ENCYCLOPEDIA MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC PART 30

SONGHAY EMPIRE

Origin

  Islam began to spread in the Songhay empire some time in the eleventh century CE, when the ruling Za or Dia dynasty first accepted Islam. It was a prosperous region with a booming trade from the city of Gao. In fact, a Songhay kingdom in the region of Gao had existed since the eleventh century, but it had come under the control of Mali in 1325. After the decline of Mali, the kingdom of Gao reasserted itself as the major kingdom in the Sahel. By the late fourteenth century, Gao reasserted itself as the Sunni dynasty, the other name of the Songhay empire.

  Songhay would not fully eclipse Mali until the reign of Sunni ‘Ali Ber, who reigned from 1464 to 1492. He aggressively turned the kingdom of Gao into an empire under his leadership, and the most important towns of the Western Sudan came under the Songhay empire. The great cities of Islamic learning, such as Timbuktu (captured from the Tuaregs) and Jenne, also came under his power between 1471 and 1476. The empire stretched across the Niger valley, west to Senegal and east to Agades (modern-day Niger). With his cavalry and a highly mobile fleet of ships, ‘Ali Ber pushed the Berbers who had always played such a crucial role in the downfall of Sahelian kingdoms, far north.

The Sunni Kings

 

  The ‘ulama have condemned Sunni ‘Ali, the first real founder, in spite of his contribution in founding the Songhay empire. They claimed he was a nominal Muslim and compromised between paganism and Islam, although he prayed and fasted. Once he punished the famous scholar Al-Maghili to whom is attributed the introduction of theQadiriyyafraternity of Sufis in Africa by calling him ‘‘a pagan.’’ He believed in magical practices and local cults. This, however, was not something new in the Songhay only. Almost the same practice continued in other parts of West Africa until the time that various revivalist movements took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Sunni ‘Ali’s syncretism was soon denounced by the eminent Muslim scholars in Timbuktu. Timbuktu had an established reputation as a center of Islamic learning and civilization of West Africa. Members of the famous Aqit family of Berber scholars were enjoying the post of the Grand Qadi (Chief Justice) at the time and were known for their fearless oppositions to the rulers. Sunni ’Ali did not take such criticism lightly. In his lifetime he suppressed the scholars of timbuktu, but after his death the situation completely changed and the Muslim scholars triumphed. Muhammad Toure´, a military general, asked his successor, Sunni Barou, to make a public appearance and make a confession of his faith in Islam. When Barou refused to do so, Muhammad Toure´ ousted him and established a new dynasty in his own name, called theAskiyadynasty. Sunni ’Ali may be compared with Sundiate of Mali and Askiya Muhammad Toure´ to Mansa Musa, a champion for the cause of Islam.

  An ardent Muslim, when Muhammad Toure´ (r. 1493–1528) came to power, he established Islamic law and extensively drew upon the expertise of his Timbuktu scholars in matters of the state. He also arranged for a large number of Muslims to be trained as judges (qadis) and he replaced native Songhay administrators with Arab Muslims in a bid to stabilize the empire. Timbuktu gained fame as an intellectual center rivaling many others in the Muslim world. It had the credit of establishing the first Muslim university Sankore University in West Africa, the name of which is commemorated still today in Ibadan University, where a certain staff residential area is named Sankore Avenue. Learners from various parts of the world came to study a wide array of sciences, ranging from language and politics to law and medicine (apart from the city’s more than 180 madrasahs where one could undertake strictly Islamic studies). Medieval Europe sent emissaries to the University of Sankore to witness its excellent libraries with manuscripts and to consult with the learned mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, and jurists whose intellectual endeavors were said to be paid for out of the king’s own treasury.

  Muhammad Toure´ continued Sunni Ali’s imperial expansion by seizing the important Saharan oases and conquering Mali. From there he conquered Hausaland. He also further centralized the government by creating a large and elaborate bureaucracy to oversee his extensive empire. Merchants and traders traveled from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to exchange their exotic wares for the gold of Songhay. As in Mali, there was a privileged caste of craftsmen, and slave labor played an important role in agriculture. Gold, kola nuts, and slaves were the main exports, whereas textiles, horses, salt, and luxury goods were the main imports.

  Toure´ also standardized weights, measures, and currency so that culture throughout the Songhay began to homogenize. These programs of conquest, centralization, and standardization were the most ambitious and far-reaching in sub-Saharan history until the colonization of the continent by the Europeans. Songhay reached its greatest territorial expansion under Askia Dawud (r. 1549–1582), when the empire stretched all the way to Cameroon. With literally several thousand cultures under its control, Songhay was the largest empire in African history.

  Toure´, on his pilgrimage to Makkah, came into close contact with various Muslim scholars and rulers in the Arab countries. He visited the caliph of Egypt, who proclaimed him caliph of the whole of Sudan. Sudan, at the time, was a loose term for a large area in sub-Saharan Africa usually embracing Mali, Chad, northwest Nigeria, and Niger. In Makkah, the King accorded him great respect, turbanned him, and gave him a sword and the title of Khalifah of western Sudan. On his return from Makkah in 1497, he proudly used the title of al-Hajj.Askiya took such a keen interest in the Islamic legal system that he asked a number of questions on Islamic theology from his personal friend, Muhammad al-Maghili. Al-Maghili wrote down the answers in detail, which Askiya circulated in the Songhay empire. The questions pertained to the fundamental structure of the faith that later served as the chief source of ‘Uthman Dan Fodio’s revolution in Hausaland a few years thereafter.

  Although most of the people in urban areas had turned Muslim, the majority of those living in the rural areas still followed African traditional religion. Some aspects of traditional religion have been preserved to this day, including the sacred drum, the sacred fire, and the old types of costume and hairstyle.

  Overall, the appearance of Islam in western Sudan was important for much more than religious reasons. It introduced the culture of scholarship to countries beyond Egypt and theMaghriband stabilized trade between her and the lands beyond the Sahara. It also, however, left terrible religious conflicts between the various tribes who did or did not accept Islam, and created a different kind of unrest.

Decline

  After Askiya Muhammad Toure´, the empire began to crumble. His sons who had shared power with him deposed him since there was no fixed law of succession to the throne. During a period of sixty years (1528– 1591), eight Askiyas came to power consecutively.

  Songhay had gotten too large by this time; it encompassed too much territory to control. After the reign of Askia Dawud, subject peoples began to revolt, even though Songhay had an army of more than thirty five thousand soldiers. The first major region to go was Hausaland. In 1590, al-Mansur, the powerful and ambitious sultan of Morocco, decided that he wanted control of the West African gold trade badly enough to send his army all the way across the Sahara. The spears and swords of the Songhay warriors were no match for the cannons and muskets of the Moroccan army. The Moroccan invasion destroyed the Songhay empire. It contributed, along with such other phenomena as the growing Atlantic trade, to the decline of the trade routes that had brought prosperity to the region for hundreds of years.

