructing many luminaries in this field.16 When most
of Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Hādī’s biographers have mentioned al-Ḥijāzī, they
have offered no biographical identifiers, leading to multiple identifications
of this figure by modern scholars.17 One researcher has conjectured that
the teacher might have been Aḥmad al-Shihāb al-Ḥijāzī (d. 893/1488), a
scholar who lived in Old Cairo.18
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s personal library included approximately 600 of
his own works and another 2,400 by other authors. Most of his works are
currently held at al-Asad Library in Damascus. He composed a number of
works about ailments and the ailing body. He wrote treatises about medical
treatments for two types of leprosy (Adwiyat al-bahaq wa’l-baraṣ),19
coughs (Adwiyat al-wāfida ʿalá al-hummā al-bārida) and eye diseases
(Al-Funūn fī adwiyat al-ʿuyūn). He also wrote about death resulting from
the plague and other epidemics (Funūn al-manūn fī al-wabāʾ wa’l-ṭāʿūn).
His interest in this last subject was shared by many other Mamluk and
Ayyubid writers, as Michael Dols has shown – perhaps because, like many
of these other men, plague had personally affected members of his imme-
diate family.20 Of his thirteen wives and concubines, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s
favourite was his second wife, Bulbul bint ʿAbd Allāh, who was men-
tioned earlier in this chapter as the subject of one of his books. She bore
him two children – ʿĀʾisha and ʿAbd al-Hādī – before dying of the plague
in 883/1478 or 1479. After her death, he took into his household another
concubine, who was also named Bulbul. She bore six children by him,
among them Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan, an adolescent son who died of the plague
in 897/1492. Remarkably, nine more of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s children died
from plague infections in this same year.21
The vulnerability of life, particularly of children’s lives, led many
bereaved fathers in the late Mamluk period to write about their grief and
99

the saving grace of religious devotion.22 Al-Sakhāwī, for instance, wrote

one after his son’s death in 863 or 864/1458 or 1459 from the plague.23
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī completed his treatise Al-Irshād ilá ḥukm mawt al-awlād
(Guidance on Children’s Deaths) in late 897/1492, the devastating year in
which he lost ten children. The approximately 500-page work is divided
into fifty-eight chapters and treats an assortment of topics. The Prophet
Muḥammad lost an infant son named Ibrāhīm, so relevant hadiths are
discussed here, along with poetry, historical anecdotes on grief and loss,
popular responses to children’s deaths, advice on exhibiting patience
and steadfastness in the face of tragedy, and actions from which parents
must refrain in their grief. Disciplining the body encouraged stoicism
and acceptance of the reality of a child’s death. Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī advised
parents not to scar themselves, shed tears, slap or scratch their cheeks,
shave their beards, rend their clothes or blacken their faces. These ritu-
alistic acts expressed mourning and anger and also served to venerate
the dead in early modern Islamdom.24 Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s recommen-
dations demand even greater personal restraint of the mourner than do
the commands for the bereaved issued by the Prophet Muḥammad, who
reproached a woman for weeping openly when her granddaughter died.
She asked him if he ever cried, and he responded: ‘I do not weep (loudly)
but silently when I feel moved’.25 Bodily practice informed piety and
served as an index of religious formation. The rest of this lengthy book
was dedicated to Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s own children; and, upon his death,
the book was inherited by his surviving offspring and later Ibn Ṭūlūn.
Kitāb al-ḍabṭ
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī also described bodies as indices of religious forma-
tion in an earlier work of his, an eleven-folio work titled Kitāb al-ḍabṭ
wa’l-tabyīn li-dhawī al-ʿilal wa’l-ʿāhāt min al-muḥaddithīn (The Book
of Correctness and Clarity of Hadith-Transmitters Who Had Defects [in
Their Hadith] and Physical Blights). An autograph copy dated 889 or
890/1484 or 1485 is today housed in al-Asad Library in Damascus.26 The
title contains a clever double entendre, as the term ʿilal signifies both ill-
nesses and defects in hadith resulting from faulty transmissions or outright
fabrications. (The title contains a hint of tension, as the term al-ḍabṭ refers
specifically to the correctness of hadith-transmitters.) Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s
work aligns defects of hadith with defects of the body. Unsound, trans-
gressive bodies transmit unsound, transgressive hadith through ineptitude
or conscious deception. By combining ‘defects/illnesses and physical
blights’ in the manuscript title, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī evoked the long Arabic
100

tradition – spanning the 2nd/8th to his own – of commentaries on ʿilal

al-ḥadith, or defects in hadith; but the work is an exercise in ʿilm al-rijāl,
or the evaluation of hadith-narrators. Literature in this genre originated in
the 2nd/8th century and grew tremendously throughout the Islamic Middle
Ages.27 The earliest known work on the subject was written by Hishām b.
Ḥassān (d. c. 147/764), but Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī appended a chain of trans-
mitters to the colophon of this manuscript that identified al-Bukhārī as the
source of this work. Consultations of al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ and Al-Ḍuʿafāʾ
al-ṣaghīr did not offer up any likely sources for Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s work,
so al-Bukhārī’s as yet unrecovered Kitāb al-ʿilal or Al-Ḍuʿafāʾ al-kabīr
probably contains the root of this 9th/15th-century work.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī offered only a succinct introduction to his work in
which he explained: ‘I will mention herein hadith – transmitters who were
among the people of ailments and physical blights (aṣḥāb al-awjāʿ wa’l-
ʿāhāt) . . . and will arrange them alphabetically’. Following this opening,
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī listed forty-five men – none of whom, incidentally,
appeared in al-Rafiʿī’s isnād – who lived in the first 255 years of Islamic
history and numbered among ‘the blind[,. . .] the hemiplegic, the wall-
eyed, the flat-nosed and the large-mouthed’,28 as well as the bleary-eyed,
the hunchbacked, the lame, the leprous and the one-eyed. The life dates
of the named men support Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s claim that al-Bukhārī, who
died in 256/870, originally transmitted this information.
The intended audience for this work were probably fellow legal schol-
ars, though it seems not to have circulated widely. Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s con-
temporaries and successors do not cite it; and, as will be seen in Chapter
5, his student Ibn Ṭūlūn appears not to have mentioned it to a friend who
had written his own book about eminent Muslims with ʿāhāt. Researching
the works of the men and the single woman named in the isnād turns up
no writings about disabled hadith-transmitters, though some, such as Abū
Bakr b. al-Muḥibb al-Maqdisī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 789/1387), wrote books
about weak hadith and weak hadith-transmitters.
In spite of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s expressed intentions in the introduction,
it is only loosely organised alphabetically. The list of names is divided into
sections bearing letter names as headings. The letters zāʾ, hāʾ, wāw and
yāʾ are not at all represented in the text; many headings are empty, with
space left to fill in names, as was common in medieval Arabic manuscripts;
and, from folio 161b to 164a, the author briefly confused the alphabetical
order of the headings, so that one reads the following sequence: dāl, dhāl,
sīn, dhāl, rāʾ, shīn. Although the dhāl heading appears twice, no names
are listed under either heading. This structural confusion is heightened by
the difficulty of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s handwriting. He used diacritical marks
101

sparingly and wrote sloppily, prompting even native readers of Arabic to

comment on the palaeographical challenges they have faced when deci-
phering his writing.29 The letter ‫ ﻝ‬in its terminal and independent forms is
written like ‫ ﻙ‬, and the tail of the ‫ ﻡ‬in its terminal and independent forms
curves like the Latin letter ‘c’. And lastly, the author never writes the
hamza.
There are also signs that Kitāb al-ḍabṭ was carelessly and hastily com-
posed or was perhaps only intended as a draft. For one, the name ‘Ḥārith’
appears twice in the manuscript and is both times misspelled.30 Secondly,
the author made several marginal and interlinear corrections to rectify
mis-alphabetisation. Thirdly, there are several cross-outs. Under the khāʾ
heading, the author mistakenly wrote ‘Razīq the Blind on the authority of
Abū Hurayra’, then crossed out the name, later placing it under the correct
heading.31 The cacography, frequent errors and conspicuously unfin-
ished portions of this short manuscript create a harried impression that
strangely complements the subject of this work, since, unlike al-Rafiʿī’s
isnād, all of the men in Kitāb al-ḍabṭ were widely viewed unfavourably as
hadith-transmitters.
In sharp contrast to the earlier portions of the manuscript, the conclud-
ing folio consists entirely of four isnāds tracing the transmission of this
list of traditionists back to al-Bukhārī, a widely respected 3rd/9th-century
traditionist who reportedly had his own defect: a stutter (ʿī fī lisānihi).32
Apparently, a physical defect did not automatically disqualify one’s
hadith-transmissions; having a physical defect and defective hadith were
understood as coincidental phenomena. The chains of narration read as
follows:
1. Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. [ʿAlī] al-Buqsumāṭī al-Baʿlī al-Ḥanbalī

(d. after 870/1465)33 → Abū al-Faraj b. al-Zaʿbūb al-Baʿlī al-Ḥanbalī
(d. 778/1377)
2. al-Qāḍī al-Quḍāt [Taqī al-Dīn] Abū Bakr b. al-Ṣadr al-Ṭarābulusī al-Ḥanbalī
(d. 871/1467) → Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. al-Yūnāniyya al-Baʿlī
al-Ḥanbalī (707–83/1307–81 or 1382)34
3. Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Zayd al-Mawṣilī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 870/1465) →
ʿĀʾisha bint ʿAbd al-Hādī al-Maqdisiyya al-Ḥanbaliyya (d. 816/1413)
→ al-Ḥajjār (d. 730/1329) → al-Qāḍī Abū Jaʿfar al-Ḥanbalī and Abū
ʿAbdallāh al-Ṣāliḥī al-Ḥanbalī → Abū Bakr b. al-Muḥibb al-Maqdisī
al-Ḥanbalī (d. 789/1387) → Qāḍī al-Quḍāt al-Maqdisī al-ʿUmarī al-ʿAdawī
al-Ḥanbalī (probably al-Qāḍī Sulaymān, d. 718/1315)→ Abū ʿAbdallāh
al-Ḥusayn b. al-Mubārak al-Zabīdī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 649/1251)
4. al-Qāḍī Sulaymān (628–718/1230–1315) → Abū al-Faraj ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
b. Muḥammad al-Maqdisī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 682/1283) and Abū ʿAbdallāh
102

Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Maqdisī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 643/1245) →

Abū al-Faraj ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAlī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 597/1201), who
said that he and Ibn al-Zabīdī heard it from → Abū al-Waqt ʿAbd al-
Awwal b. ʿIsá al-Sijzī (d. 553/1158) → [alternative link interpolated:
Abū al-Ḥasan al-Dāwudī (d. 467–9/1074–6)] → Abū al-Faraj and
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Hādī al-Ḥanbalī and Abū al-Ḥusayn Muḥammad
b. Muḥammad al-Ḥanbalī → Abū Yaʿlá Muḥammad b. al-Farrāʾ
al-Ḥanbalī (d. 458/1066)
1. a. → al-Dāwudī (d. 467/1074) → Abū Muḥammad al-Saraḥsī
(d. 381/991) → Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Yūsuf b. Maṭar
al-Firabrī (d. 320/932)
1. b. → Abū al-Fatḥ b. Abī al-Fawāris (d. 412/1022) → al-Saraḥsī
(d. 381/991) → al-Firabrī (d. 320/932) → Abū ʿAbdallāh b. Ismāʾil
al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870).
Lists such as this one reflected debates in the sphere of legal scholarship,
where the reliability of transmitters who had impaired hearing and sight
was endlessly questioned. Al-Ṣafadī, for one, argued that blind people, like
sighted women of the early Islamic period, were disadvantaged in hearing
and relating hadith, but could certainly rise to the occasion and transmit
hadith well. Sighted women could not see their teachers or audience, as
they heard and related from behind curtains, and blindness was the curtain
for unsighted men.35 In the sphere of hadith-transmission, the blighted
body served as a contested site of moral reckoning and cultural valuation,
where societal values were writ small. However, in medieval pictorial and
textual depictions of the Prophet Muḥammad’s life, disabled people figure
comfortably among his Companions. In this miniature painting from a late
10th/16th-century Ottoman manuscript, the Prophet is seated in a pulpit,
preaching at a mosque. His son-in-law ʿAlī and his grandsons Ḥasan and
Ḥusayn are seated on the floor to the right of the Prophet. The Prophet’s
face is veiled, and all members of his family have flame halos around
their heads. To the left of the Prophet, at the base of the pulpit, is seated
an older male adult dwarf. His age is conveyed by his white moustache
and beard. The Ottoman inscriptions above and below the scene and on
the reverse of the page make no reference to the dwarf. In the bottom left
corner of the painting sits a bare-legged man with a beggar’s bowl next to
him. Men of various social classes, ages and backgrounds are depicted as
gathering to hear the Prophet speak, and it would have been auditors such
as these who would have reported the sayings and actions of the Prophet
and recited learned Qur’anic verses. Textual sources attest to the presence
of disabled people in the life of the Prophet, and this Ottoman miniature
simply illustrates this fact.
103

Figure 4.1 ‘Prophet Muḥammad Preaching’. (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art,

55.121.40, Baghdad, late 10th/16th century. Image copyright © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.)
ʿĀhāt in Late Mamluk/Early Ottoman Damascus

As in Egypt, plague raged intermittently in 9th/15th and 10th/16th-century
Syria, devastating families and communities, stalling crop production
and raising the prices of commodities. Physical disabilities were visible
elements of the Syrian landscape. Ibn Ṭūlūn reports that in Ramaḍān or
104

