Abstract The late 8th/14th century saw a renaissance of high occultism throughout Islamdom—a development alarming to puritan scholars. This includes Ibn Ḫaldūn (d. 808/1406), whose anti-occultist position in the Muqaddima is often assumed to be an example of his visionary empiricism; yet his goal is simply the recategorization of all occult sciences under the twin rubrics of magic and divination, and his veto persuades more on religious and social grounds than natural-scientific. Restoring the historian’s argument to its original state of debate with the burgeoning occultist movement associated with the Mamluk sultan Barqūq’s (r. 784/1382-791/1389 and 792/1390-801/1399) court reveals it to be not forward-thinking but rather conservative, fideist and indeed reactionary, as such closely allied with Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧawziyya’s (d. 751/1350) puritanical project in particular; and in any event, the eager patronage and pursuit of the occult sciences by early modern ruling and scholarly elites suggests that his appeal could only fall on deaf ears. That it also flatly opposed the forms of millennial sovereignty that would define the post-Mongol era was equally disqualifying. I here take Šaraf al‑Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (d. 858/1454), Ibn Ḫaldūn’s younger colleague and fellow resident in Cairo, as his sparring partner from the opposing camp: the Timurid historian was a card-carrying occultist and member of the Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ network of neopythagorean-neoplatonic-monist thinkers then gaining prominence from India to Anatolia via Egypt. I further take geomancy (ʿilm al-raml) as a test case, since Yazdī wrote a tract in defense of the popular divinatory science that directly rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s arguments in the Muqaddima. To set the stage for their debate, I briefly introduce contemporary geomantic theory and practice, then discuss Ibn Ḫaldūn’s and Yazdī’s respective theories of occultism with a view toward establishing points of agreement and disagreement; I also append a translation of Yazdī’s tract as a basis for this comparison.

Abstract In the tenth/sixteenth century six treatises on physiognomy (ʿilm-i firāsat)—a science widely considered able to predict inner moral dispositions (aḫlāq-i bāṭina) based on external appearances (aḥwāl-i ẓāhira)—were written for the Ottoman court. In a world in which statecraft and politics were ultimately based on questions of morality (aḫlāq), physiognomy was presented as a particularly useful skill for the Ottoman court due to its ability to evaluate inner moral character with scientific precision. Based on such knowledge, a partial conception of justice could be implemented with an instrumental coating of impartiality. Moreover, men with prized moral qualities could be selected for the ruling elite. The science also offered the sultan and his court a modus operandi for attaining self-knowledge and, if combined with moral self-disciplining (riyāḍat), a way to acquire divine characteristics.

This article maps out the depiction among pre-Islamic tribes of two seasons, the August ḫarīf rains and the qayẓ dry season. References to the ḫarīf rain are found almost exclusively in southwestern Arabia, Yemen and the Ḥiǧāz. Tribes in these regions evidently began their seasonal migration in August, that is, earlier than tribes of central and northeastern Arabia (Naǧd), where migration began in October and November. The most conspicuous result of this difference is the development of two regional methods of depicting the ẓaʿn, or departure of the beloved’s caravan, in the classical qaṣīda (polythematic ode). Naǧdī tribes set this scene at the beginning of the summer dry season, while the Ḥiǧāzī Huḏayl set it in a rainy season. A sequence of poets within Tamīm developed an idiosyncratic set of vocabulary for developing the early-summer ẓaʿn, just as certain Huḏalī poets developed certain techniques to describe their rainy season ẓaʿn. Cet article analyse la représentation dans les tribus préislamiques de deux saisons, les pluies d’août (ḫarīf) et la saison sèche (al-qayẓ). Les références à la pluie ḫarīf se trouvent presque exclusivement au sud-ouest de l’Arabie, au Yémen et dans le Ḥiǧāz. Les tribus de ces régions commençaient apparemment leur migration saisonnière en août, plus tôt que les tribus du centre et du nord-est de l’Arabie (Naǧd), où la migration commençait en octobre ou novembre. Le résultat le plus remarquable de cette différence est l’évolution de deux méthodes régionales de la représentation du ẓaʿn, le départ de la caravane de la bien-aimée, dans la qaṣīda classique (ode polythématique). Les tribus du Naǧd plantent le décor de cette scène au début de la saison sèche, tandis que la tribu ḥiǧāzienne Huḏayl la situe à la saison des pluies. This article is in English.

The Prophet’s documents comprise a category of objects that are the intentions of the Prophet, legally binding texts, and physical objects that touched the Prophet all at once. Reports of these documents are found in various genres of medieval Islamic literature, where they are frequently transmitted through family isnāds. While these reports are self-consciously geared toward recording the intentions of the Prophet, in effect they reflect the concern of the subalterns of hadith literature to locate themselves somewhere within the narrative of the Prophet’s life. The reports investigated here thus preserve an element of what hadith meant to Bedouin recipients, revealing a pre-canonical arena for hadith in which hadith behaved not as text but as physical object, as a “hadith-object.”1