  Trade routes fell under local control and deteriorated beyond recovery. The Moroccans also took Timbuktu in 1591 and ruled over the city until about 1780, supervising its ultimate decline. During the early nineteenth century, Timbuktu passed into the hands of a variety of  West African groups, including the Tuaregs and the Bamabra, who founded the Bamabra kingdom of Se´gou farther to the south. In the late nineteenth century, as European powers invaded parts of Africa, French colonizers took over the city.

  In 1612, the remaining cities of Songhay fell into anarchy and the greatest empire of African history came to a sudden close. No African nation since has risen to prominence and wealth as did the mighty Songhay.

Further Reading

Caillie´,Re´ne´.Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo; and Across the Great Desert to Morocco Performed in the Years 1824–1828. Colburn and Bentley, 1830.

Davidson, Basil.Africa in History. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Dubois, Felix.Timbuctoo the Mysterious. Transl. Diane White. Heinemann, 1897.

Gardner, Brian.The Quest for Timbuktu. Cassell, 1968.

Jackson, John G.Introduction to African Civilizations. Citadel Press, 1994.

Robinson, D., and D. Smith.Sources of the African Past. London: Heinemann, 1979.

Shillington, Kevin.History of Africa. St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Shinnie, Margaret. Ancient African Kingdoms. Edward Arnold, 1965.

SOUTHEAST ASIA, HISTORY AND CULTURE

  Although never conceived of as a unitary region in Arabic accounts, Southeast Asia was a maritime contact zone for Indian Ocean trade with China from antiquity. The shippers who plied this route, such as Ibn Khurradadhbih, recorded the names of several of the harbors at which they called for water, victuals, and trade. The most famous of the trading ports were located in the vicinity of the Isthmus of Kra (Kalah), in the locales of North Sumatra (Ramni), East Sumatra (Zabaj), Tioman Island (Tiyuma), and the coasts of Cambodia (Qmar) and Champa (Sanf ) the last being the collective name for the Austronesian kingdoms once located in central Vietnam.

  The majority of the Southeast Asian ports gained advantage from this passing India trade, and their organization and culture reflected Indic modes. The Buddhist (or at times Saivite) kingdoms of Java; Angkor in Cambodia; the Cham cities in Vietnam; and Srivijaya in the Straits of Malacca all maintained cults of divine kingship and the use of Sanskrit for official proclamations. Because of this, most medieval accounts placed Southeast Asian toponyms in general descriptions of India.

  The region was not always a stable constellation of states. Eleventh-century attacks by the Tamil Cholas weakened Srivijaya and may have led the Khmers to play a stronger role on the peninsula. Further, the Mongol conquests of the twelfth century saw a reorientation of Southern Song networks involving Java as a more active agent of interoceanic trade. The Javanese state Singasari, and then its thirteenth century successor Majapahit, exercised hegemony over Sumatra. The general view of a Java-dominated island world seems to have led to the nascence in the Arabic texts of this toponym, as in the encyclopedia of Yaqut, who stated in his Mu‘jam al-buldan that Java was one of the first of the kingdoms of China. Ibn al-Mujawir also made reference, in his Ta’rikh al-mustabsir (ca. 1228), to rough passage to ‘‘the region of Jawa.’’ When Marco Polo visited the region in 1292, he referred to Sumatra as Java Minora. Similarly, when Ibn Battuta returned from China circa 1345, he named Sumatra as a part of Jawa.

  The Mongols had also invaded mainland Burma in 1258, and their impact in Asia was a catalyst for the southward movement of the Tai peoples at the expense of the mainland Mon and Khmer populations. After slow beginnings on North Sumatra, and between the exertions of Singasari and Majapahit, Islamization would spread westward to other parts of the Malay Peninsula and the spice islands before the arrival of the Portuguese, who took the port of Malacca in 1511 and attempted to monopolize the collection of spices in the region. This allowed for the rise of the Sumatran state of Aceh under ‘Ali Mughayat Shah (r. 1514–1530). Whereas the Portuguese apothecary Tome´Pires, stationed in freshly conquered Malacca between 1512 and 1515, could write of a largely non-Muslim Java, by 1527, Majapahit had been defeated by the coastal sultanate of Demak, ushering in a long-term process of Islamization from above.

  Muslims were also an increasingly notable presence in mainland Southeast Asian courts, such as Siam and Cambodia, but their influence was shortlived. With the rise of Atlantic commercial power in the seventeenth century, Sumatran Aceh and West Java’s Banten constituted the leading Muslim competitors for trade in the region. Their territories, like those of many Southeast Asian states, were slowly being eaten away over the course of the coming centuries by Western colonialism. At the same time, Islam became ever more linked with many of the cultures of  the archipelago while Theravada Buddhism became ever more entrenched as that of the mainland.

Further reading

Cortesa˜o, Armando (Trans and ed).The Suma Oriental of Tome´ Pires (...) and the book of Fransisco Rodriguez (...). The Hakluyt Society, second series, no. 89, London, 1944.

Coede`s, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Honolulu: East West Center Press, 1968.

Ibn Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuˆta A.D. 1325–1354, vol. IV. Translated and edited by H.A.R. Gibb and C.F. Beckingham. London: Hakluyt Society, 1994, 874–887.

Ibrahim, Muhammad Rabi’ b. Muhammad. The Ship of Sulaimaˆn. Transl. J. O’Kane. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1972.

Jacq-Hergoualc’h, Michel. The Malay Peninsula: Crossroads of the Maritime Silk Road. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

Reid, Anthony.Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988–1993.

Tibbetts, G.R.A Study of the Arabic Texts Containing Material on South-East Asia. Leiden and London: Brill, 1979.

Wolters, Oliver.Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Srıˆvijaya. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962.

Yule, Henry, and Henri Cordier.The Book of Ser Marco Polo. 2 vols. Philo Press, Amsterdam, 1975.

SOUTHEAST ASIA, LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

   Ever since Southeast Asia began to feature in the accounts of Muslim mariners, it is clear they had dealings mainly with the Austronesian peoples of the archipelago and coastal harbors of the mainland, for whom Malay served as thelingua franca. Ninthcentury Arab accounts referred to the Malacca Straits as Salaht, from the Malay selat (strait), while the ’Aja’ib al-hind of al-Ramhurmuzi (ca. 1000) made reference to the practice of sitting deferentially before a local king by using the Malay verb bersila. The use of Malay along the main artery of trade was often commented on by later travelers. Jean Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689) reported that the languages of the cultured world included Malay as that ‘‘of educated people, from the flooding Indus to China and Japan, and in most of the Eastern isles, much like Latin in our Europe.’’

  Although Malay played an important role in interethnic communication, there is a dearth of inscriptions in that language as compared to those of the cultures of Java and Cambodia, whether in the once widespread Indic-derived scripts or in the Arabic script that supplanted them in the Muslim islands of Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula. Equally, there is a paucity of manuscript holdings again as compared with the palm leaf texts of those kingdoms that remained substantially Hindu Buddhist in outlook when the Europeans arrived; most notably the Southeast Asian mainland and the islands of Java and Bali.