Shawwāl 908/March 1503 ‘it became known in Damascus that in the

village of Qaṭanā there is a source of water that cures al-ʿāhāt. Droves of
people – men and women – flock there to perform ablutions, naked or oth-
erwise, in its cold waters. This occurred with many groups [of people] who
had severe impairments.’36 Against the backdrop of public-health crises
and economic instability, communities of scholars and friends unified
around shared devotions to learning and social companionship, and their
works began to reflect the experiences of people confronting disease, pain
and death all too often in their daily lives.
Mamluk Syria consisted of the provinces of Hama, Safed, al-Karak,
Damascus, Aleppo and Tripoli. Under both the Mamluks and Ottomans,
Damascus was the largest, most populous and most strategically impor-
tant province of the region, and its history was correspondingly the most
extensively recorded of all of the Syrian provinces. After the Ottoman
takeover of Syria in 922/1516, the new conquerors saw fit to consoli-
date the administrative geographies of the Mamluk sultanate, leaving
only three large provinces: Damascus, Aleppo and Tripoli. This act of
redistricting was precipitated by detailed censuses taken of the newly
acquired areas. On 2 Ramaḍān 922/28 November 1516, the day after
Sultan Selīm triumphantly entered Damascus, a census was taken of the
city.37 Later 10th/16th-century Ottoman cadastral registers for Damascus
are extant. They recorded the numbers of Muslim, Christian and Jewish
male heads of households, and each confessional group was subdivided
into various categories. These detailed records specified whether a head
of household was a mujarrad (bachelor or foreigner), religious function-
ary, descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad or disabled. Four categories
of disability were recognised by the census authorities: blindness, lame-
ness, mental illness/demon possession and severe lameness to the point of
losing mobility (mukassaḥ), and they were exempt from certain taxes.38
This imperial documentation reveals the significance of people of blights
in legal contexts and offers insights into how individual human bodies
related to the Damascene body politic. Under Ḥanafī law, a person must
possess full reason or sanity to carry out a required duty, thus preventing
a mentally ill or possessed person from being required to pay zakat, or
the charitable tax, which typically amounted to a yearly donation of 2.5
per cent of one’s assets. The dictates of Shiʿi, Mālikī, Ḥanbalī and Shāfiʿī
law all differ from Ḥanafī law on this point, as they oblige the mentally
ill or demon-possessed individual to pay zakat.39 The other sensory- and
mobility-related disabilities are not exempt from paying these charitable
donations.
105

Conclusion
All in all, the visibility of ahl al-ʿāhāt in public, domestic and political
spaces forced medieval Muslim subjects to reckon with notions of physi-
cal difference and illness, ultimately using them as ‘a kind of metaphor
for a significant group of concepts, values, and ideals in medieval Islamic
civilization’.40 In the case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s Kitāb al-ḍabṭ, a work that
participates in and merges the Arabic traditions of listing the names of
people with ʿāhāt and of evaluating the reliability of hadith-transmitters,
the transgressive, blighted body is aligned with transgressive, faulty
transmissions of Islamic traditions. The ideal maintainer and propagator
of religious truth has a whole male body. In their circumstances and their
bodies, women, like some disabled men, were inherently disadvantaged in
hearing and relating hadith. Some were able to do so well, but disabled and
female traditionists were regarded with much suspicion.
Notes
1. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 9.
2. Ali, Arabic, p. 39.
3. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī, Al-Tadwīn fī akhbār qazwīn (Record of Events in
Qazwin), ed. ʿAzizallāh al-ʿAṭāradī (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1987),
2:63–4.
4. Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 2:839.
5. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Al-Qalā’id al-jawhariyya fī taʾrīkh al-Ṣāliḥiyya (Jewelled
Necklaces: The History of al-Ṣāliḥiyya), ed. Muḥammad Aḥmad Dahmān
(Damascus: s.n., 1949–56), 1:24–5; Muḥammad b. ʿĪsá Ibn Kinnān,
Al-Murūj al-sundusiyya al-fasīḥa fī talkhīs Taʾrīkh al-Ṣāliḥiyya (Wide
Silken Meadows: A Summary of the History of al-Ṣāliḥiyya), ed.
Muḥammad Aḥmad Dahmān (Damascus: Maṭbaʿa al-taraqī, 1947), p. 15;
ʿAbd al-Qādir b. Muḥammad al-Nuʿaymī, Al-Dāris fī taʾrīkh al-madāris
(The Student: On the History of Madrasas) (Damascus: Maṭbaʿat al-tarqī,
1948), 1:477.
6. Al-Badrī, Nuzhat, p. 320. Portions of this text (pp. 24ff.) have been trans-
lated into French as Description de Damas, ed. and trans. H. Sauvaire (Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1896), 2:407–41. The authorship of Nuzhat al-anām
has been disputed, but, on p. 62 of Nuzhat al-anām, al-Badrī mentioned his
Rāḥat al-arwāḥ fī ḥashīsh wa’l-rāḥ, a book on hashish and wine that he had
written as a young man.
7. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Al-Qalā’id, 2:381–2.
8. EI 2, s.v. ‘Ibn Ṭūlūn’, 3:958.
9. The bulk of Ibn Ṭūlūn’s autograph was edited and published in 1949 by
106

Muḥammad Aḥmad Dahmān, who had purchased the manuscript in 1927

from a dealer in Egypt. Only in the course of editing did Dahmān realise
that several chapters were missing. Unbeknown to him, those chapters were
rebound in another manuscript currently housed at Princeton University. I
am preparing an article about these recovered pages and their significance for
early modern Damascene history.
10. Toru Miura, ‘The Ṣāliḥiyya Quarter in the Suburbs of Damascus: Its
Formation, Structure, and Transformation in the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk
Periods’, BEO 47 (1995), p. 164.
11. Ibid., p. 131. For more on al-Ṣāliḥiyya, see Shākir Muṣṭafá, Madīna li’l-
ʿilm: Āl Qudāma wa’l-Ṣāliḥiyya (A Learned City: The Qudāma Clan and
al-Ṣāliḥiyya) (Damascus: Dār Ṭalās, 1997); and Stefan Leder, ‘Charismatic
Scripturalism: The Hanbali Maqdisis of Damascus’, Der Islam 74 (1997),
pp. 279–304.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres, ed. Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 2.
13. Muḥammad ʿUthmān Shubayr, Al-Imām Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Hādī al-Ḥanbalī
wa-atharuhu fī al-fiqh al-Islāmī (Imām Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Hādī al-Ḥanbalī
and His Influence on Islamic Jurisprudence) (Amman: Dār al-furqān,
2001), p. 55. Yehoshu’a Frenkel has translated a certificate in which Ibn
ʿAbd al-Hādī’s family members, including a five-day-old son, are named
as audience participants in his ‘Women in Late Mamluk Damascus in the
Light of Audience Certificates (Samāʿāt)’, in Urbain Vermeulen and Jo van
Steenbergen (eds), Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk
Eras (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 421–3. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Yûsuf
ibn ʿAbd al-Hâdî and His Autograph of the Wuqû‘ al-Balâ bil-Bukhl wal-
Bukhalâ’, BEO 31 (1979), p. 29.
14. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Kitāb al-arbaʿīn ʿan arbaʿīn shaykhan, Al-Asad Library,
Damascus, Syria, MS 958, fo. 46a; Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:105,
107, 167, 256, 394; 2:529, 553, 590, 684, 780–1; Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī,
Kawākib al-sāʾira bi-aʿyān al-miʾah al-ʿashira, ed. Jibrāʾil Sulaymān
Jabbūr (Beirut: Al-Maṭbaʿat al-amīrikāniyya, 1945), 1:252.
15. Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Shillī (d. 1093/1681 or 1682), Kitāb al-sanāʾ
al-bāhir bi-takmīl al-Nūr al-sāfir fī akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir, ed. Ibrāhīm
b. Aḥmad al-Maqḥafī (Sanaa: Maktabat al-irshād, 2004), pp. 231, 263,
272; Ibn al-Ḥimṣī, Ḥawādith, 1:196; ʿAbd Allāh Murdād Abū al-Khayr,
Al-Mukhtaṣar min kitāb nashr al-nūr wa’l-zahr fī tarājim afāḍil Makka
(Abridgement of the Book of the Diffusion of Light and Flowers: On the
Biographies of Virtuous Meccans), ed. Muḥammad Saʿīd al-ʿĀmūdī and
Aḥmad ʿAlī (Jiddah: ʿĀlam al-maʿrifa, 1986), p. 142.
16. Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mut‘at, 1:105, 167, 256, 394; 2:529, 780–1.
17. Muḥammad Jamīl al-Shaṭṭī, Mukhtaṣar ṭabaqāt al-ḥanābila (Damascus:
Maṭbaʿat al-taraqī, 1920), p. 75; Muḥammad Asʿad Ṭalas, ‘Muqaddima’,
in Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Hādī, Thimār al-maqāṣid fī dhikr al-masājid (Fruits of
107

Meaning: On Mosques), ed. Muḥammad Asʿad Ṭalas (Beirut: s.n., 1943),

p. 13; Ṣalāḥ Muḥammad al-Khiyamī, ‘Jamāl al-Dīn Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Hādī
al-Maqdisī al-Dimashqī, al-mutawaffa sanat 909 H: ḥayāt wa-āthāruhu
l-makhṭūṭa wa’l-maṭbūʿa’, Majallat Maʿhad al-Makhṭūṭāt al-ʿArabiyya 26.2
(1982), p. 777.
18. Malti-Douglas, ‘Yûsuf’, p. 22.
19. The terms bahaq and baraṣ are difficult to define with any precision. In
some contemporary Arabic dialects, baraṣ designates a white face covered
with freckles. For a discussion of possible meanings of these terms, see
C. Elgood, ‘On the Significance of al-Baras and al-Bahaq’, Journal of the
Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 27 (1931), pp. 177–81.
20. Michael Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977).
21. Shubayr, Al-Imām, pp. 53–4. Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan must have died after 13
Jumādā I 897/25 March 1492, as his father related hadith to him on this day.
See Frenkel, ‘Women’, p. 422.
22. Avner Giladi, ‘Islamic Consolation Treatises for Bereaved Parents: Some
Bibliographical Notes’, SI 81 (1995), p. 197.
23. Avner Giladi, ‘ “The Child Was Small . . . Not So the Grief for Him”:
Sources, Structure, and Content of al-Sakhāwī’s Consolation Treatise for
Bereaved Parents’, Poetics Today 14.2 (1993), p. 371.
24. Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, ed. S. M. Stern, trans. S. M. Stern and
C. R. Baker (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973), pp. 224–7. See
also Leor Halevi’s study on mourning, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites
and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), esp. chapters four and five.
25. Hidayet Hosain, ‘Translation of Ash-Shama’il of Tirmizi’, Islamic Culture 8
(July 1934), p. 381.
26. Yūsuf Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Kitāb al-ḍabṭ wa’l-tabyīn li-dhawī al-ʿilal wa’l-
ʿāhāt min al-muḥaddithīn, Al-Asad Library, Damascus, Syria, MS 3216, fos
157a–168a, AH 889 or 890/1484 or 1485 CE. Copies of this manuscript can
be found in three Saudi libraries: the Imam Muhammad b. Saʿud Islamic
University Library in Riyadh, the Library of the Kaʿaba in Mecca and the
Islamic University of Medina Library.
27. Waḍī Allāh b. Muḥammad ʿAbbās, ‘Al-ʿillah’, in Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Kitāb
al-ʿilal wa-maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. Waḍī Allāh b. Muḥammad ʿAbbās (Riyadh:
Dār al-khānī, 2001), pp. 39–44.
28. Malti-Douglas, ‘Mentalités’, p. 218.
29. al-Khiyamī, ‘Jamāl al-Dīn’, pp. 775–809; Al-Shaṭṭī, Mukhtaṣar, p. 77; Malti-
Douglas, ‘Yûsuf’, pp. 25, 27; Muḥammad Khālid al-Kharsah, ‘Tarjamat
al-muʾallif’, in idem (ed.), Nujūm al-masā takshuf maʿānī al-rasā li’l-ṣāliḥāt
min al-nisāʾ (Damascus: Maktabat al-bayrūtī, 1990), p. 22.
30. Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Kitāb al-ḍabṭ, fos 165a, 167b.
31. Ibid., fos 161b, 163a.
108

32. Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463/1072), Kitāb mūḍiḥ awhām al-jamʿ wa’l-
tafrīq (Hyderabad: Maṭbaʿat al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1959), 1:7.
33. Muḥammad b. ‘Abd Allāh Ibn Ḥumayd, Al-Suḥub al-wābila ‘alá ḍarā’iḥ
al-ḥanābila (Rain Clouds Over Ḥanbalī Tombs) (s.l.: Maktabat al-Imām
Aḥmad, 1989), p. 1,007. In Al-Ḍawʾ, 8:184, al-Sakhāwī indicated that he
died after 870/1465.
34. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī recorded Ibn al-Yūnāniyya’s death date as AH 783.
See his Al-Durar al-kamina fī aʿyān al-miʾat al-thāmina (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl,
1993), 4:56, no. 157. Ibn al-Yūnāniyya’s death date is alternatively given as
793 in Ibn al-ʿImād’s Shadharāt al-dhahab, and in this same biographical
entry it is recorded that he assumed his judgeship in Baalbek in 789.
36. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat, al-khillān fī ḥawādith al-zamān (Banter among
Friends on the Events of the Time) (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998),
p. 214.
37. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat [1964], 2:31. The results of this survey have not
been recovered today, but the transition from Mamluk to Ottoman rule was
certainly chaotic and disruptive. Nine days after the census was taken, Ibn
Ṭūlūn attests that armed soldiers forced him from his home and destroyed his
books. See Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat [1964], 2:34.
38. Muhammad Adnan Bakhit, ‘The Christian Population of the Province of
Damascus in the Sixteenth Century’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard
Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning
of a Plural Society (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), p.
20; Bakhit, The Ottoman Province of Damascus in the Sixteenth Century
(Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1982), p. 49; Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal
Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern
Syria in the Late Sixteenth Century (Erlangen: Palm und Enke, 1977),
pp. 37–8.
39. Rispler-Chaim, Disability, p. 38.
109

5
Public Insults and Undoing Shame: Censoring

the Blighted Body
One can read any 10th/16th- or 11th/17th-century biography of the famous

