Saturday, June 15, 2024

The jilt of Baghdad

... or so I'm translating Mathieu Tillier's désamour. This is Muhammad "Waki'" bin Khalaf, namesake of Ibn al-Jarrah: an Iraqi qadi best-known for providing a history of that office. It was almost the history, for Wael Hallaq (2005)'s chapter on the Umayyads.

Tillier, it seems, has noticed that modern historians have placed a lot of weight on this one manuscript - the only MS as survived to the print age. (This happens a lot.) So he's looking into why Waki' wrote this history. Tillier finds that this is a post-Mihna text, like Tabari's history; it pits against each other "Prophets-and-Kings". Independent - read, Sunni - judges would be our prophets, speaking the eternal Word Of God ghayr makhlûq. The Quran so interpreted, not the caliph, be God's shadow on Earth.

Waki' got himself swept-up in the raw politics as, perhaps, Tabari had not. And where Tabari got copied, Waki' basically didn't, except in this one case. It may be that, as now, it was noticed in mediaeval Iraq that too few historians had even recorded about the preBaghdadian qadi.

If Tillier is right, which he usually is, then whenever Waki' is talking about Umayyad Damascus, we have to suspect he's thinking about Mutazilite Baghdad. Waki' would agree with Crone and Hinds - taking it personally.

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