  Nonetheless, the holdings that remain indicate that the pre-Islamic Malay literature, like most of the literatures of the region, consisted of a rich selection of royal epics, declamatory poetry, and morality tales,  suffused with stories from (or complete reworkings of) Indian epics, such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. With Islamization, these were both supplemented or replaced by Islamic tales drawn from Arabic and Persian literature, such as the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyya, and many indigenous compositions in the form of poems sometimes brief, sometimes epic known as syair (from the Arabic).

  Malay also played a leading role in the inculcation of Islamic norms in the archipelago, first mystical and then primarily for the transmission of knowledge of Shafi’i fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). The first known Malay author, Hamzah al-Fansuri (d. 1527), wrote in one of his poetic works that he had done so in Malay in the hope that ‘‘those of God Almighty’s servants unacquainted with Farsi and Arabic will be able to discuss its contents.’’ Again, in 1601, Shams al-Din of Pasai, wrote in hisMir’at al-mu’minthat he had written ‘‘in the Jawi language in order to render words of the principles of religion for those unable to understand Arabic or Farsi,’’ and al-Raniri, the chief Qadi to the Acehnese court in the late 1630s, composed his compendium on Shafi’ifiqh, the Sirat al-mustaqim;he did so in Malay.

  Malay literature has also been strongly influenced by that of Java, which shares in the corpus of Indian stories that were often recast with specifically Javanese admixtures (such as the powerful clown characters or the cultural hero Panji).

  Furthermore, with the Islamization of Java and closer contacts between its sultanates and those of the Malay world, there was an increasing trend toward polyglossia among Islamic scholars. Perhaps for this reason one of the great Malay exponents of the Sufi tradition, and the author of the first Malay exegesis of the Qur’an, ‘Abd al-Ra’uf al-Sinkili (1615–1693), noted in his Mir’aˆt al-tulla ˆb that he made specific recourse to al-lisan al-jawiyya al-samutra’iyya (the Sumatran Jawi tongue), perhaps implying that there were indeed other Southeast Asian languages.

Further reading

Collins, James T.Malay, World Language: A Short History. 2d ed. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2000

SUDAN

  Bilad al-Sudan, the ‘‘land of the blacks,’’ was the name used for the savannah regions south of  the Sahara from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. It can be divided into the Western Sudan (present-day Senegal to Mali), the Central Sudan around and to the northeast of Lake Chad (today Niger, northern Nigeria, and Chad), and the Nilotic Sudan (today the northern part of the Republic of Sudan). Western Sudan was sometimes also given the generic name ‘‘Takrur.’’

  The Muslims’ relation to the Sudan was initially one of trade. The origins of trans-Saharan trade is not known, but it did predate the Arab presence in North Africa, and it must have seen a marked expansion when the Maghrib was included in an Islamic world market, at least from the eighth or ninth century. Muslim traders traveled across the desert to market towns in the Sudanic belt, such as Tadmekka, Walata, and Awdaghost, where they met with local long-distance traders that had brought gold, ivory, and slaves from forest regions of the south. Eventually these Sudanic traders also started to make the journey across the desert to the trade centers that grew up on the northern side, such as Aghmat, Sijilmasa, and Wargala.

  The Muslim traders did not, by and large, make any attempt at proselytization of their faith. Instead, they kept apart in separate quarters, often somewhat outside the main Sudanic towns. But the lucrative trade did in itself attract local elites to the civilization and thus the religion of the strangers. The rules of the Shari’a formed a legal framework necessary for more elaborate commercial networks, and those Sudanic traders that wanted to insert themselves directly in the transdesert trade would find conversion a major benefit for participation in it.

  The trade also led to the growth of large empires in the Sudanic region. The first was Ghana (or Wagadu). It collapsed, perhaps after an Almoravid attack, in 1076, and was succeeded by Mali on the Niger bend (early thirteenth century). Mali became famous in the Muslim world for its wealth based on the gold trade, a reputation entrenched when its ruler, Mansa Musa, made a resplendenthajj in 1324. In the fifteenth century, the power of Mali was overtaken by the Songhay empire (c. 1460–1591), slightly to its east, with the capital of Gao.

  Unlike Ghana’s rulers, those of Mali had converted to Islam. However, it was initially only a partial conversion, as they also had to retain their religious legitimacy as divinely ordained rulers according to the popular faiths of their subjects. As Islam spread among the socially dominant classes of the population, however, Muslim religiosity also became important for the ruler, and theaskiyarulers of Songhay, such as Askiya Muhammad, sought a reputation for piety by inviting Muslim reformers from the north to deepen knowledge of Islam in his lands.

  Local traders also spread Islam southward from Jenne and other riverain centers, embodied by scholarly lineages such as the Suwari teachers and traders (the Jahanke and Juula).

  The western trade routes were initially the most important ones across the desert. But the first major Sudanic king to convert to Islam was not of the west, but the ruler of the Kanem empire east of Lake Chad. He had already in the eleventh century made the transition to Islam. Kanem was also the first and only Sudanic kingdom to colonize a part of the Maghreb when it invaded Fezzan (today southern Libya) and established a local capital there at Traghen in around 1258. This expansionism from the south lasted about a century before weaknesses at home caused contacts to the colony to be cut off and it eventually withered away.

  The traders that first brought Islam across the desert were mostly Ibadis or other Khariji groups that dominated such northern centers as Sijilmasa and Wargala. Thus Sudanic Islam was initially an Ibadi Islam, and it may have been this school to which the Kanem king converted. However, in this period Islam was still an elite and trader religion. By the time it spread to a wider audience from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Malikism reigned supreme in the north, and although some Ibadi desert retreats (Ghardaia, Wargala, Ghadames) remained important trading centers, it was Maliki Islam that came to dominate the Sudan, and all traces of an Ibadi past were lost to posterity.

  The history of Islam in the Nilotic region differs from the western and central ones, because the Nile River allows a continuity of population from north to south. It also differs because Christianity had gained a firm foothold in the Nile valley, such as in the Nubian kingdoms of  Maris, Muqurra, and Alwa. Muqurra, with its capital of Dongola, came under Egyptian Muslim control under the Mamluks, and its cathedral was turned into a mosque in 1317. The kingdom of Alwa to the south (near modern day Khartoum) fell apart around the same time. The immigration of Arab tribes, together with Arabization of the local population groups, made Arabic the dominant language, and Islam dominated the Nilotic Sudan by the end of the sixteenth century. At the end of this period, a dynasty of the Funj people established the kingdom of Sennar, which included most of the Nilotic Sudan and lasted until the nineteenth century.