Meccan historian Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd (891–954/1486–1547) and find no
mention of his biographical compilation Al-Nukat al-ẓirāf fī man ubtuliya
bi’l-ʿāhāt min al-ashrāf (Charming Anecdotes about Honourable People
Who Were Afflicted with ʿĀhāt), a book that caused quite a commotion
when it was completed in Rajab 948/October or November 1541.1 The
curious silence surrounding al-Nukat al-ẓirāf may stem from a consensus
on the book’s insignificance, or from peer discretion about a book that
brought much dishonour to its author and his family’s legacy, or even
from an unawareness that the book existed, since this first version was
destroyed rather quickly after publication. In this suppressed work, Jār
Allāh had named some of his noble Meccan contemporaries as disabled,
and a group of men named as frontally bald (ṣulʿān) were scandalised to
have been identified in connection with their physical defects.
In early modern Ottoman Arab societies, ‘biographical entries were
written within a social setting marked by rivalries, enmity, and alliances,
and were thus charged with “political” significance. Many a quarrel
between notable households had its roots in unfavourable mentions in,
or exclusions from, biographical works.’2 The politicised nature of early
modern biographies was certainly not lost on Jār Allāh, who on 12 Rabīʿ
II 944/17 September 1537, just four years before the publication of his
Al-Nukat al-ẓirāf, had appended a note to a manuscript of al-Suyūṭī’s
biographical dictionary Dhayl ṭabaqāt al-ḥuffāẓ in which he complained
that the author had ‘left out a group of relevant people, among whom is
his teacher and my great-grandfather . . . Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Fahd
al-Hāshimī al-Makkī’. Surely, Jār Allāh understood that al-Suyūṭī had
quietly, but forcefully, integrated an insult against his great-grandfather
into his biographical compilation, and noted that he had rectified this omis-
sion by including an entry for his great-grandfather in his own biographi-
cal compilation Tuḥfat al-ayqāẓ.3 However, the frontally bald Meccan
men who were so offended by their inclusion in Al-Nukat al-ẓirāf did not
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Public Insults and Undoing Shame
respond with the same scholarly quietude as did Jār Allāh. They mobilised
quickly to register their displeasure by accusing Jār Allāh and his family
of sundry illnesses and disabilities and by seeking the opinion of Aḥmad b.
Muḥammad b. Ḥajar al-Haytamī (909–74/1504–67), a prominent Meccan
jurist, about the lawfulness of the book.
Ibn Ḥajar’s Fatwa on Slandering the Impaired Body

Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, a cross-eyed mufti who incidentally was not named
in this book, had only settled in Mecca in 940/1533, at the age of 31,
eight years before this affair. His early schooling took place at the Azhar
mosque in Cairo, where he mainly studied under Zakariyyāʾ al-Anṣārī
(d. 926/1520). He excelled in his study of Islamic and Arabic subjects;
and, before reaching the age of 20, he was thus entrusted with teaching
others in these fields. By the time he was approached by the group of
aggrieved disabled men, he was only 39 years old but had acquired a sub-
stantial reputation as a skilled thinker of the Shāfiʿī school who engaged
publicly and frequently in scholarly debates.4
Ibn Ḥajar received the unnamed petitioner’s question soon after
publication of the book, and summarised the inquiry as follows:
A question is asked about a man who wrote a book named Al-Nukat al-ẓirāf
fī man ubtuliya bi’l-ʿāhāt min al-ashrāf. In this book, the author mentioned
a group of men living today, about whom he said, ‘So-and-so is bald from
illness (aqraʿ), and so-and-so has a receding hairline (aṣlaʿ), and so-and-so is
lame, and so-and-so is leprous, and so-and-so is blind’. He devoted a chapter
to each type [of defect], and then went on to mention a group of the Prophet’s
companions as having receding hairlines (ṣalaʿ) and things like that. [The
author] asserted to [me] his claim that this work is an admonition (mawʿiẓa),
and the purpose of this book is nothing more than this. So, is this a form of
the forbidden backbiting (al-ghība al-muḥarrama)? If not, does Islamic law
allow mentioning something like this? Also, what connects the book’s author
to objections about the book? Is it or is it not obligatory to cut up this book
because of the damage suffered by its existence and spread?5
The fatwa’s solicitor obviously found Al-Nukat al-ẓirāf to be a troubling
and transgressive book and Jār Allāh’s authorial motive unseemly and
opaque, if not outright illegal. The solicitor’s suspicions were not to be
taken lightly, as jurists frequently classified slander as one of Islam’s
gravest sins, alongside murder and polytheism. One of the earliest
Qur’anic revelations augured badly for malicious gossip, proclaiming
‘Woe to every slanderer, defamer!’ In another verse, ghība is made tan-
tamount to cannibalism. ‘Spy not, nor let some of you backbite others.
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Does one of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother? You abhor
it!’6 Slandering someone compromises that person’s public self, and by
extension his or her family. A suspected slanderer like Jār Allāh was
also compromised publicly and would have found his family members
and their legacies of moral rectitude and intellectual rigour implicated in
this affair. The Fahd family claimed Alid descent through Muḥammad
b. al-Ḥanafiyya, imbuing them with exclusive, prestigious blood ties to
Mecca. As such, they had maintained distinguished positions in Meccan
social and scholarly circles since the 8th/14th century. In each generation,
a single man emerged as the family’s representative scholar, and the role
was passed from father to son. The four eminent Fahd scholars were: Taqī
al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Fahd al-Makkī (787–871/1385–1466), Najm al-Dīn
Muḥammad b. Fahd al-Makkī (812–85/1409–80), ʿIzz al-Dīn ʿUmar
b. Fahd al-Makkī (850–923/1447–1517) and Muḥibb al-Dīn Jār Allāh
Muḥammad b. Fahd al-Makkī (891–954/1486–1547).7
Yet, in spite of the weight of Jār Allāh b. Fahd’s personal and familial
reputation, Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī issued a scathing fatwa condemning
the book’s personal revelations as vicious backbiting and rejecting the
author’s claim that the work served as an admonition. His response to
the submitted question began:
Yes, what has been said is a form of the forbidden backbiting, because the
Islamic community has agreed upon it, and the Prophet has designated it as
something that one would hate to have mentioned about oneself, regardless
of whether it was about one’s body (like being tall, bleary-eyed, one-eyed,
bald due to an ailment [aqraʿ], black, yellow), one’s name, one’s character,
one’s deeds (like eating a lot), one’s clothes (like having wide sleeves), one’s
child, one’s wife, one’s slave, one’s riding animal or one’s home (like its being
cramped). Ghība is the same if it is uttered with the tongue or communicated
in writing, since the pen works just like the tongue, or through gestures.
Al-Nawawī [d. 676/1277] said that there is no difference [among these various
modes of expressing ghība]. Al-Ghazālī [d. 505/1111] agreed, but added that
the heart can commit ghība. What they have said has been said by others.8
Relying on Prophetic tradition (sunna) and community consensus (ijmaʿ),
Ibn Ḥajar concluded that ghība was subjectively determined and could
be committed against people’s bodies, personal qualities, actions, house-
hold members and possessions. The definition is wide-ranging, possibly
making this one of the easier major sins to commit. In societies where
men and women of all social strata commonly had nicknames based on
physical and mental impairments, how does one avoid stumbling thought-
lessly into slander?9 The subject was sufficiently relevant and sensitive to
have been treated by al-Nawawī in his advice manual, where he delineated
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the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable usages of nicknames

related to impairment.
Allah said: ‘Do not call each other by nicknames’. [Q 49: 11]. Scholars agree
on the impermissibility of bestowing on someone a hated nickname, unless it
is an actual description of him, such as the bleary-eyed, the one balding on the
sides of his head (al-ajlaḥ), the blind, the lame, the squint-eyed, the leprous,
the broken-skulled, the jaundiced, the hunchback, the deaf, the blue-eyed
(al-azraq), the snub-nosed, the one with ectropion, the broken-toothed, the
amputee, the ill, the paralytic and the one-handed, or if said nickname describes
his father or mother. Scholars also agree on the permissibility of mentioning [a
hated nickname] for the purpose of identifying someone to a person who only
knows him through his physical defect.10
In the absence of any Qur’anic verse or prophetic tradition excusing

any form of slander, Sunni theologians came to agree that ghība was
permissible in six cases, as Ibn Ḥajar sought to explain:
In Islamic law, an exception is made for what is said about the defects of other
people if done with good intentions, which can only take place in six situa-
tions: redressing grievances (taẓallum), eliminating wrongdoing (istiʿāna ʿalá
taghyīr al-munkar), asking for a legal opinion (istiftāʾ), warning Muslims of
evil (taḥdhīr min al-sharr), communicating about a known fault (tajāhur bi’l-
fisq), and the sixth is for identifying someone whose nickname describes a
visible physical defect, such as ‘the lame’ or ‘the bleary-eyed’. Scholars used
to do that for identification purposes, and so it was not hated if one learned it
after becoming well known for it. Thereafter, mentioning [a physical defect]
was permissible without an implication of deficiency, even if one could do
without [mentioning] it. It is established knowledge that slander is only permit-
ted in these six circumstances and no others. Still, [Ibn Fahd] has opposed these
categories by adding to these a seventh, which is general advice (al-naṣīḥa
al-ʿāmma), as in [mentioning] the deficiencies of hadith-narrators (jarḥ
al-ruwāh), although this approaches the category of warning (al-taḥdhīr).11
As seen in the previous chapter, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s Kitāb al-ḍabṭ con-
stituted an Islamically acceptable treatise about hadith-narrators and
transmitters with physical blights, because his mention of people’s
deficiencies was necessary to warn Muslims against disreputable and
unreliable narrators. Jār Allāh, however, appeared not to have linked the
bodies he described to any discernible threat to the Muslim community, so
his work did not fall under the licit category of warning.
Verily, what this author has done is forbidden slander, because he mentioned
defects of others without good intentions, as defined in Islamic law. This
book did not fall under any of the six aforementioned categories, not even
113

the last. This last condition is not applicable here because this author did not
restrict himself to well-known faults that one’s friends would have known
and to not mentioning what could only be known from reading his book.
As such, this book is, by consensus opinion, forbidden. His claim that he
intended the mention of those ʿāhāt as an admonition is absurd, since no one
has ever said that one of the rationales for slander is mentioning people’s
defects in order to warn others about said defects. Still, even if he had men-
tioned that this is one of the permissible reasons for slander, what is right
would be known.12
Jār Allāh violated moral codes governing respectability of the bodies of

living men who were honoured in their communities and possessed local
social capital. With his pen, Jār Allāh was able to loosen and unravel
scholars’ turbans, exposing them on the page in ways these men would
never have done in their daily public lives. The association of turbanless-
ness with intimacy is elegantly portrayed in an ink-and-watercolour paint-
ing from the Indian Deccan depicting a scholar in an intimate teaching
moment with his royal pupil, which would be in keeping with the Deccani
painters’ interest in depicting members of the ruling classes in private
moments.13 Intimacy is conveyed through various postures: the scholar’s
extended hand towards his student, his half-rising on his left leg and
the figures’ two heads inclined towards each other. The mentor has also
removed his turban and set it on the ground, exposing his balding pate,
suggesting that this scene does not depict a moment of public presenta-
tion. We know little of views of baldness in the Indian Deccan. A pre-5th-
century Pali text describes a debate between the Buddha and a Brahmin,
who castigated the former as a bald-shaven man (muṇḍaka). Baldness here
was associated with exile, as people had their heads shaven before being
forcibly removed from communities.14 The Hoysaḷa king Nṛpa Kāma,
who reigned from 1022 to 1027 in the Indian Deccan, was described as
bald in an inscription, though the term does not seem to have been used
derogatorily.15 Of course, baldness may have had different connotations
in the 16th- and 17th-century Muslim Deccan, but removing the turban
in the presence of another signalled true intimacy. Ghaly has speculated
that Jār Allāh probably took advantage of intimate moments in the baths
or of sacred moments before prayer to learn of someone else’s baldness.
The Ḥanbalī and Shāfiʿī rites permit washing the turban or washing the
forehead without removing the turban, but the Mālikī and Ḥanafī schools
require men to remove their turbans and wash their bare heads.16 Catching
a glimpse of someone’s unturbaned head is not itself sinful; but, in Ibn
Ḥajar’s eyes, Jār Allāh’s indiscreet revelations condemned him and his
book.
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Figure 5.1 ‘Young Prince and Mentor Sitting in Landscape’. (Source: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 13.228.10.2, Indian Deccan, c. 1600. Image copyright © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.)
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Historicising Male Baldness