  In spite of its geographical closeness to Muslim Egypt, Islamic scholarship was much less developed in the Nilotic regions than in the western Sudan. There, desert-side centers such as Timbuktu and Walata, as well as scholarly tribes of the desert proper, produced an extensive Islamic literature and became focuses of learning that later came to influence not only their own region but also the central lands of Islam. More militant expressions of religious mobilization, such as the Almoravid movements that had some roots in the south, also showed the impact that the Sudan had on the Maghreb and beyond.

Further Reading

Hunwick, John O.Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: AlSa‘di’s Ta’rikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents. Leiden: Brill, 1999, 2003.

———.Shari‘a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Levtzion, Nehemia.Ancient Ghana and Mali. London: Methuen, 1973.

———. ‘‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800,’’ and ‘‘The Juula and the Expansion of Islam into the Forest.’’ In The History of Islam in Africa, edited by N. Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, 63–116. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000.

Levtzion, Nehemia, and J.F.P. Hopkins (Eds).Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Lewicki, Tadeusz. ‘‘Traits d’histoire du commerce transsaharien. Marchands et missionnaires ibadites en Soudan occidental et central au cours des viiie-xiie sie`cles.’’Etnografia polskaviii (1964): 291–311.

SUFISM AND SUFIS: SOUTH ASIA

  Sufism, or the mystical component of Islam, in South Asia constitutes a critical component of Muslim society in the medieval period. Alongside the religious learned class (‘ulama’), Sufis had developed sophisticated institutions of learning, networks for merchants, charitable organizations, and contributed immensely to scholarship. In South Asia, just as their counterparts in the Middle East and North Africa, Sufis were scholars of law, philosophy, theology, literature, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Sufis obtained prominent political positions as advisors to statesmen on jurisprudence and on policy decisions, and they also were influential members in all of the major Islamic Sunni and Shi‘i legal schools. Sufi scholars in South Asia were responsible for developing major intellectual trends, philosophical schools of thought, and devising legal interpretations that were historical in nature.

  Many of the major educational institutions that taught traditional Qur’anic, legal, linguistic, and hadith and seerah studies had incorporated Sufi studies into their curriculum. As scholars, Sufis developed new ways of defining and transmitting spiritual knowledge and authority and simultaneously devised their own methods of legitimation. By the medieval period, Sufism evolved as the main expression of Islamic piety by being patronized either by the Delhi sultanate or the Mughal dynasty. Their popular religious appeal simultaneously was connected to the intellectual growth and exuberance of Muslim scholarship.

  Emperor Akbar’s erudite historian, Abu Fazl, recorded in A’in-i Akbarithat there were fourteen major Sufi orders in South Asia. In Abu Fazl’s analysis of Sufism, he outlines the subbranches of each of the orders, the founding Sufi masters, the genealogies, and their primary areas of influence. The fourteen Sufi orders that were dominant in the medieval period were: Chishtı, Hubairı , Zaidı , Habibı , Karkia, Suhrawardı, Taifurı , Junaidı , Firdausı , Tasuia, Gazrunı ,‘Iyazı , Adhamı , and Saqatia. Each Sufi order constituted its own rituals, meditation practices, prayer manuals, literature on Sufism, and independent institutions that lodged members and senior Sufi masters.

  A review of two major Sufi orders, the Chishtis and Suhrawardı, will illustrate the major religious practices of Sufis in South Asia. Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı, commonly called Khwaja Gharib Nawaz (‘‘The Patron Saint of the Poor’’) established the Chishti Sufi order in India. Mu‘ı n al-dın Chishtı was born in Sijistan, an eastern province of Persia, was forced out of his town by invasions, and became itinerant until he settled in Ajmer, India. Chishtı studied in a variety of prestigious Islamic colleges (madaris) in Baghdad, Samarqand, Tabriz, and Bukhara, where he mastered languages, philosophy, law, and ethics and then concentrated on an internal mystical approach to religion. It is recorded that Chishtı met prominent Sufis, such as ‘Abdu’l Qadir Jilanı, Najm ud-dın Kubra, and Abdul Qadir al-Suhrawardı, and studied under the eminent Usman Baghdadı for twenty years. Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı reached Delhi in 1193, and then settled in Ajmer to establish his teachings and the Sufi order. Like earlier prominent Sufi masters before him, Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı implemented a hierarchical master–disciple (pir–murıd) structure for spiritual training, and he also successfully assimilated local customs into the order. Chishtı understood the benefits of cross-religious exchanges and shared many Hinduyogi practices, such as bowing before an elder, shaving the head of new members, presenting water to guests, and the use of devotional music (sama‘) for worship. The distinguishing features of Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı’s teachings and practices are assimilating Sufi practices within the Indian religious context, while other contemporary Sufis and legalminded scholars were interested in maintaining boundaries between Islam and the Hindu tradition.

  The difficult social and political conditions under which Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı lived influenced his emphasis on incorporating social services with his Sufi theosophy. With a corrupt sociopolitical and economic system under the Delhi sultanate, Chishtı’s rejection of all worldly material (tark-i dunya) was the foundation of his ideology. Any possession of property was considered a compromise of faith. According to Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı, ‘‘The highest form of worship to God was to redress the misery of those in distress, to fulfill the needs of the poor and to feed the hungry.’’ Chishtı¯ Sufis lived on charity (futuh) and practiced several mystical breathing techniques, engaged in spiritual confinement in a cell for meditational purposes, and involved themselves in devotional music gatherings (sama‘). The more advanced Sufis tied a rope around their feet and lowered their bodies into a well for forty days for prayer (chilla-i ma‘kus). Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı preached that fasting from food was a good method for increasing one’s faith, and if one desired food it should be a vegetarian diet. The Chishtıs had a reputation of having a large section of lower classes and the dispossessed in society as members. Since the Chishtıs accepted any member without discrimination of religion, class, ethnicity, and gender, the order rapidly became eclectic. When an individual became a member of the Chishtı¯ Sufi order, which did not require religious conversion, he or she needed first, to choose an elder as a spiritual guide and second, to commit themselves to maintain the grounds of the shrine (dargah). Mu‘ın al-dın Chishtı’s blend of a mystical life and social services for the poor profoundly changed the Islamic mystical institutions in the Indian subcontinent. His Sufi order served as an alternative form of popular spiritual expression because it empowered individuals to develop a spiritual discipline within a meaningful framework.

  Another significant Sufi order in South Asia during the medieval period was the Suhrawardı Sufis, mainly located in Punjab and Sind. Baha’ al-dın Zakariyya Multanı  (1181–1262) was Shihab al-dın ‘Abu  Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardı ’s (d. 1234) primary successor (khalıfa) to establish the Sufi order in Multan. Zakariyya successfully made his Sufi center (khanaqah) an important center for both secular and religious activities as prominent royal families would visit and attend Suhrawardı  rituals. A well-known poet and disciple of Zakariyya was Faqr al-dın ‘Iraqı, who wrote on the experience of divine union in his book Lama‘at (Divine Flashes). Zakariyya’s son and primary khalıfa, Sadr al-dı n ‘Arif (d. 1285), continued the Suhrawardı order’s mission, and his conversations were recorded by his successor, Zia al-dın. Another important Suhrawardı  successor of ‘Umar al-Suhrawardı was Qadı Hamıd al-dın Nagauri, who was based in Delhi. Nagauri wrote on the principles and practices of  Sufism in Usul ut tarıqat (The Principles of the Sufı Path),which was widely used in most Suhrawardı centers in the Indian subcontinent. Nagauri served as Shaikh-al-Islam for the Delhi sultanate and was considered a leading scholar in his period. An extensive tafsır is attributed to Nagauri called Tafsır i Parai ‘Amma. Works pertaining to Nagauri’s ideas on mystical experiences connected to the larger cosmos. Another eminent Suhrawardı¯master and teacher was Jalal al-dın Bukharı (d. 1291), who wrote Siraj al Hidayah (Rays of Guidance) in which he discussed the establishment of the Suhrawardı order in Ucch and in the Sind province. Most of this information is recorded by one of the major Suhrawardı¯chroniclers, Hamıd ibn Fazl Allah Jamalı (d. 1536), author of  Siyar al ‘Arifın.

  Since its early history in Baghdad, the Suhrawardı Sufi order maintained the principle of embracing the world with the esoteric practices of Sufism. That is, the early theosophist of the Sufi order, ‘Umar al-Suhrawardı, emphasized the necessity of becoming politically active and building networking alliances in order to be active members of the community. Part of al-Suhrawardı’s basic creed was to adhere to and fully recognize the caliph’s rule, or perhaps to obey general state authority, because this authority was a manifestation of divine authority on earth.

  Suhrawardıs understood the Sufi path as the way to perfect one’s devotion and the journey where one can fully embrace divine beauty; at the heart of the Suhrawardı Sufism was the reconnection with the divine the human soul had previously experienced in a preexistent time. This did not mean that Suhrawardıs could not lead a practical life; rather, they were encouraged to enjoy the benefits of this world and to not reject the world. They understood that the Prophet Muhammad S.A.W  established a balanced code for Suf living, and this example was the model for Suhrawardıs. According to the Suhrawardıs, there were only a few advanced devotees who were able to pray all night and work all day. The majority of believers needed to maintain prayers and specific Sufi practices, such as meditational spiritual exercises (dhikr),as part of their daily routine. On the controversial issue of whether Sufis should maintain a celibate lifestyle, Suhrawardıs argued that only advanced Sufi masters were qualified to judge whether their disciples were spiritually equipped to take on that challenge. But there was a consensus that the lifestyle of the antinomian nomadic begging Qalandars was not acceptable in the Islamic tradition.

  The overwhelming stress on proper moral conduct (adab) is mainly connected with his concern that Sufis develop an internal and external discipline that mirrored the Prophet’s life. For the Suhrawardıs the physical world is very much related to the spiritual world, and in order for Sufis to perfect their spirituality their physical customs must reflect their internal condition. Most South Asian Suhrawardı  masters connected adabas way to obey the law completely because it was a manifestation of divine order. Some suggested that in the process of creating a perfect harmonious society, it required an intensely structured model. Adabwas a critical element in this ideal world because all the minute details of an individual’s behavior could be controlled. However, Suhrawardıs believed they were practicing more than spiritual purity, but in the larger scheme, Suhrawardı Sufis were attempting to reunite with the divine, and this required them to uphold Islamic law. One needed to be prepared to carry out this extraordinary responsibility by having one’s thoughts and actions planned for every moment.

Further Reading

Akhtar, Mohd. Saleem. ‘‘A Critical Appraisal of the Sufi Hagiographical Corpus of Medieval India.’’Islamic Culture52 (1978): 139–150.

Buehler, Arthur.Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Currie, Paul.Muin al-dı¯n Chishtı¯ of Ajmer. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Ernst, Carl.Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center. Albany: State University of New York, 1992.

Ernst, Carl, and Bruce Lawrence.Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Dihlavi, Akhtar.Tazkirah-o ‘Auliya¯’-yi Hind-o Pakistan. Lahore: Kimiraj Printers, 1972.

Haq, Muhammad Enamul.A History of Sufism in Bengal. Asiatic Society of Bangladesh Publication, 30. Dacca: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1975.

Haeri, Muneera.The Chishtis: A Living Light. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Huda, Qamar-ul.Striving for Divine Union: The Spiritual Exercises for Suhrawardı¯Sufis. London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003.

Jotwani, Motilal.Sufis of Sind. New Delhi: K. S. Printers, 1986.

Martin, Grace, and Carl Ernst (Eds.Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam. Istanbul: Editions Isis, 1994.

Nabi, Mohammad Noor.Development of Muslim Religious Thought in India from 1200 A.D. to 1450 A.D. Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University Press, 1962.

Nizam Ad-Din Awliya’.Morals for the Heart. Recorded by Amir Hasan Sijzi. Transl. Bruce Lawrence. Classics of Western Spirituality, 74. New York: Paulist Press, 1992.

Nizami, Khaliq Ahmed.Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India in the Thirteenth Century. 2d ed. New Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1978.

Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt.Sufi Music of India and Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Rasool, Ghulam.Chishti Nizami Sufi Order of Bengal till mid 15th Century and its Socio-religious Contribution. Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-Delli, 1990.

Rizvi, Saiyid Athar Abbas.Early Sufism and its History in India to 1600 A.D. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1978 and,A History of Sufism in

India, from 16th Century to Modern Century. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1983.

Schimmel, Annemarie.Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. Handbuch der Orientalistik. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980.

———.Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Siddiqui, Iqtidar Husain. ‘‘Resurgence of Chishti Silsila in the Sultanate of Delhi during the Lodi Period (A.D. 1451–1526).’’In Islam in India: Studies and Commentaries. Vol. 2, Religion and Religious Education, edited by Christian Troll, 58–72. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1985.

Troll, Christian (Ed). Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Valiyuddin, Mir. Contemplative Discipline in Sufism. London: East-West Publications, 1980.

SUHRAWARDI, AL-, SHIHAB AL-DIN ‘UMAR (1145–1234)

  Shihab al-Din Abu Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi belonged to a prominent Persian Sufi family and was responsible for officially organizing the Suhrawardi Sufi order. At an early age he was initiated into Islamic mysticism by his renowned uncle, Abu Najib al-Suhrawardi (d. 1168), and he studied jurisprudence, philosophy, law, logic, theology, Qur’anic studies, and hadith studies. He studied theology under the eminent scholar and Sufi teacher ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166), and at a young age al-Suhrawardi mastered the Hanbali and Shafi‘i branches of Islamic law in Baghdad.