Partial or total baldness resulting from shaving the head, ageing or disease
had multiple significations in 9th/15th- and 10th/16th-century Cairo,
Damascus and Mecca, especially in the realms of Islamic ritual and iden-
tity, crime and punishment and health and ageing. A bald-shaven head
(rāʾis ḥalīq) can only result through conscious human action. Being a pur-
poseful act, it had a wider range of meanings than uncontrollable hair loss
through age or illness. Islamic law recommends that the heads of Muslim
infants be shorn and the weight of the hair in silver or gold be distributed
as alms. Adult men often shaved their heads after completing the pilgrim-
age to Mecca. Head-shaving could also have non-ritualistic associations.
Some medieval Sufis also positioned their bodies as the primary site of
expressing antinomian piety, often embracing devotional practices that
rejected societal norms. An extreme diet, drunkenness, a vow of chastity,
public nudity, matted hair and even a shaven head could mark a man as a
Sufi.17 In the realm of law, a judge could order humiliating discretionary
punishments, such as shaving an offender’s head or blackening his face
with ashes.18
Spontaneous baldness that arises when the body sheds hair, and not
when hair is deliberately removed, was also understood with tremendous
nuance. There are in classical Arabic several types of natural hair loss:
jalḥ, nazaʿ, quzʿ, kawsaj, ṣalʿ and qaraʿ. Jalḥ signifies balding on the
sides of the head; nazaʿ is baldness on either side of the forehead; quzʿ
is hair on one’s head that it is so thin it is only visible when it blows in
the wind; kawsaj is thin-beardedness. The fatwa petitioner asked about
Ibn Fahd’s discussion of people with ṣalʿ and qaraʿ, and Ibn Ḥajar only
discussed those two types of hair loss, so I will define them with greater
precision. Ṣalʿ was probably a well-known condition for Sunni and Shiʿi
Muslims, as caliphs ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and ʿAlī were commonly described
as ṣulʿān.19 It was probably these caliphal associations that led one
author to designate three traits of power: frontal baldness, a wide belly
and slowness to anger.20 In the dictionary Ṣiḥāḥ al-lughah, al-Jawharī
(d. 393/1003) defined ṣalʿ as frontal baldness or a receding hairline and
ṣulʿa as a frontally balding pate.21 The littérateur al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023)
defined various types of baldness in his encyclopaedia as follows: ‘If the
hair has fallen from the front of the head, then the person is ajlaḥ. If more
than that has fallen out, then he is aṣlaʿ. If the hair of the temples falls out,
then he is anzaʿ.’22 Al-Tawḥīdī’s definitions of jalḥ and ṣulʿ differ from
those provided by the lexicographers and, as we shall see, by the medical
specialists, which may derive from their intended uses. Al-Tawḥīdī wrote
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that ‘these terms should make things easier for the expository writer . . .
They are useful’, suggesting that these topoi were understood by popular
audiences in these particular ways.23 However, Ibn al-Athīr (d. 630/1233),
in his own dictionary, stated that the word ṣullaʿ means ‘land on which
no plants grow’ and derives from ṣalʿ al-rāʾis, or the loss of hair from the
head.24 Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311 or 1312) confirmed that ṣalʿ is a pattern
of baldness that begins at the hairline and progresses towards the back of
the head.25
Medical literature on the subject nuanced these definitions even further.
The Persian physician ʿAlī b. Sahl Rabbān al-Ṭabarī (d. c. 256/870)
defined ṣalʿ as ‘the dryness of the roots of the hair and the absence of
nourishment to it [the hair]’, noting that there was no cure for this condi-
tion. However, he suggested that ‘frontal baldness may come from over-
wearing turbans, which depletes moisture from the roots of the hair and
dries them out. Perhaps it also comes from sexual intercourse because the
brain is cold and moist, and sexual intercourse increases its coldness.’ He
then cited Hippocrates’s claim that ṣalʿ does not afflict castrated males,
boys or menstruating women, because they all retain the moist qualities
of their heads.26 The physician Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) designated ṣalʿ as
a baldness arising from dry humours. As such, the excess cold and moist
humours in castrated males and women would prevent the onset of ṣalʿ.
He also identified hereditary factors, like the size of one’s hair follicles,
that affect susceptibility to ṣalʿ, attributing the lower rate of ṣalʿ among
Ethiopians to their tight hair follicles that resist shedding. Though he
offered no cure for ṣalʿ, Ibn Sīnā did warn that awareness of preventa-
tive measures, like foregoing the constant wearing of heavy turbans,
could delay its onset.27 Further, he differentiated ṣalʿ, a baldness that
arises from predisposing factors, from qaraʿ, dāʾ al-thaʿlab (ophiasis, lit.
‘fox disease’) and dāʾ al-ḥayya (alopecia, lit. ‘snake disease’), which all
result from ailments. The physician Ibn Hindū (d. 410/1019) defined each
disease thus:
dāʾ al-thaʿlab (alopecia, lit., fox disease): This is loss of hair due to extraneous
purulent fluids that collect at the roots of hair and, because of their sharpness
and acidity, they prevent the hair from growing. It is known as ‘fox disease’
because it often afflicts foxes.
dāʾ al-ḥayya (ophiasis, lit., snake disease): This is similar to the above
because both share the same cause. However, the snake disease looks different,
for the part of the head which is afflicted looks like a snake that has shed its
skin. The condition is also known as qaraʿ.
ṣalʿ (baldness): Receding hair resulting from the loss of hair-nourishing
fluid.28
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All in all, ṣalʿ seems to designate natural hair loss in adult males, whereas
qaraʿ is hair loss associated with afflictions and disease. Al-Jawharī
defined qaraʿ as baldness resulting from illness and qurʿa as a head bald
from illness.29 Both Ibn al-Athīr and Ibn Manẓūr defined qaraʿ as total
hair loss resulting from illness and noted that people say the snake ‘is
called aqraʿ because venom flows into its head and accumulates there
until the skin of its head is shed’.30 Al-Damīrī (d. 808/1405 or 1406)
defined ‘al-aqraʿ [as] someone with a hairless head that is white from
poison’. Just as it was believed that an excess of internal poison caused
a snake to shed its skin, so too was it thought that the poison of subder-
mal ‘purulent fluids’ weakened the roots of human hair and made it fall
out. In fact, this link between snake venom and the causal agent of qaraʿ
is borne out in medieval recipes for the theriac (diryāq, alt. tiryāq), an
antidote to snake venom, that also claimed efficacy against dāʾ al-ḥayya
and dāʾ al-thaʿlab.31 Other medieval compilers and authors recorded
treatments for qaraʿ. Al-Ṭabarī recommended boiling walnuts, a Yemeni
plant (warsiyyā) and shān in water until they formed an oily paste, then
smearing said paste on one’s head.32
Perceptions of Baldness
A prophetic parable related by Abu Hurayra reveals much about social
attitudes to qaraʿ. In this parable, three poor men – a leper, a man bald
from illness (al-aqraʿ) and a blind man – are approached in turn by an
angel who offers to grant each man one wish. The leper asks for ‘a good
complexion and a good skin, and to be rid of what drives people from me’.
The bald man requests ‘good hair and to be cured of this disease, for the
people feel repulsion for me’, and the blind man wants ‘to have back my
sight and to be able to see people’. The angel granted all of their wishes and
gave each of them a pregnant animal, so they could all become wealthy in
livestock. Returning some time later to each one in the form of his previ-
ous illness, the disguised angel asks each man to spare him an animal from
his vast herd. The bald and leprous men refuse, so they are then restored
to their former poor, disabled selves. Only the blind man agrees to gift the
angel with an animal, earning the angel’s praise for his generosity. In this
story, qaraʿ is classified, alongside leprosy and blindness, as a physical
impairment,33 but only qaraʿ and leprosy socially disable a person for
their repellent, unaesthetic associations. Though blindness was certainly
not a desired condition, the blind man in this parable is imbued with the
clearest moral vision.34
Baldness was also featured in ʿāhāt-themed lists and prose dating from
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as early as the 3rd/9th century. Al-Jāḥiẓ included a chapter on al-ṣulʿ and

al-qurʿ and another on al-quzʿān and al-qurʿān in his Kitāb al-burṣān,
which was written sometime before 237/851; and Ibn Qutayba listed the
names of honourable men who were ṣulʿān in his Kitāb al-maʿārif.35
Al-Thaʿālibī identified ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, ʿAlī, Marwān and ʿUmar b.
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz as ṣulʿān in his Laṭāʾif al-maʿārif.36 Ibn al-Jawzī and Ibn
Rusta both named ʿUtba b. Abī Sufyān, as well as caliphs ʿUmar, ʿAlī,
ʿUthmān and Marwān, as ṣulʿān.37 Historically, ṣalʿ seems to have been
associated with eminent Sunni leadership.
Essentially, both ṣalʿ and qaraʿ could afflict men of advanced age, but
only qaraʿ could also come about from an ailment. Qaraʿ marked one’s
body as compromised and diseased. For Mamluk and Ottoman Arab adult
men, honour resided in the hair of one’s head and face. Full beards signi-
fied male virility and power, and as such were central to adult Muslim
men’s gender identity and sense of honour; full heads of hair were markers
of youth and/or sound health; and large turbans projected the prestige
of intelligence. Leslie Peirce, through her close analysis of the Ottoman
Turkish city of Aintab’s court registers of 948/1541 (incidentally, the
same year in which Jār Allāh published al-Nukat al-ẓirāf), revealed
slander cases as elucidating historically contingent and local constructions
of honour and shame. ‘Zones of honor for the adult male’, she concludes,
‘[were] therefore potential targets of insult.’38 With the publication of
al-Nukat al-ẓirāf, a community found its honour tested.
Returning to the Fatwa

Now that Ibn Ḥajar had argued for the illegality of Jār Allāh’s work, he
continued by discussing appropriate forms of repentance and punishment.
If he insists on his contention, he should receive a grave disciplinary punish-