  The ‘Abbasid caliph al-Nasir li-Din Allah designated al-Suhrawardi the Shaykh al-Islam or Minister of Religious Affairs to supervise political and religious affairs for the ‘Abbasid administration. As a political theorist, al-Suhrawardi advocated the supremacy of the caliph because he was the capstone who mastered the Islamic sciences, who commanded knowledge of law, and who was the mediator between God and creation. For al-Suhrawardi, since humanity was incapable of returning to God on its own, the caliphate was the temporal overseer and the representative of God on earth. His political theories did invite their share of criticism from legal scholars of his time, who felt he was too closely connected to legitimizing the policies of the state.

  Al-Suhrawardi’s legacy is primarily within Sufism, where he asserted that living according to Sufi principles and beliefs was the perfect way for devotion and to enjoy divine beauty. According to al-Suhrawardi, the Sufi tradition was rooted in the life of the Prophet Muhammad s.a.w, who embodied human perfection and divine guidance. It is the goal of Sufis to mirror the Prophet in order to discipline their entire inner and outer selves. His Sufi theosophy stressed proper moral conduct (adab) because the physical world is very much related to the spiritual world, and in order for Sufis to perfect their spirituality to meet the divine their physical customs must reflect their internal condition. Al-Suhrawardi’s ideas on proper moral conduct stem from the belief that it is necessary to obey the law completely because it is a manifestation of divine order. Adab was a critical element in his ideal world because all minute details of an individual’s behavior could be controlled, a practice the Sufi novice needed to master. For al-Suhrawardi, Sufis were practicing more than spiritual purity, but in the larger scheme, Sufis were attempting to reunite with the divine in their lifetime, and this required them not to abandon or neglect the law. According to al-Suhrawardi, one needed to be prepared to carry out this extraordinary responsibility by having one’s thoughts and actions planned for every moment, at every place.

  One of al-Suhrawardi’s best extant Sufi texts, ‘Awarif al-Ma‘arif (The Knowledge of the Spiritually Learned), was one of the more popular Sufi books of his time, and posthumously it became the standard preparatory text book for Sufi novices around the Islamic world. One of the many reasons for its esteemed reputation in the Sufi world was that the manual attempted to reconcile the practices of Sufism with the observance of Islamic law. To later generations of Sufis and to a wide cross-section of Sufi orders, al-Suhrawardi’s Sufi treatise became one of the most closely studied and memorized texts in the tradition. Al-Suhrawardi’s contribution to Sufi thought, to Islamic piety, and to living a holy life was to ensure that Sufis fully comprehended adab as a transformative medium between the inner and outer worlds. For him,adabwas grounded in theology that is less about the physical, psychological, and temporal dimensions of moral conduct; rather, it is more concerned with accentuating the constant opening of the heart that inspires a real journey toward encountering God.

Further Reading

Ali Suhrawardi, Seyyed Abu Fez Qalandar.Anwar-e Suhrawardiyya. Lahore: Markarzi Majlis Suhrawardiyya, n.d.

Gramlich, Richard (Trans).Die Gaben der Erkenntisse des ‘Umar as-Suhrawardi. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978.

Haartmann, Angelika.An-Nasir li-Din Allah. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975.

Huda, Qamar-ul.Striving for Divine Union: Spiritual Exercises of Suhrawardi Sufis. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003.

Kalam, Muhammad din.Suhrawardi ‘Auliya’. Lahore: Maktaba Tarikh, 1969.

Manai, Aishah Yusuf.Abu Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi: hayatuhu wa-tasawwuf. Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1991.

Maqbul, Nur Ahmed.Khazina-yi Karam. Karachi: Kirmanwala Publishers, 1976.

al-Suhrawardi, ‘Abu Hafs ‘Umar. ‘Awarif al-Ma’arif. Cairo: Maktabat al-Qahira, 1973.

‘‘The Light beyond the Shore in the Theology of Proper Sufi Moral Conduct (Adab).’’Journal of the American Academy of Religion72, no. 2 (2004): 461–484.

‘‘The Remembrance of the Prophet in Suhrawardi’s‘Awarifal-Ma‘arif.’’ Journal of Islamic Studies12, no. 2 (2001):129–150

SULAYHIDS

  The Sulayhids, a Yemenite dynasty in close relationship with the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, ruled Yemen between AH 439/1047 CE and AH 532/1138 CE. The earliest Fatimid base had been in Yemen when the Isma’ili da‘i Ibn Hawshab Mansur al-Yaman declared his mission at Mt. Masar near San‘a’ in 268/881 and started conquering many parts of northern Yemen in preparation for the advent of the Fatimid caliphate there. However, the Fatimid al-Mahdi chose North Africa for the establishment of his caliphate, and Yemen, on purpose, was abandoned politically, although a mission (da‘wa) continued to exist there. When, in the eleventh century, to face the Seljuk challenge, the Fatimids entered into a thick confrontation with the ‘Abbasid caliphate, their interest in Yemen was revived as a base for its trade with India to compete with that of the ‘Abbasids in that region, and also because the Fatimid Mediterranean trade declined because of the Zirid defiance in North Africa in league with the ‘Abbasid–Seljuk entente. This brought the Sulayhids into prominence, helped by the Fatimids, to establish themselves in Yemen on their behalf.

  ‘Ali ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Ali, of the Sulayhi family, belonging to the Yam branch of the Hamdan tribe, was the son of a Shafi‘iqadiin the Haraz region west of San‘a’. He was converted to Ismailism by the then incumbent of the Fatimidda‘wain Yemen, Sulayman ibn ‘Abd Allah of the Zawahi family. In 429/1038, at a pilgrimage at Mecca, ‘Ali gathered enough followers to declare his mission on behalf of the Fatimids and to embark on a campaign of conquests that culminated in the taking of San‘a’ in 439/1047 from the Yu‘firids. By 455/1063, he had conquered all of  Yemen. About this the near-contemporary historian Umara wrote: ‘‘By the end of 455 H. he had conquered all the plains and mountains; all the lands and waters of Yemen, the like of which had not been seen either in the Jahiliyya or Islam.’’

  Exactly at that time, Fatimid Egypt was passing through a great crisis because of a long-drawnout famine (al-shidda al-‘uzma) and the ravages of a soldier of fortune, Nasir al-Dawla. ‘Ali sent a prolonged embassy under his da‘i Lamak ibn Malik al-Hammadi from 454/1062 to 459/1067 to the court of the Imam–Caliph al-Mustansir bi-Allah (427–487/ 1036–1094) at Cairo. Lamak was lodged at the Dar al-‘Ilm (Academy of Science), the headquarters of the Chief Da‘i al-Mu’ayyad fi al-din al-Shirazi (d. 470/ 1077). It seems that this embassy was responsible for many decisions. ‘Ali wanted to visit the Fatimid court as a savior from its crisis, but he was prevented from doing so. ‘Ali had wanted to control Mecca and its Sharifate. He was dissuaded from it and was instead encouraged to conquer Hadramawt. ‘Ali wanted that  his family would be confirmed in the da‘waas da‘i kings. This was agreed upon, but an autonomous da‘wa was set up under the Sulayhid sovereigns. It is possible that the process of transferring the da‘wa literature to the Yemen began at this time, and so also the strengthening of theda‘wain India under Yemeni control, thus securing the Egypt Yemen India trade route.

  Without waiting for the Imam’s permission, ‘Ali started on his journey to Egypt via Mecca, where he went for pilgrimage at the end of 459 (early 1067). He was assassinated there by the forces of Sa‘id, the Najahid king of Zabid. ‘Ali’s wife, Asma bint Shihab, was taken prisoner.

  ‘Ali was succeeded by Ahmad al-Mukarram, his second son. His first son, Muhammad al-A‘azz, had predeceased him by a year. Al-Mukarram rescued his mother by defeating the Najahid Sa‘id in a battle that also resulted in his paralysis. In 467/1074, he had to retire to Dhu Jibla near Ibb, leaving the affairs of the state in the hands of his wife, al-Sayyida al-Hurra al-Malika Arwa, who resided probably in Haraz, while San‘a’ was put under the charge of ‘Imran ibn al-Fadl al-Yami, along with Abu l-Su’ud ibn As‘ad ibn Shihab, the brother of queen-mother Asma. Asma died later in the same year (467/1074).

  That year also saw the establishment of the absolute power of the Armenian military leader Badr al-Jamali in Egypt. From then until his death in 470/ 1078, the Chief Da‘i al-Mu’ayyad fi l-din al-Shirazi was probably responsible for bringing Badr al-Jamali and Queen Arwa in close collaboration with each other. Badr needed the adherence of Yemen, and the queen needed her autonomy. The maintenance of this Egypt–Yemen entente explains the acceptance by the Yemeni da‘wa of the caliphate of al-Musta‘li, the nominee of Badr’s son al-Afdal after the death of the caliph al-Mustansir. The older son of al-Mustansir, Nizar, was bypassed in Fatimid succession but was supported by the Da‘i Hasan ibn Sabbah who established a rival Nizari Da‘wa at Alamut in Iran.

  When al-Mukarram died in 477/1084, the queen faced a rivalry between the two Qadis—‘Imran ibn al-Fadl and Lamak ibn Malik. Imran was stationed in San‘a’ and was the commander-in-chief of the Sulayhid army. However, he once insulted the memory of al-Mukarram’s father and fell out of grace of the king and the queen, although he later fought with the Sulayhids against the Najahids and was killed in battle. ‘Imran’s family would later control San‘a’ and found a Hamdanid kingdom there. The queen, on the other hand, was supported by the da‘wa under Lamak and then under his son, Yahya. Although the queen was the solede factoruler, the official ruler was her minor son, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Mustansir. However, she was at this time given by Imam al-Mustansir the title of Hujja,making her the highest religious leader in her region. The queen was supported by two military chiefs—Amir Abu Himyar Saba ibn Ahmad of the Sulayhid family and Amir Abu l-Rabi‘ ‘Amir ibn Sulayman of the Zawahi family—both in constant conflict with each other, thus weakening the Sulayhid state. In the years 491–492/1098–1099, the two Amirs died. The da‘i Lamak ibn Malik and the queen’s two sons, ‘Ali and al-Muzaffar, also died about this time, leaving the queen at the mercy of another Amir, al-Mufaddal al-Himyari, who guarded her treasure at the fortress of  Ta‘kar but was also responsible for creating many enemies against her by his constant warfare. On his death in 504/1110, Egypt sent an Armenian commander, Ibn Najib al-Dawla, as ada‘i to reign in the chaotic situation in Yemen. Soon the local tribes revolted against him and the authority of the queen was much constrained by him. In any case he was drowned in the Red Sea, probably at the unavowed instigation of the queen. Another administrator was appointed at this time from the Sulayhid family, ‘Ali ibn ‘Abd Allah, with the title of Fakhr al-khilafa. The queen, however, relied on the Da‘wa under Yahya ibn Lamak and its military arm, Sultan al-Khattab ibn al-Hasan al-Hamdani, the baron of Jurayb in the Hajur district. He is also called ada‘i, for many works of the Yemeni da‘wawere authored by him. He became the queen’s defender of faith and the protector of her realm. He never attained the position of a Da‘i mutlaq under the queen as a Hujja, which went to his mentor—the Da‘i Dhu’ayb ibn Musa al-Wadi‘i—on Da‘i Yahya’s death in 520/1126.

  In the meantime, in Egypt, the imam caliph al-Mustansir was followed by al-Musta‘li (487–495/1094–1101), and then by al-Amir (495–524/1101–1130), who was assassinated by the Nizaris. On Amir’s death, Queen Arwa recognized his minor son Tayyib as imam, thus severing her ties with the new Fatimid ruler al-Hafiz and his successors. Tayyib, in hiding, was then never heard from. Two years later, in 526/1132, the Tayyibi da‘wa was declared in Yemen with da‘i Dhu’ayb as the first da‘i Mutlaq a rank that continued to signify the headship of the da‘wa in Yemen and India, independent of the Fatimid caliphate. The last years of Queen Arwa saw the disintegration of her empire. She died in 532/1138, leaving in her will a large fortune to the absent Imam Tayyib, that is, to the da‘wa. Soon after, in a year’s time, her chief military supporter, the da‘i Khattab, also died.

  The Hamdanid dynasty of San‘a’ and the Zuray’id dynasty of Aden supported the Hafizi da‘wa of the Fatimids till all three of them were terminated by the Ayyubid conquest of Egypt and Yemen during 567–569/1171–1173. Under Ayyubid rule, the Tayyibi Ismailis remained as a community, not involved in politics, and thus survived till today in Yemen and India, preserving the Da‘wa structure and the Fatimid literary heritage.

Primary Sources

Al-Janadi Baha’ al-din (d. 632/1332).Al-Suluk(relevant section trans. by Kay. See Further Reading).

Al-Khazraji (d. 812/1410).Al-kifaya wa-l-i‘lam. (See Kay in the Further Reading section for copious English notes.)

Idris Imad al-din b. Hasan al-Anf (d. 872 H./1467 CE).

Uyun al-Akhbar, VII (The Fatimids and their Successors in Yemen). Ed. Ayman Fu’ad Sayyid; English summary by Paul Walker, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.

Nuzhat al-afkar, I (Ms. Hamdani coll.). Umara ibn ‘Ali al-Hakami (d. 569/1174).Ta’rikh al-Yaman. Ed. Hasan Sulayman Mahmud. Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1957. (See Kay in the Further Reading section for English translation).

Further Reading

Al-Hamdani, Husayn.Al-Sulayhiyyun. Cairo: Maktabat Misr 1955 (now the standard source for the period).

Daftary, Farhad.The Isma‘ilis: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Hamdani, Abbas. ‘‘The Da‘i Hatim b. Ibrahim al-Hamidi (d. 596/1199) and his book Tuhfat al-qulub.’’ Oriens, 23–24 (1970–1971): 258–300.