ment. Ultimately, such conviction could drag him to a difficult situation. There
is no admonition in that [book], as it results from the temptation of Satan and
Satan’s beautification of the ugly so that the ignorant fool finds it beautiful,
thereby entering in the realm of the greatest known censure. ‘Is he, then, to
whom the evil of his conduct is made alluring, so that he looks upon it as good,
(equal to one who is rightly guided)?’ [Q 35: 8]. And if he had considered His
exalted words ‘If they had only referred it to the Messenger, or to those charged
with authority among them, the proper investigators would have tested it from
them’ [Q 4: 83], then he would have referred the question to experts in Islamic
law before writing the book and would have done what they ordered him to
do, but keeping these difficult questions to himself may indicate depraved
intentions and the triumph of zealotry for worthlessness. It is incumbent on
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this author to renounce this ugly style, which is a slanderous attack on the
dignity of Muslims. He has no right to argue ‘there are precedents for mention-
ing that’ . . . For that reason we would ask [Ibn Fahd], ‘Are there precedents
for this ugly composition? Who has come before you in this [enterprise]? Is
it someone whose words and deeds are emulated, like Aḥmad [ibn Ḥanbal],
[Yaḥyá] Ibn Maʿīn, Abū Zurʿa al-Rāzī or their counterparts who came before
or after them? Or is it some unimportant person to whose words and deeds no
one pays attention?’ If it is the first, then you must explain who it is. But if it is
the second, then Allah will not care in which valley the two of you will waste
away. In the time of the masters of our masters, it happened that a long fatwa
came down about authors. Their question was: ‘Is it only permissible for an
author to mention defects if he is referring to a deficiency? [p. 83] What defect,
other than one related to or resulting from deficiencies, is a religious good?’
Mentioning defects is strongly forbidden and unlawful if it is about the learned
classes and reciters of Qur’an, but in fact, for no one is there a justification for
it, just as al-Qurṭūbī (d. 671/1272) has said, which is related as the consensus
opinion.
The proof of that is found in [al-Nawawī’s] Sharḥ al-muhadhdhab [in a
hadith related] from Ibn ʿAbbās – May Allah be pleased with both of them:
‘Whoever harms a jurist harms the Messenger of Allah, and whoever harms the
Messenger of Allah harms Allah’. It follows that this author must think about
this and repudiate this work by destroying it, and he must then repent to Allah
for having gone too far in offending the dead and the living, especially the most
important members of this community.39
Ghība threatens to undermine social networks in human communities. The
‘jurist–Prophet–God’ hierarchy places Jār Allāh outside the direct line of
authority between man and God and positions the jurist Ibn Ḥajar’s body
and soul as coextensive and interchangeable with the essence of God,
essentially eliminating any moral authority to which Jār Allāh had lain
claim.
Perhaps he should also consider whether the noble politeness of al-Shāfiʿī suc-
ceeded with regard to Fāṭima al-Zahrāʾ when he alluded to her name and did
not announce it egregiously out of tact for her . . . ‘The Messenger of Allah cut
a noble woman, and he spoke about her, saying “If some woman (fulāna) had
stolen from a noble woman, I would have cut off her hand” ’. In [al-Shāfiʿī’s]
version, fulāna was a tactful reference to Fāṭima, even though her father had
originally mentioned her by her name. If this author had considered the noble
politeness of al-Shāfiʿī in this case, then he would have realised that the enor-
mity of what he did will not be repaired in a lifetime, unless he repents and
repudiates this work, hoping for the forgiveness of Allah. May it serve as a
warning against insisting on believing that admonition is in this [work]. Truly,
there is no admonition in this at all. What is the admonition in ‘Such-and-such
a deceased person was one-eyed, or such-and-such a living person is leprous,
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or similar things that harm the living and the dead’? Even if we overlooked the
truth and supposed that there is admonition, this admonition is accompanied by
innumerable malicious acts. Who has made it lawful to give an assumed benefit
precedence over a confirmed harm? Only someone ignorant about Qur’an, tra-
dition (sunna) and community consensus would say that. If he said ‘what was
said about a Companion of the Prophet does not slander me, because a) I related
it, and b) they do not hate it because they are not frivolous people’, then we
would say, ‘Slander applies to you, by any calculation, because you imitated
someone who is not imitated in this and because whoever related it did not
follow your example. Rather, he followed another example that did not expose
or damage those mentioned. As for you, you have followed an example that
leads people to condemn it. You have been disparaging of the Companions and
have given reason to disparage them. You will bear the burdens of the sins com-
mitted in this respect until Doomsday. As for your claim that they do not abhor
that, this is an absurd claim because abhorring it is something related to innate
disposition and has nothing to do with frivolity one way or another.’ All in all,
if this author repented and destroyed that work, there would be nothing more to
say about this to anyone. Before that happens, his censure is a matter for a wise
man, even if he is annoyed, obstinate and stubborn and has not submitted to
experts in Islamic law and judges. May Allah support them and those appointed
to this matter in their faith. May He divide oppressors and the disobedient with
the sword of His justice. [Ibn Fahd’s] refraining from [submitting to authority],
as people see, is fitting until he shows them his repentance and the depravity
of the ugly acts included in that book by destroying it. Otherwise, it is incum-
bent on them to seize and cut up this work, just as in al-Jalāl al-Suyūṭī’s legal
ruling about someone who had built a house that was destroyed for depravity
[occurring within the home]. Al-Ghazālī and others have shown the same. A
group [of jurists] from the remaining legal schools have also made statements
about this. If you ask ‘How did you come to a ruling of censure? Legal proof
texts and experts from the legal schools are decisive on speaking about bodies
and their defects’, I would say, ‘That [sin] belongs among the lesser ones, as
most of the authors have said, but the aforementioned book includes a greater
one, verily, one of the grave sins’. May Allah – praise and exalt Him – in his
mercy and kindness forgive me and the author. Amen. Allah – praise and exalt
Him – knows best.40
Ibn Ḥajar ordered two courses of action for the author – repentance and
destruction of the book, and even a conditional one for the petitioners –
seizing and cutting up the book if Ibn Fahd refused to destroy it himself.
Ibn Fahd did not repent and did not tear up the book, but rather steadfastly
maintained the legitimacy of his project. However, bolstered by Ibn
Ḥajar’s ruling, a group of bald men who had been mentioned in al-Nukat
al-ẓirāf stormed Ibn Fahd’s home on 5 Shaʿbān 948/23 November 1541,
just days after the book’s publication, seized his book, tore up the pages
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and washed the paper fragments at a mosque. The ink ran from the pages,
destroying Jār Allāh’s work.41 Purifying the fragments through ritual
ablutions ensured that the unIslamic words would no longer damage the
community. Book-burning was also practised: the Sunni caliph ʿUthmān,
after completing his definitive recension of the Qur’an, the version that
circulates today, famously ordered the burning of all earlier versions. This
command set the basis for future legal decisions about the handling and
disposal of unIslamic texts. As Leor Halevi has noted, medieval Muslim
‘[j]urists had advocated erasing or burning the books of Christians,
obtained as booty in the course of war, as a cautionary measure to prevent
the dissemination of falsehood’.42
The Aftermath
Twenty days later, floodwaters entered Mecca and damaged the Kaʿaba
and the Holy Mosque, inspiring a poet named Saʿd Allāh to write verses
linking this major deluge to the minor deluge that wiped Jār Allāh’s book
clean:
Jār Allāh’s work was completely erased
With drops on the fifth day of the month of Shaʿbān.
The flood destroyed it on the fifth, and twenty days later
came annihilation. The building fell.
This damage spread and in it there is
A reminder for those who would love obscenities and turmoil.43
Convinced that recent events confirmed his narrative of pious suffering and
the acceptability of his text, Ibn Fahd drafted a new version of al-Nukat
al-Ẓirāf approximately two days after the flood entered the city.44 Then he
wrote a defence of it in 949/1542 entitled Al-Nuṣra wa’l-isʿāffī al-radd
ʿalá al-muntaqidīn li-muʾallifī al-Nukat al-ẓirāf (Advocacy and Succour
against the Critics of My Book Charming Anecdotes) that is unrecover-
able.45 At the same time, he dispatched letters soliciting fatwas to Shams
al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ṭūlūn (880/1473–953/1546), a Ḥanbalī mufti and
historian in Damascus who was also his close friend, and to four Cairene
judges – Abū al-Fayḍ b. ʿAlī al-Sulamī al-Ḥanafī, Aḥmad b. al-Najjār
al-Ḥanbalī, Nāṣir al-Laqānī al-Mālikī (who was, incidentally, one of Ibn
Ḥajar’s former teachers) and Aḥmad al-Bulqīnī al-Shāfiʿī – representing
each of the Sunni schools of law. The letter read:46
What do you say – may God be pleased with you – of a student who read a
book entitled Mufīd al-ʿulūm by the well-known Ḥanafī scholar Abī Bakr
Muḥammad b. Mūsá al-Khawarizmī? The student saw chapters on the physical
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defects (ʿilal) of noble people. The author mentioned a group of the early and
late prominent figures of this community who were recognised by that [their
defects], with such [epithets as] ‘The Lame Man’, ‘The Bald Man’ (al-aqraʿ),
‘The Blind Man’ and the like. Seeing this, the student composed a book on this
issue using the same justification proposed by the author of the aforementioned
book, namely, promoting admonition, learning and entertainment. Would this
intention be legitimate when embarking upon such an act? Give us the fatwa,
asking that God would make Paradise your reward!47
By Jār Allāh’s account, all of them responded that his work accorded
with the tenets of Islam and could not be categorised as ghība. The
Ḥanafī scholar of Cairo wrote back: ‘Your intention was not ugly, since
Ibn Qutayba set the precedent for mentioning people with such ʿāhāt as
leprosy, lameness, deafness, amputation, cross eyes, blue eyes, buck teeth,
thin beard, frontal baldness, halitosis, one eye and blindness’. According
to Jār Allāh, the other three Cairene scholars sent similar responses to this
first one.48
The fifth scholar, Ibn Ṭūlūn, had known Jār Allāh for more than thirty
years at this point. One modern scholar has placed Ibn Ṭūlūn and Jār
Allāh’s first meeting in Damascus in 922/1516–7, when Jār Allāh visited
Damascus to tour the city and to study with scholars, but there is some
possibility that they met even earlier in 920/1515, when Ibn Ṭūlūn made
the pilgrimage to Mecca at the age of 40.49 During this trip, Ibn Ṭūlūn
studied hadith and shamāʾil with Jār Allāh’s father ʿIzz al-Dīn b. Fahd on
6 Dhū al-Ḥijja 920/21 January 1515 in a public gathering place (dār al-
nadwa).50 In any case, when they met in Damascus in 922/1516 or 1517,
they were at different life stages. Ibn Ṭūlūn was married to his ‘one and
only wife’ Karīmat al-ʿAllāma bint al-Shaykh Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad
b. ʿAwn al-Shāghūrī al-Ḥanafī (d. after 923/1517), the daughter of a
prominent Damascene shaykh, sometime before 915/1509.51 They had
not had more children since the death of their five-year-old daughter Sitt
al-ʿUlamāʾ Khadīja in 920/1514.52 Jār Allāh was unmarried, childless
and ten years younger than his friend. Ibn Ṭūlūn worked hard to earn a
reputation as a capable historian, whereas Jār Allāh essentially inherited
his forefathers’ status as scholars. In spite of their differences, they shared
a commitment to producing scholarship, travelling around the Arab prov-
inces and making contact with scholars, reading new books and compos-
ing original histories. Ibn Ṭūlūn integrated his friend into his social circles
in Damascus, and Jār Allāh sought out his expert opinion on the reliability
of certain hadith-transmitters.53 His father ʿIzz al-Dīn b. Fahd died on or
just before Friday, 13 Jumādā II 923/3 July 1517, while Jār Allāh was in
Damascus. He learned of his father’s death when a funeral prayer was read
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at the Umayyad Mosque to honour ʿIzz al-Dīn on this Friday.54 Jār Allāh
left Damascus for Mecca the following day, arriving at his family’s home
sometime later in the same month.55 Indeed, by this time, Jār Allāh and
Ibn Ṭūlūn regarded themselves as the unofficial historians of the Hijaz and
Greater Syria respectively, exchanging private letters every year in which
they reported the deaths of notables from their home regions.56 At times,
information that they traded as friends was also incorporated into their
chronicles and biographical dictionaries intended for public consump-
tion; but their more informal channels of knowledge-transmission signal
what types of events they found personally important and also the place
of friendship in late Mamluk–early Ottoman historical production in the
Arab provinces.57 Given their history of friendship, it comes as no surprise
that Ibn Ṭūlūn, who in his writings frequently referred to Jār Allāh to as
‘our brother’, wrote a warmly supportive letter:
Imam Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Mufliḥ al-Ḥanbalī [d. 763/1361] said
in the book Al-Ādāb al-sharʿiyya [Legal Customs] that al-Qūṭī said about a
people that ghība applies to religion and only applies to honour or physical
characteristics when it is uttered to imply defect [of character]. In his book
al-Maʿārif, Imam Abū Muḥammad b. Qutayba worked along these lines,
mentioning hemiplegia, lameness, leprosy and other such things. Furthermore,
there were no complaints that people wrote works on this subject, for instance,
al-Ṣalāḥ al-Ṣafadī in his Al-Shuʿūr bi-akhyār al-ʿūr and Nakt al-himyān ʿalá
nukat al-ʿumyān. They did not intend defect, but rather intended it, as cautious
scholars have previously, as knowledge and inclusiveness (iḥāṭa) of the nobles
whom these [physical conditions] had befallen and as a respectful message for
posterity and as an admonition.58
Although Ibn Ṭūlūn owned the original copy of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s Kitāb
al-ḍabṭ, a biographical dictionary of hadith specialists with ʿāhāt, he
neither referenced it as an acceptable critique of persons with ʿāhāt nor
mentioned it as an example of a literary genre that aligns ʿāhāt with ques-
tionable moral qualities.59 Even though Ibn Ṭūlūn supported the concept
of the book, the uproar surrounding practices of ghība made him cautious
about his own writings. As a postscript to this letter, Ibn Ṭūlūn admit-
ted that he had been composing a commentary called Taʿjīl al-bishāra
li-man ṣabara ʿalá dhahāb al-baṣar (Accelerating the Good Omen for
Those Who Were Patient upon Losing Their Eyesight) but was now suf-
ficiently intimidated by the turn of events in Mecca to leave out the name
of a writer (aḥad min al-udabāʾ) whose sight was failing.60 In spite of his
language about including accomplished disabled people in histories of
nobility, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s impulse is checked by considerations of their desire
to be so named. This brief addendum is rather telling, as it demonstrates an
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awareness that Ibn Qutayba’s and al-Ṣafadī’s books may have been seen
as acceptable because they only mentioned deceased figures. (This same
explanation may apply to Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s Kitāb al-ḍabṭ, which only
mentioned hadith specialists with ʿāhāt who had lived between the 1st/7th
and 3rd/9th centuries.) Even if Islamic law does allow one to mention a
living person’s physical defects under certain circumstances, 10th/16th-
century social mores and taboos deemed it beyond the pale of decency.61
Religious justifications simply had to be sought to defend these social
codes.
Ibn Ṭūlūn’s anxieties about naming the writer with failing sight may
also have something to do with his reclusive tendencies at this point of
his life. At the time of his exchange of letters with Jār Allāh, Ibn Ṭūlūn
was a widower who had seen all three of his children predecease him.
(Al-Ghazzī’s biography of Ibn Ṭūlūn discreetly informs readers that
‘when he died, he had no children and no wife’. In fact, the prevailing
consensus among modern scholars is that Ibn Ṭūlūn was a ‘committed
bachelor’ who died ‘without issue’.)62 As mentioned earlier, his daughter
Sitt al-ʿUlamāʾ Khadīja (Rabīʿ II 915–Dhū al-Qaʿda 920/July 1509–
December 1514), who in her short life had actually received an ijāza from
al-Sirāj al-Ṣayrafī, died of the plague. When Ottoman forces conquered
Syria, Ibn Ṭūlūn and his family were displaced from their Ṣāliḥiyya
home, forcing them to relocate to al-Mizza, a village three miles south-
west of al-Ṣāliḥiyya. While in exile, his wife and his children ʿĀʾisha
and ʿUthmān died, leaving him alone in this new place, prompting him
to leave al-Mizza and to take up residence in al-Yūnusiyya, a Sufi lodge
in Damascus. ʿUthmān b. al-Shams b. Ṭūlūn died on 9 Dhū al-Qaʿda
938/13 June 1532 at the age of seven. In addition to having read a portion
of the Qur’an, learned many texts and received authorisation from several
scholars to transmit texts, ‘his father honoured him’.63 ʿĀʾisha, who was
also called Maryam, died on 13 Rabīʿ I 943/30 August 1536, just ten days
shy of her 17th birthday. In her lifetime, she had sat at the feet of many
teachers and had received numerous certificates of transmission.64 After
the death of his nuclear family, Ibn Ṭūlūn withdrew from public life and
eventually died a recluse.
Ibn Ṭūlūn’s reluctance to name this particular writer probably influ-
enced Jār Allāh’s subsequent drafts of al-Nukat al-ẓirāf. While he was
in Barābir Valley, near Mecca, in late Jumādā I 950/August 1543, Jār
Allāh completed a third, expanded version of his work that was retitled
Al-Nukat al-ẓirāf fī mawʿiẓa bi-dhawī l-ʿāhāt min al-ashrāf (Charming
Anecdotes: An Admonition Regarding Honourable People with Physical
Blights) to emphasise its admonitory aspects.65 He organised this new
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fifty-nine-folio treatise somewhat differently from the original version and

also from earlier examples of Arabic literature about physically blighted
people. After the title page (fo. 1a) and incipit (1b–2a) comes a foreword
(2a–3b) that surveys such precedents in the field of ʿāhāt literature as
al-Khawarizmī’s Mufīd al-ʿulūm, Ibn Qutayba’s Maʿārif, al-Sakhāwī’s
Al-Iʿlān bi’l-tawbīkh, al-Ṣafadī’s Nakt al-himyān ʿalá nukat al-ʿumyān and
Al-Shuʿūr bi’l-ʿūr, al-Jāḥiẓ’ Kitāb al-ʿurjān and Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī’s
Kitāb al-lubāb. In this section, Jār Allāh aligned his project with the works
of al-Khawarizmī, al-Jāḥiẓ and al-Ṣafadī, claiming to have mimicked
al-Khawarizmī’s technique of listing names of people with particular
blights, al-Jāḥiẓ’s humorous assembly of anecdotes about his contem-
poraries and al-Ṣafadī’s biographical dictionary of deceased luminaries.
Following this segment is a lengthy introduction (3b–16a) that comprises
two sections. In the first (3b–9a), the author surveyed Islamic discourses
about dhawī l-ʿāhāt, citing al-Qasṭallānī, Ibn al-ʿImād, al-Sakhāwī, Imām
al-Shāfiʿī, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Nawawī, al-Mawardī and others,
and in the second he vigorously defended his 948/1541 version of al-
Nukat al-ẓirāf (9a–16a). Chapter 1, titled ‘Concerning those with ʿāhāt
and examples of honourable men among them’, includes discussions of
al-Khawarizmī’s three chapters about people with ʿāhāt (16a–17a) and
biographical entries culled verbatim from earlier sources on the prophets
Yaʿqūb (17a–b) and Shuʿayb (18a), Abū Quḥāfah, the father of Abū Bakr
(18b–19a), Abū Sufyān (19a–b), Ibn ʿAbbās (19b–21a), ʿItbān (21a), ʿAmr
b. Qays b. Umm Maktūm (21b), Muḥarrama (21b–22a), al-Bukhārī (22a–
b), al-Tirmidhī (22b), Abū l-Qāsim b. Fīrruh al-Shāṭibī al-Ḍarīr (22b),
Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (23a), Abū Zayd ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbdallāh
al-Shahilī (23a), Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Andalusī
al-Mālikī al-Aʿmá al-Naḥwī (23a–b), Aḥmad b. Yūsuf al-Raʿīnī al-Ḍarīr
(23b), Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh al-Sanhūrī al-Azharī al-Ḍarīr (23b),
Abbasid family members (24a), Zakariyyāʾ al-Anṣarī (24a), a long list of
blind and one-eyed scholars (24b–26b), hadith about diseased and disabled
people, especially the Prophet’s miraculous cures of the ill (27a–35b), and
Companions of the Prophet (35b–38a).66 Chapter 2 (38b–53b) focused
on ‘physical conditions like having one eye, cross eyes, frontal baldness
(ṣalʿ), lameness, leprosy and a number of ʿāhāt and illnesses’. In the
manuscript’s explicit (khātimat al-kitāb) (54a–59a), the author described
the rewards that accrue to the ill and disabled, summarised his main points,
detailed his method of composition and lambasted the detractors who had
destroyed his first version.
In this new version, Jār Allāh showed enough sensitivity to the criti-
cism he received to remove most of his contemporaries’ names, though he
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again named himself as having a receding hairline, identified one Ayyūb

al-Makkī as disabled in a marginal note and identified his critic Ibn Ḥajar
al-Haytamī as cross-eyed (aḥwal).67 Otherwise, his references to living
people were more circumspect. As for the bald men who destroyed his
book, he only described them as profligate Meccans who were impor-
tant in the community, adding that, though he had named them as ṣulʿān
(m. sing. aṣlaʿ) in the first version of the book, they were in truth qurʿān
(m. sing. aqraʿ).68 If the bald men were in fact profligates (fujjār al-ʿaṣr),
why would Jār Allāh have included them in a book about honourable
people? Was his original authorial motive more in line with that of Ibn
ʿAbd al-Hādī, who correlated ‘defective bodies’ with defective moralities
in his Kitāb al-Ḍabṭ? The bulk of the first version of al-Nukat al-ẓirāf con-
sisted of chapters dedicated to individual ʿāhāt, and in each chapter living
people were named. Following these chapters, a group of Companions
who had had ʿāhāt were mentioned, because they were an irreproach-
able group who represented a golden age of Islam. Although the discrep-
ancy between the pious reputations of the disabled Companions and the
impious ones of the disabled Meccan men would have been obvious to a
contemporary Meccan, Jār Allāh could naively claim that he would never
insult a Companion, so the entire book must be a praise book.
He seems not to have anticipated the fierce opposition, because he was
ill-prepared for Ibn Ḥajar’s challenge to name a literary precedent for al-
Nukat al-ẓirāf and to prove that he had not committed ghība. Jār Allāh, in
his own letter soliciting a fatwa, was only able to name al-Khawarizmī’s
Mufīd al-ʿulūm as a literary precedent and did not directly ask the five
legal experts about backbiting. In response, the Cairene judge Abū al-Fayḍ
b. ʿAlī al-Sulamī al-Ḥanafī only cited Ibn Qutayba’s work as a sound prec-
edent. Ibn Ṭūlūn also named Ibn Qutayba and added al-Ṣafadī’s works
on blind and one-eyed Muslims for good measure. When he rewrote the
book, Jār Allāh referenced these and other works in the book’s introduc-
tion, but his rebuttal of the charges of slander was remarkably weak.
Although claiming that one of the six exceptions to ghība did fit his case,
he never did specify which one, only avowing that ‘When I wrote of dhawī
l-ʿāhāt, I did not have any defect (naqīṣa) in mind. On the contrary, I
wanted to identify these people, console them and present a light admo-
nition.’ It is unclear whom Jār Allāh intended to admonish, though past
literary works, such as those penned by al-Ḥijāzī and al-Badrī, identified
the disabled as blameless and their taunters as unprincipled aggressors.
Additionally, the contemporary Meccan poet Shihāb al-Dīn b. al-ʿUlayf
(d. 926/1520) composed a similarly constructed poem about a man who
defends his lame friend from gossipmongers who ‘regaled [him] with the
127

defects of a person with an ʿāha’, concluding that ‘his situation proves

that there is no objection in being lame’.69 Perhaps Jār Allāh assumed that
his readers would understand that a work praising ahl al-ʿāhāt necessarily
positions itself in opposition to detractors of disabled people. In any case,
after this statement, he appealed to the deeds of the caliph ʿUmar, who had
declared that ‘ghība of bodies is not something forbidden’. In addition,
the Prophet Muḥammad referred to people as ‘black and short’ and ‘thin-
bearded’, so many eminent Muslim men have identified people by their
physical differences. What is more, Jār Allāh claimed that his text could
not have been written with malicious intent since he had named himself
as frontally bald, his maternal grandfather as lame, and a number of his
teachers as blind.70 In the last folios of the book, Jār Allāh offers a bright
summary of his project: ‘All of the afflicted provide us beautiful examples
of seeking merit and honour . . . I intended this work as true admonition
and pure entertainment, so that it may serve as an admonishment to those
who admonish and as entertainment to students.’71
Ibn Ḥajar’s challenge for Jār Allāh to name a literary precedent for his
work and to defend it against charges of slander, along with Jār Allāh’s
placement of his book within acceptable literary standards and his argu-
ments for its moral appropriateness, may itself be a traditional response
in literary controversies. Frédéric Lagrange has parsed Abū Ḥayyān
al-Tawḥīdī’s (d. 414/1023) introduction to Akhlāq al-wazīrayn (The
Morality of the Two Viziers), a lengthy and scathing invective against two
sitting Buyid princes, to reveal a particular strategy against criticisms of
slander. Al-Tawḥīdī directed most of his attacks against one of the viziers,
Ibn ʿAbbād, for relishing both the active and passive roles in male–
male anal intercourse. But, to lessen the outrage over such accusations,
al-Tawḥīdī first classified his work as one of satire ‘to situate himself in
a certain literary continuity, even though his work could be seen as the
founding of a new genre. Every creation at the heart of the adab has to
be camouflaged through its location in a pre-existing literary movement,
a tradition through which one could award oneself predecessors, thereby
guaranteeing for oneself a sort of generic isnad.’72 In the second part of
al-Tawḥīdī’s defence, he argued that one of the six exceptions to ghība
applied in his case, specifically the legal compulsion to expose the moral
failings of a political leader.
With far less artfulness and confidence, Jār Allāh deployed a similar
two-pronged defence that turned on establishing a generic precedent and
finding a moral justification. Instead of satire, Jār Allāh claimed admoni-
tion and entertainment as his genres of choice, though he seemed to have
been unaware of several important works of ahl al-ʿāhāt literature, includ-
128

ing most of the texts cited in this book’s introduction. He was possibly
uninterested in understanding the history of this genre because he was
only appropriating it to legitimise his insults against his contemporaries.
If his attempt to situate his book in a literary tradition felt thin, then his
religious justification reads even more weakly. Unlike al-Tawḥīdī, who
cited a moral imperative to protect Muslims from evil, which is one of the
six exceptions to ghība, as justification for his book, Jār Allāh just said that
one of the known exceptions did, indeed, apply to his case, though he never
specified which one. Jār Allāh’s unpreparedness for the backlash against
his book demonstrates a grave misreading of this cultural moment that did
not end when his book was destroyed. By rewriting the text, he believed
that an audience existed for his work; but the reception of the revised al-
Nukat al-ẓirāf seems to have been rather muted, as early modern sources
are altogether silent about the book. (Seven months after Jār Allāh had
completed this revised version, Ibn Ṭūlūn made the pilgrimage to Mecca,
but there is no evidence that he read the book or was given a copy of it.73)
So, what do we know of the reception? For one, Jār Allāh’s autograph
manuscript is the only known extant copy, suggesting that later genera-
tions did not know of this work or, if they did, did not deem it worthy of
copying. Secondly, none of Jār Allāh’s biographers mentioned this book.
In any case, the manuscript’s title page bears the name of three works –
Jār Allāh’s al-Nukat al-ẓirāf, Majd al-Dīn al-Fayrūzabādī’s (d. 817/1414)
Safar al-suʿāda and al-Mundhirī’s (d. 656/1258) Arbiʿūn ḥadīth – all
written in what appears to be Jār Allāh’s own hand. His reasons for col-
lating his book with these two short collections of hadith remain obscure,
but it is possible that he wanted to ensure its survival by attaching it to
religious texts that people would have been loath to discard or destroy, or
that he used the compilation as a didactic text, for he continued to receive
students even after this incident. Although none of his sons became his-
torians, meaning that the Ibn Fahd legacy as Meccan historians died with
Jār Allāh, other family members recognised and benefited from his social
position and knowledge. His relative Taqī al-Dīn b. Ḥazan b. Fahd (d.
987/1580) was his student and grew up to become a respected jurist.74
In 953/1546, the Aleppan historian Ibn al-Ḥanbalī (d. 971/1563) came
to Mecca to study with Jār Allāh, who died in Mecca in 954/1547. Some
years later, in his Durr al-ḥabab fī taʾrīkh aʿyān ḥalab, a biographical
dictionary of Aleppan notables, Ibn al-Ḥanbalī explicitly declared a man’s
sexual preference for young men – and, in an echo of Jār Allāh’s experi-
ences, many of Ibn al-Ḥanbalī’s peers felt that mentioning such a sexual
preference was tantamount to ghība. Though murmurs of ghība were
heard against him, no other adverse consequences ensued.75
129

Conclusion
The intersections of honour and the male body came to a forceful head in
mid-10th/16th-century Mecca (and Aleppo), but the themes have perme-
ated every chapter of this book. For al-Ḥijāzī, taking balādhur to improve
his memory brought him honour and marked him as a dedicated student. It
was only after the drug had caused boils to erupt all over his body that he
was ostracised by his community and regarded with scepticism. He tried
to shift public perception of the boils by depicting his ordeal as suffering
in God’s name. From this experience comes an effort to ascribe other posi-
tive values to blighted bodies. Many of his poems, as well as those com-
piled by his student al-Badrī, directly address the disbelief and shame of
outsiders who found it difficult to believe that a person with blights could
be found desirable. Al-Badrī arranged a selection of love poems about
men with afflicted body parts into a quasi-narrative of love, pain, medical
treatment, recovery and death, situating disease and blight, both tempo-
rary and permanent, as natural features of a virile man’s life. In this era,
disease and blightedness were prevalent enough to contribute to the dif-
fusion of these themes in religious, literary and historical discourses and
in the public consciousness of both native residents of Cairo, Damascus
and Mecca and visitors to these cities. Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī aligned blighted
hadith-transmitters with dishonourable faulty hadith.
This single theme of blightedness was sustained in public and private
discourses over 150 years, filtered through different media: poetry, literary
and historical prose, religious polemic, letters of friendship, moral conso-
lation and biography. In these threads of conversations and narratives, we
have seen just how distinct blights were differently valued in changing
contexts. The textual traditions described in this book developed from
close personal ties, scholarly friendship, shared travels and various writ-
ings on the theme of physical difference. Although this particular study
has focused overwhelmingly on the body, this was certainly not the only
subject that unified them, as Yossef Rapoport has found:
Working women were the subject of at least three intriguing literary works
composed during the second half of the fifteenth century. Ibn Ṭūlūn devoted
a treatise to traditions about spinners, entitled Qiṭf al-Zahrāt fīmā qīla fī
al-Ghazzālāt (Bunch of Flowers on the Sayings concerning Female Spinners).
The Cairene litterateur Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī al-Ḥazrajī [sic] (d. 875/1471)
composed a collection of epigrams directed to various types of women, includ-
ing spinners, seamstresses and other women of professions. The Damascene
Ibn al-Mibrad (d. 909/1503) collected an anthology of traditions and anecdotes
about women, most of them in praise of women who work the spindle.76
130

That three of our writers expounded on not only the productive labour of
women workers but also ahl al-ʿāhāt perhaps speaks to their sensibility to
individuals who did not share their social position and class. (Cairo Geniza
documents confirm the division of manufacturing labour along gender
lines. Women primarily carried out those tasks that could comfortably
take place in the home, and men manufactured and sold goods in public
spaces.) But then again, it may also signal a basic uniformity of literary
tropes. Whatever the case may be, finding other converging interests
within this group of writers makes their shared awareness of corporeal
themes seem less like accidental convergences and more like a significant
tradition of scholarly contact. It may also confirm the utility of Michael
Chamberlain’s call in his own study of networks of friendship and scholar-
ship in Ayyubid and Mamluk Damascus for scholars to consider the stra-
tegic concerns and ethical zones of scholarly friendships. Unequal power
relations between masters and disciples or teachers and students created
situations of obligatory devotion, and the duties of pupils to teachers are
well documented in Islamicate histories; but other, more freely exchanged
bonds of friendship thrived in these contexts too, and here, researchers
may be able to trace writing trends and literary influences that proliferated
beyond conventional scholarly hierarchies and outside of institutional
affiliations.
Notes
1. For Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd, see EI 2, s.v. ‘Ibn Fahd’, 3:760; al-Sakhawī, Al-Ḍawʾ,
3:52; al-ʿAydarūsī, Taʾrīkh nūr al-sāfir ʿan akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir (Egypt:
s.n., 1980–6), p. 241; al-Ghazzī, Kawākib, 2:131; Ibn al-ʿImād, Shadharāt,
8:301; Muḥammad al-Ḥabīb al-Hīla, Al-Taʾrīkh wa’l-muʾarrikhūn bi-Makka
min al-qarn al-thālith al-hijrī ilá al-qarn al-thālith ʿashar (History and
Historians of Mecca from the Third to the Thirteenth Hijri Century) (Mecca:
Muʾassasat al-furqān li’l-turāth al-islāmī, 1994), pp. 195–213.
2. Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World,
1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 50.
3. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Dhahabī, Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Makkī
b. Fahd and al-Suyūṭī, Kitāb tadhkirat al-ḥuffāẓ (Beirut: Dār al-kutub
al-ʿilmiyya, 1998), p. 382.
4. EI 2, s.v. ‘Ibn Ḥadjar al-Haytamī, Abū ’l-ʿAbbās b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad
b. ʿAlī b. Ḥadjar, Shihāb al-Dīn, al-Haytamī al-Saʿdī’ (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1960–), 3:776–8.
5. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Al-Fatāwá al-kubrá al-fiqhiyya
(Grand Juridical Fatwas) (Cairo: ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Aḥmad Ḥanafī, 1938),
4:82.
131

6. Qur’an 49: 12, 104: 1.

7. Of the Fahd scholars, Taqī al-Dīn b. Fahd had the farthest-reaching influence
and acquired the most prestigious reputation as a historian. His chronicles
about contemporary Mecca served as a core text upon which his descendants
expanded. Najm al-Dīn b. Fahd wrote two major histories, Al-Durr al-kamīn,
an extension of Taqī al-Dīn al-Fāsī’s (d. 832/1428) Mecca-centred biograph-
ical dictionary Al-ʿIqd al-thamīn fī taʾrīkh al-Balad al-Amīn (The Precious
Necklace: A History of the Honest Town) and Itḥāf al-wará bi-akhbār Umm
al-Qurá (The Gifts of Mortals: Reports about Mecca), a history of Mecca
from the time of the Prophet until months before the author’s own death. ʿIzz
al-Dīn b. Fahd’s Bulūgh al-qirá (The Elegance of Hospitality) is a history of
Mecca from 885/1480 to 922/1516. Jār Allāh b. Fahd’s diaristic chronicle
Nayl al-muná began in Dhū al-Ḥijja 923/December 1517 and terminated in
Rajab 946/November 1539.
8. Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Fatāwá, 4:82. The parenthetical statements are Ibn
Ḥajar’s own asides in the text.
9. For anxieties in medieval Latin Christendom about the negative effect that
nicknames based on physical impairments may have had on social interac-
tions and integration, see Irina Metzler, ‘Disability in the Middle Ages:
Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies’,
History Compass 9.1 (2011), p. 53; and Metzler, ‘What’s in a Name?
Considering the Onomastics of Disability in the Middle Ages’, in W. Turner
and T. Pearman (eds), Disabilities of Medieval Europe (Lampeter: Edwin
Mellen Press, forthcoming).
10. Al-Nawawī, Kitāb al-adhkār (The Book of What Is Said), ed. Muḥammad
Fayyāḍ al-Barūrī (Damascus: Dar al-Mallāḥ, 1971), p. 250.
11. Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Fatāwá, 4:82.
12. Ibid., 4:82.
13. Marika Sardar, ‘Islamic Art of the Deccan’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art
History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–) <http://www.
metmuseum.org/toah/hd/decc/hd_decc.htm> (October 2003). Last accessed
17 November 2011.
14. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, ‘The Buddha’s cūḍā, Hair, uṣṇīṣa, and Crown’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 4
(October 1928), pp. 815–41; and Eisel Mazard, ‘The Buddha Was Bald
. . . But Is Everywhere Depicted with a Full Head of Hair’, New Mandala,
30 December 2010. <http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/12/30/
the-buddha-was-bald/>. Last accessed 31 December 2010.
15. J. Duncan M. Derrett, The Hoysaḷas: A Medieval Indian Royal Family
(Madras: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 21; A. L. Basham, ‘The
Hoysaḷas: A Medieval Indian Royal Family’, BSOAS 22.1/3 (1959), p. 167.
16. Ghaly, Islam and Disability, p. 96. The turban was such a key garment for
scholarly identity that Jār Allāh’s revelation may have registered as not only
a violation of personal honour, but also of professional dignity. Certainly,
132

Jār Allāh and Ibn Ḥajar were aware of this association, having each written
books about turbans. According to Albrecht Fuess, ‘The ulama were appar-
ently distinguished by the size of their turban (ʿimāmah) and therefore as a
class were named arbāb al-ʿamāʾim, masters of the turbans. The wearing of
turbans was not limited exclusively to the ulama, but for them it was much
bigger, sometimes reaching abnormal sizes. The expression “to enlarge
one’s turban” became a synonym for showing off’. See his ‘Sultans with
Horns: The Political Significance of Headgear in the Mamluk Empire’, MSR
12.2 (2008), pp. 74–5.
17. See Ahmet Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the
Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550 (Oxford: OneWorld, 2006); and
Bashir, Sufi Bodies. Megan Reid has found many examples of men’s anti-
nomian piety in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, but ‘antinomian holy women
seem not to have existed at all in medieval Islam’. See her ‘Exemplars of
Excess’, p. 108.
18. Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice
from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), pp. 34, 61. Of course, the association of bald-shaven
heads with criminality predates the 10th/16th century. Al-Jāḥiẓ remarked
that in the 3rd/9th century: ‘For men, there was no harder or more odious
punishment from the sultan than shaving the head and the beard’. Kitāb
al-burṣān, p. 325.
19. Al-Thaʿālibī, Laṭāʾif, p. 96. The editor/translator has added in a footnote:
‘[a]s with blindness, the frequency of baldness amongst the early Caliphs
became regarded as a sign of nobility’.
20. Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb ʿuyūn al-akhbār, 1:223.
21. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fos 41a–b, citing Abū Naṣr
al-Jawharī, Ṣiḥāḥ al-lughah (The Soundness of Language) (Beirut: Dār al-
kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1999), 3:1,244, 1,262.
22. Al-Tawḥīdī, Baṣāʾir, 6:146.
23. Ibid., 6:147.
24. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fo. 41b, citing Majd al-Dīn Ibn
al-Athīr, Nihāya fī al-gharīb al-ḥadīth wa’l-athar (Beirut: Dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth
al-ʿarabī, 1985), 3:46.
25. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, p. 2,482.
26. Al-Ṭabarī, Firdaws, pp. 53, 136.
27. Ibn Sīnā, Qānūn fī al-ṭibb, in H. T. Bachour, La Dermatologie chez les
arabes (Damascus, 1990), p. 267. Cited in Mourad Mokni, ‘La peau et ses
maladies d’après un traité de médecine tardif’, Master’s thesis, Université de
Tunis, 2006, pp. 35–7.
28. Abū al-Faraj ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn Ibn Hindū, Miftāḥ al-ṭibb wa-minhāj al-ṭullāb,
trans. Aida Tibi, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith (Reading: Garnet Publishing,
2010), p. 70. Ophiasis is a form of alopecia, so one can also find transla-
tions of dāʾ al-thaʿlab as simply ‘alopecia’. Cf. Emilie Savage-Smith and
133

Peter Pormann, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Washington, DC: Georgetown

University Press, 2007), p. 31; and Mokni, ‘La peau’, p. 35.
29. Al-Jawharī, Ṣiḥāḥ, 3:1,262.
30. Ibn al-Athīr, Nihāya, 4:44–5; Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, p. 3,594.
31. Kitāb al-diryāq, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, MS A.F. 10,
fos 11a, 15b; Kitāb al-sumūm/Kitāb al-diryāq, sold as Lot 21, Sotheby’s,
London, 25 April 2002, fo. 36a. Jaclynne Kerner has misconstrued these
terms as ‘the “drug” (i.e., poison) of the snake and the ?fox?’. See her ‘Art
in the Name of Science: Illustrated Manuscripts of the Kitāb al-diryāq’,
PhD dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2004, p. 78.
Similarly, Leigh Chipman’s suggestion of a common cure for snake-
bite and qaraʿ comes from misleading rubrication in a manuscript by
alʿAṭṭār al-Isrāʾīlī of the Mamluk pharmacological treatise Minhāj al-dukkān
(Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt). On fo. 197b, the copyist rubri-
cised luṭūkh al-ḥayyāt (snake ointments), then listed the first ingredient as
ḥabb al-qarʿ (pumpkin seed). On fo. 225b, ḍimād al-ḥayyāt wa-ḥabb al-qarʿ
(snake poultice and pumpkin seed) – the poultice and the first ingredient – are
rubricised. Chipman, in trying to make sense of this second rubric, translated
it as a ‘poultice for snakes and baldness?’. See her The World of Pharmacy
and Pharmacists in Mamlūk Cairo (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), p. 270.
32. Al-Ṭabarī, Firdaws, p. 135.
33. Ṣaḥīḥ Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 56, hadith 670; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, book 42, hadith
7,071. The English translations are taken from Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.),
Classical Arabic Stories: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), pp. 179–80. Baldness in the contemporary Middle East is
treated as a cosmetic issue, not as a disease, and the medieval classification
of baldness as disease is borne out by modern genetic studies. One team of
scientists has found that baldness is an auto-immune disorder that has genetic
‘commonalit[ies] with rheumatoid arthritis, type I diabetes and coeliac
disease’. See Lynn Petukhova et al., ‘Genome-wide association study in
alopecia areata implicates both innate and adaptive immunity’, Nature 466.1
(1 July 2010), p. 116. For an interview with lead author Angela Christiano,
see Claudia Dreifus, ‘Living and Studying Alopecia’, The New York Times,
27 December 2010, p. D2.
34. Blindness occupied a special place in the Arabic lexicon and in the Muslim
imagination. A. Fischer has argued that Muḥammad introduced to the
Arab world a ‘pious jargon’, whose influence is particularly evident in the
antiphrastic euphemism of baṣīr (sharp-sighted) for aʿmá (blind). See his
‘Arab. baṣīr “scharfsichtig” per antiphrasin = “blind”’, ZDMG 61 (1907),
pp. 425–34.
35. Al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-burṣān, pp. 321–30; Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb al-maʿārif,
p. 196.
36. Al-Thaʿālibī, Kitāb laṭāʾif al-maʿarif, ed. Pieter de Jong (Lugduni
Batavorum: Brill, 1867), p. 69.
134

37. Ibn al-Jawzī, Talqīḥ, p. 448; Ibn Rusta, Kitāb al-aʿlāq, p. 223.
38. Peirce, Morality, p. 195.
39. Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Fatāwá, 4:82–3.
40. Ibid., 4:83.
41. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fos 15b, 59a.
42. Leor Halevi, ‘Christian Impurity versus Economic Necessity: A Fifteenth-
Century Fatwa on European Paper’, Speculum 83 (2008), p. 934.
43. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fo. 15b.
44. Ibid., fo. 59a.
45. Ibid., fo. 10b.
46. Ibid., fos 13b–14a.
47. I adapted this translation of Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fos
13a–b, from Ghaly, Islam and Disability, p. 101. In the introduction to
Mufīd al-ʿulūm, the author al-Qazwīnī, who has been misidentified as
al-Khawarizmī, defined his work as ‘entertainment for friends’.
49. Al-Hīla, Al-Taʾrīkh, p. 196; Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, Durr
al-ḥabab fī taʾrīkh aʿyān ḥalab (The Pearls of the Beloved: The History
of the Notables of Aleppo), ed. Maḥmūd Aḥmad al-Fākhūrī and Yaḥyá
Zakariyya ʿAbāra (Damascus: Wizārat al-thaqāfa, 1972), 1:434.
50. Ibn Ṭūlūn’s five-year-old daughter Khadīja had died in the previous month.
Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:429; Ibn Ṭūlūn, I‘lām al-wará bi-man
wulliya nāʾiban min al-atrāk bi-dimashq al-shām al-kubrá (Damascus:
Wizārat al-thaqāfa wa’l-irshād al-qawmī, 1964), p. 208; Ibn al-ʿImād,
Shadharāt, 10:146.
51. For biographical details on Ibn Ṭūlūn’s father-in-law Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm
b. Muḥammad b. ʿAwn al-Shāghūrī al-Ḥanafī (d. 916/1511), see Ibn
al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:282–3, 2:661; al-Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ, 1:146–7;
Ibn al-ʿImād, Shadharāt, 8:73; and al-Ghazzī, Kawākib, 1:13, 260–1; 2:174.
He also taught Ibn Ṭūlūn and awarded him an ijāza in iftāʾ (the deliverance
of formal legal opinions) on 29 Rabīʿ II 911/29 August 1505. See Ibn Ṭūlūn,
Al-Fulk al-mashḥūn fī aḥwāl Muḥammad b. Ṭūlūn, ed. Muḥammad Khayr
Ramaḍān Yūsuf (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1996), p. 52.
52. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat, 2:61.
53. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Al-Rasā’il al-ta’rīkhiyya (Historical Letters) (Damascus:
Maṭbaʿat al-Turqī, 1929), 2:2–4; Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat [1964], 2:6–10, 14.
54. Modern biographers of ʿIzz al-Dīn have listed his death year as 921/1515,
because Ibn Ṭūlūn wrote in Iʿlām al-wará about meeting him in Mecca at
this time. Before the publication of Mufākahat al-khillān, the Iʿlām passage
was widely accepted as the latest record of ʿIzz al-Dīn being seen alive.
55. Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat [1964], 2:63.
56. Al-Suyūṭī, Dhayl ṭabaqāt al-ḥuffāẓ (Beirut: Dār iḥyā al-turāth al-ʿarabī,
1980), p. 383; Al-Ghazzī, Kawākib, 1:67; 2:117, 158.
57. For instance, Jār Allāh wrote to Ibn Ṭūlūn about Muḥammad b. ʿIrāq’s
135

death and burial in Medina, and his subsequent disinterment and reburial
in Mecca in Ṣafar 933/1526 (Al-Ghazzī, Kawākib, 1:67); and Jār Allāh Ibn
Fahd related this same event in his chronicle of Mecca (Kitāb nayl al-muná
bi-dhayl bulūgh al-qirá li-takmilat itḥāf al-wará: taʾrīkh makka al-mukar-
rama min sana 922H ilá 946H, ed. Muḥammad al-Ḥabīb al-Hīla (Riyadh:
Muʾassassat al-furqān li’l-turāth al-islāmī, 2000), 1:388–90.
59. He must have acquired it from one of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s children after
922/1516, when he rebuilt his library after Ottoman troops had destroyed his
original library.
60. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fo. 14b. I know of no extant copy of
this work.
61. Highlighting the professional incompetence of one’s contemporaries did
not imply sin. A line of an anonymous untitled manuscript penned in Mecca
in Jumādā I 950/1543 reads: ‘Our shaykh, the learned memoriser of the
Qur’an, Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī reported in his book Al-Dhayl al-ṭāhir
that Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Naṣrallāh [d. 844/1440, also known as
Muḥibb al-Dīn b. Naṣrallāh al-Baghdādī al-Ḥanbalī] described the defects
(masāwī) of some of the judges of his time’. (See Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin,
Berlin, Germany, MS Ahlwardt 8418, AH 950/1543 CE, fo. 63b.) Although
Al-Dhayl al-ṭāhir is not extant, other works indicate that Ibn Naṣrallāh, who
incidentally was one-eyed, criticised fellow judges of Cairo for their profes-
sional ineptitude. See al-Sakhāwī, Dhayl ʿalá rafʿ al-iṣr, ed. Jawdah Hilāl
and Muḥammad Maḥmūd Ṣubḥ (Cairo: Al-Hayʾah al-miṣriyya al-ʿāmma
li’l-kitāb, 2000), p. 116.
62. Al-Ghazzī, Kawākib, 2:54; Stephan Conermann, ‘Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 955/1548):
Life and Works’, MSR 8.1 (2004), p. 120; EI 2, s.v. ‘Ibn Ṭūlūn’, 3:957.
63. Ibn Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī, Mutʿat, 1:27, 492. On p. 27, ʿUthmān’s death date is
given as 19 Dhū al-Qaʿada, whereas on p. 492 it is noted as 9 Dhū al-Qaʿada.
Since Ibn al-Mullā al-Ḥaṣkafī’s text preserves the only currently known bio-
graphical notice about ʿUthmān, the precise date of his death remains uncer-
tain without recourse to the copy of Mutʿat al-adhhān in the Staatsbibliothek
zu Berlin, MS no. 9888.
64. Ibid., 2:870, 876–7.
65. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fo. 59a. The sole surviving manu-
script is Jār Allāh’s autograph copy, which is currently housed in the Chester
Beatty Library, Dublin, Ireland, MS 3838, AH 950/1543 CE. For a descrip-
tion of the manuscript, see Arthur J. Arberry, The Chester Beatty Library:
A Handlist of the Arabic Manuscripts (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co. Ltd,
1949), 4:26; al-Hīla, Taʾrīkh, pp. 208–9.
66. Jār Allāh’s autograph notes that begin in the left margin on fo. 24a and
snake clockwise across the upper margins of fos 24a and 23b, down the right
margin of fo. 23b and across the bottom margins of fos 23b and 24a name
more individuals with ʿāhāt.
136

67. Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Al-Nukat, fos 2a, 15a. Though not a contem-
porary, Ibn Fahd also named someone who had special significance to his
family. In the margion of fo. 2a, he mentioned Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b.
al-Raḍī Ibrāhīm Abū al-Yumn al-Ṭabarī (d. 809/1406), a preacher at Mecca’s
Holy Mosque who had taught hadith to Taqī al-Dīn b. Fahd. On him, see
al-Fāsī, Al-ʿIqd al-thamīn fī taʾrīkh al-balad al-amīn, ed. Muḥammad Ḥāmid
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68. Ibid., fos 15a, 42a.
69. Ibn al-ʿUlayf al-Makkī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn, Al-Dīwān,
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70. Ibid., fo. 13a.
71. Ibid., fo. 58b.
72. Lagrange, ‘Obscenity’, p. 175.
73. Al-Ghazzī, Kawākib, 1:131.
74. Al-Shillī, Kitāb al-sanāʾ, p. 567; Abū al-Khayr, Al-Mukhtaṣar, p. 150.
75. El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, p. 50.
76. Yossef Rapoport, Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society
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156

Index
addiction, 46 deafness, 9, 10, 12, 51, 53–5, 63n36, 69n121, 84, 96,
aesthetic theory, 14 123
ahl al-ʿāhāt, 12–13, 15–16, 23–4, 36, 39, 104–6, 128 Deccan, 114–5
al-Aḥṭar, Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh, 86 demon possession see junūn
Alf layla wa-layla, 52 dwarfism, 103–4
al-Amshāṭī al-ʿAynṭābī, Shams al-Dīn, 76–7
anthologies, literary, 52–3, 72–3, 78, 89–92 evil eye, 53, 90–1
anthropology of the body, 7–8
al-Asyūṭī, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, 48, 50–1, 59 al-Fāḍil, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (qāḍī), 87
al-Azharī, Muḥammad, 86 al-Fayyūm, 39
Bāb Zuwayla, 76 Galen, 45–6

al-Badrī, 13, 15, 46, 60, 73–83, 87, 89, 91, 98, 127, 130 al-Ghazālī, 26, 112, 121
balādhur (marking nut), 15, 45–9, 130 ghība (slander), 111–13, 119–20, 124
al-Balādhurī, 47 goggle eyes, 6, 12
baldness, 15–16, 113–19
qaraʿ, 7, 53, 55, 111, 116–19, 123 al-Ḥājibī, Shihāb al-Dīn, 87
ṣalʿa, 7, 11–13, 110–11, 116–19, 123, 126 halitosis, 6, 10–12, 29, 85, 123
Banū Qudāma, 97 hashish, 46, 74
Barqūq (sultan), 39–40 hemiplegia, 11, 96, 124
al-Barqūqiyya madrasa, 76 al-Ḥijāzī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad, 15, 37–41, 44, 48,
Barsbay (sultan), 39 50–4, 57–60, 73, 75–6, 78–80, 83–5, 88–9, 127,
al-Bāʿūnī, Burhān al-Dīn, 74, 78 130
Baybars I (sultan), 39 al-Ḥillī, Safī al-Dīn, 87
Baybars II (sultan), 41–3 hunchbacks, 7, 10, 13, 27, 84, 96, 113
al-Baybarsiyya madrasa, 40–4, 50, 58–9
beggars, 39, 48, 62n14, 103 Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Yūsuf, 15, 26, 97–106, 113, 124–5,
al-Biqāʿī, 49, 59 127, 130
black skin, 11, 13, 26, 56, 128 Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir, Muḥyī al-Dīn, 86
blindness, 9, 11–13, 22–3, 40, 42, 53, 62n14, 81, 84, Ibn Abī Ḥajala, 84
91, 96, 103, 105, 111, 113, 118–19, 123 Ibn Abī Saʿūd, Shihāb al-Dīn, 57
blond hair, 27–9 Ibn ʿAdī, Haytham, 9–10
blue-green eyes, 9–12, 29, 36–7, 90, 123 Ibn al-Amīn, Abū al-Faḍl, 88
blurbs, 78–9 Ibn ʿArabshāh, Shihāb al-Dīn, 52
al-Bukhārī, 97, 101–3, 126 Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, 85, 87–8
Ibn Aybak al-Dimashqī, 87
Cairo Geniza, 131 Ibn Dāniyāl, 85
caliphs, 13 Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Muḥibb al-Dīn Jār Allāh, 15, 29,
Abbasid, 11, 119 110–14, 119–30
ʿAlī, 116, 119 Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, ʿIzz al-Dīn ʿUmar, 112, 123–4
Mamluk, 56, 74 Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Najm al-Dīn Muḥammad, 112
ʿUmar, 116, 119, 128 Ibn Fahd al-Makkī, Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad, 29, 110,
ʿUthmān, 11, 116, 119, 122 112
castration, 29 Ibn Ḥabīb, Muḥammad, 10
Coptic Christianity, 39, 83 Ibn Ḥabīb al-Ḥalabī, 87
cross eyes, 9, 11–12, 27, 57, 84, 111, 123, 126 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, 15, 41–3, 56, 58, 79, 84,
126
Daftarkhwān, 84–5, 87 Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, 16, 111–14, 119–29
al-Dajjāl, 25–6, 31 Ibn Ḥanbal, Aḥmad, 26, 120
157

Ibn Isrāʾil, Najm al-Dīn, 87–8 al-Nawājī, 53, 79, 83

Ibn al-Jahm, ʿAlī, 80, 88 al-Nawawī, 112, 120, 126
Ibn al-Jawzī, 13, 47
Ibn Labbaykum, Zayn al-Dīn, 84, 86 one-eyed people, 9, 11–13, 25–7, 53, 56, 63n36, 84,
Ibn Makānis, Fakhr al-Dīn, 89 91, 96, 112, 123, 126
Ibn Makānis, Majd al-Dīn, 75, 85–6 ophthalmia, 12, 42, 53, 85
Ibn Maṭrūḥ, Jamāl al-Dīn, 84, 86 ophthalmologist, 43, 84
Ibn al-Mazīz, 84
Ibn Mubārak Shāh al-Dimashqī, Shihāb al-Dīn, 57, plague, 38–9, 86, 99–100, 104, 125
59 Prophet Muḥammad, 11, 15, 23–4, 29–31, 56, 96, 100,
Ibn al-Muraḥḥal, 87 103, 126
Ibn al-Muʿtazz, 11, 85, 87 Prophetic medicine, 82
Ibn Muẓaffar, Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad, 88 protruding teeth, 9, 11, 123
Ibn al-Naqīb, Nāṣir al-Dīn, 85, 87
Ibn Nubātah, 75, 84, 87–8 al-Qādirī, Shams al-Dīn, 88
Ibn Qalāqis, 75, 79–80 Qarāsunqurriyya madrasa, 59
Ibn Qutayba, 10–11, 126–7 al-Qasṭallānī, 23, 30–1, 126
Ibn Rusta, Aḥmad, 12 al-Qayyim al-Fākhūrī, 86
Ibn Ṣāliḥ, Shihāb al-Dīn, 42, 57 al-Qazwīnī, Muḥammad, 11–12
Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk, 84, 87–8 al-Qibṭī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Yūsuf, 76–7
Ibn al-Shāb al-Tāʾib, Shihāb al-Dīn, 57 al-Qirāṭī, Burhān al-Dīn, 75, 84
Ibn Shajāʾ, Burhān al-Dīn, 88
Ibn al-Shiḥna, ʿAbd al-Barr, 78, 85 al-Rishī, Shihāb al-Dīn, 58
Ibn al-Shiḥna, Muḥibb al-Dīn, 76
Ibn Ṭūlūn, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad, 15, 26, 74, al-Ṣafadī, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, 13, 53, 75, 81, 84–9, 103, 124,
97–100, 104, 122–5, 127, 130 126–7
Ibn al-ʿUlayf, Shihāb al-Dīn, 127 al-Sakhawī, 24, 44, 50, 58, 74–8, 100, 126
Ibn al-Wakīl, Ṣadr al-Dīn, 84 al-Ṣāliḥiyya, 97–8
Ibn al-Wardī, Zayn al-Dīn, 75, 84–6 al-Sayrajī, Shihāb al-Dīn, 58
Ibn Yaghmūr, Jamāl al-Dīn Mūsá, 88 seal of prophethood, 14, 31–2
Islamic legal schools Seven Shihābs, 15, 53, 75
Ḥanafī, 43–4, 105, 114 Seven Planets, 58
Ḥanbalī, 43, 105, 114 al-Shāfiʿī, 26–7, 32, 78, 87, 120, 126
Mālikī, 43, 105, 115 al-Shawā, Maḥāsin, 84, 86–8
Shāfiʿī, 37, 43–4, 105, 111, 114 Shiʿism, 29, 43, 105
slander see ghība
al-Jāḥiẓ, 6–7, 9–10, 13, 28–9, 46, 56, 126 smallpox, 81, 86
junūn, 23, 28, 47–9, 53–4, 105 speech impediment, 12, 53, 84–5, 102
al-Suyūṭī: 27, 44, 49–50, 110, 121
al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, 13
taghayyur, 55–6
lameness, 7, 10, 12–13, 27, 42, 85, 96, 105, 111, 113, tattoos, 45, 64n56
123–4, 126 al-Tawḥīdī, Abū Ḥayyān, 12, 116–17, 128–9
leprosy, 7, 11–12, 24, 39, 45, 47, 61n13, 85, 111, 113, al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038), 12–13
118–19, 123–4, 126 al-Thaqafī, Shihāb al-Dīn, 84
al-Luʾluʾ al-Dhahabī, 86 thin-beardedness, 10–11, 27, 123, 128
al-Tilimsānī, Ibn al-ʿAfīf, 85, 86–7, 89
al-Maʿarrī, Abū al-ʿAlāʾ, 81, 126 al-Ṭūr port, 77
mamluk (slave soldier), 51 turbans, 15–16, 47, 114–15, 119
al-Manṣūrī, Shihāb al-Dīn, 42, 57, 59–60, 75, 78
al-Mawṣilī, ʿIzz al-Dīn, 84 al-Wadaʿī, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn, 84
mental illness see junūn al-Warrāq, Sirāj al-Dīn ʿUmar, 85, 87
al-Miʿmar, Ibrāhīm, 88
Mount Qāsiyūn, 97 al-Yamanī, ʿAmarah, 86
al-Muqrī, Abū al-Ḥasan, 84
Muʿtazilism, 30 Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, 90
muteness, 22–4, 51, 86 Zoroastrianism, 45
al-Zuʿayfarīnī, Aḥmad b. Yūsuf, 81, 85
al-Nabalusī, Jamāl al-Dīn, 85 al-Zuraʿī, Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan al-Ghazzī, 86
al-Naqīb, Tāj al-Dīn, 88 al-Zuraʿī, Muḥibb al-Dīn, 85
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the MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC WORLD

DIFFERENCE and DISABILITY in

Kristina Richardson is an Assistant Professor of History at

Jacket design: McColmDesign.co.uk

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© Kristina L. Richardson, 2012

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 11/13 JaghbUni Regular by

ISBN 978 0 7486 4507 7 (hardback)

The right of Kristina L. Richardson to be identified as author of this

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BEO Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales

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I.1 (page 2) ‘Battle Scene’. (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art,

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This book began as a graduate seminar paper on al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Burṣān

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Chapter 2 closely, and usefully suggested ways to reorder the material to

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By the 9th/15th century, a distinct, stripped-down visual and literary

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elephant heads; winged people with horse heads; double-faced people;

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distinctively ‘aggressive directness, revealing at the same time a crude

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marked by ‘blights’ (ʿāhāt, in Arabic) – a category that included indi-

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deafness and paraplegia; diseases like leprosy and halitosis; temporary

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history of Nubian Christian pilgrimage, healing and sacred spaces, so too

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Possessing multiple aberrant traits intensified their ugliness, which

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chapter 11 is entitled ‘Those with ʿāhāt’; chapter 12 is called ‘ʿĀhāt of

I asked a young fawn: What is your name?

Al-Baṣā’ir wa’l-dhakhā’ir (Visions and Treasures), an anthology on

Though al-Tawḥīdī does not mention any historical figures in this

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list shifts to being organised by physical traits: the one-eyed, one-eyed

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to approach this study, because this method invites consideration of

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bodies of the Prophet Muḥammad. According to Islamic hagiographi-

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removed his turban in public to perform ablutions before prayer or to enter

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perfectly able-bodied or whole, as all bodies operate within specific limita-

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(eds), Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of

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