Kay, H.C.Yaman: Its Early Medieval History. London: India Office, 1892. (English translation from several Arabic sources with copious historical notes.)

Krenkow, F. ‘‘Sulaihi.’’ InEncyclopedia of Islam. Old ed., 4 (1954): 515–517.

Stern, S.M. ‘‘The Succession of the Fatimid Imam al-Amir, the Claims of the Later Fatimids to the Imamate and the Rise of Tayyibi Isma‘ilism.’’Oriens4 (1951): 193–255. (The chronology of the last two titles was corrected in works published after 1954 when Fatimid sources began to be fully used.)

‘‘The Letters of al-Mustansir bi llah.’’ The Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies7 (1933–1935): 307–324.

‘‘The Tayyibi-Fatimid Community of Yaman at the time of the Ayyubid Conquest of Southern Arabia.’’ Arabia Studies7 (1985): 151–160

SU¨LEYMANIYE MOSQUE

  The architect Sinan (AH 895/1490 CE–996/1588) built the great Su ¨leymaniyeku¨lliye(socioreligious complex) for his patron Sultan Su ¨leyman the Magnificent (926–974/1520–1566) in the years 957–965/1550–1557. The mosque complex dominated the eastern skyline of Istanbul, occupying the third of its seven hills. The choice of such a site was intended to enhance the building’s grandeur, so that the mosque, and by identification its patron, had visual prominence in the Ottoman capital. Moreover, it commanded dramatic panoramic views from its elevated platform, which on its eastern side was raised so high that one could gaze over the rooftops of the Salis and Rabı Medreses to the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara below.

  The architectural construction, maintenance, and the huge support staff of 748 needed for the daily running of the complex was financed, as typical for such enormous imperial Ottoman commissions, by an extensive waqf endowment of farms and other income-producing properties, taxes on villages, and the rents produced by the assorted shops and cafes around the perimeter of the site. The seven-hectare complex consisted of a centrally placed mosque, a courtyard, and a cemetery enclosed within a walled esplanade that was surrounded by sixmedreses(colleges), a Koran school (mekteb),soup kitchen (imaret), hospital (darus¸s¸ifa), baths, a Sufi hostel (tabhane), and various coffeehouses and shops. The medreses were self-contained schools with small rooms for students, residences for the academic directors, and lecture halls organized around large open courtyards. A residence for Sufis was a central feature of earlier zawiya-mosque complexes, but here, its position outside the walls of the main mosque precinct was a sign of the diminished importance of Sufi sheikhs and the imperial subordination of the Sufi orders to the orthodox and increasingly centralized Sunni state.

  The centerpiece of the hilltop complex is the great domed mosque, erected on sloping ground artificially leveled at great expense. The prayer hall and mosque courtyard together form a rectangle, with a second courtyard beyond the mosque’s qibla wall that contains the simple yet imposing, double-shelldomed, octagonal tomb of the sultan. The location of the founder’s tomb here firmly and permanently attached his identity to the greatku¨lliye. Off center stood the smaller tomb of his favorite wife, the Haseki Hu¨rrem Sultan (d. 1558). Surrounded by a roofed colonnade and adorned with inscriptions referring to paradise and tile panels with garden themes, Su¨leyman’s tomb bore a resemblance to the late-seventhcentury Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and by extension evoked an association with Solomon’s Temple, which was particularly appropriate since the sultan was sometimes called ‘‘The Solomon of the Age.’’ Although earlier Ottoman complexes, such as the Ulu Cami in Manisa (776/1374), included the founder’s tomb beside the mosque, its placement directly beyond the mihrab at Su¨leyman’s mosque followed the example of the Fatih Cami (867–875/ 1463–1470), an ideologically important mosque built just after the conquest of Constantinople, that trumpeted the realization of the Ottoman imperial dream.

  Visually dramatic and mathematically rational, the Su¨leymaniye mosque is one of the sublime achievements in Islamic architecture. A peristyle (revak) with twenty-four domes runs around the interior of  the courtyard (forty-four by fifty-seven meters), which has a central ablution fountain. The courtyard is marked by four minarets that vertically extend its dimensions, the sharp spikes contrasting and competing with the majestic dome of the prayer hall. The minarets at the courtyard’s outer wall have two balconies, whereas those at the juncture of the courtyard and prayer hall are taller, with three balconies. The change in height and elaboration contributes to a sense of acceleration that culminates in the dome, a huge fifty-three-meter-high half sphere that rises above a host of smaller and lower half and full domes. The central dome is raised on a high drum buttressed at the north and south ends by great half domes, which are, in turn, supported by smaller half domes fitted neatly into the corners of the rectangle thus formed by the great central and half domes. The dome rests on four massive piers that inscribe a central area of 26.5 square meters, a dimension that is exactly half of the dome’s height. To the east and west sides of the central dome, galleried secondary spaces are vaulted by a rhythmic succession of large and small domes. The result is not so much an accumulation of discrete domical units but a single, continuous space that crescendoes at its apex. Goodwin, who has traced the relative proportions of the domical units, the interior volumes of the prayer hall, and the mosque’s plan, asserts that Sinan had a sophisticated understanding of mathematical and geometrical harmony: ‘‘These measurements conform absolutely to the symbol of the perfect circle in the perfect square and it is so satisfactory a definition of space that it dominates the complexities which modulate the rigid form of the rest of the mosque....’’ (p. 213).

  The mosque was built with luxurious materials: marble, porphyry, glazed tile, gold, richly hued paints, and even ostrich eggs. The interior furnishings once included crystal mosque lamps, handsomely inlaid wooden chests, and carpets. The mihrab wall was the first of Sinan’s works to be extensively decorated with red and blue Iznik tiles. The brilliantly colored glass windows on the qibla wall were the work of Sarhos¸ Ibrahim. The bright painting of the mosque’s interior seen today is largely the work (recently retouched) of the Fossati brothers in the mid-nineteenth century. Between the dome’s immense piers, four massive red granite columns form lateral screens that run perpendicular to theqiblawall. Their provenance was charged with territorial and political symbolism, for according to reports, one each came from the old Ottoman palace (the site on which the Su¨leymaniye was built), Kiztas ¸i in Istanbul, Alexandria (Egypt), and Baalbek (Lebanon), which itself was associated with a palace built by Solomon. However, modern historians point to the impossibility of obtaining four perfectly matched columns of such prodigious size from such disparate sources; although architectural spolia (reused material) was no doubt extracted from those places, it is more likely that all four of the columns were specially commissioned for the mosque from the same quarry and workshop.

  If the Su ¨leymaniye mosque made sophisticated reference to numerous earlier buildings at the symbolic level, it also was clearly the architectural progeny of the Hagia Sophia. Both are enormous religious buildings with expansive interior spaces that, through the careful massing of domes and half domes, had elongated axes in which vision was unimpeded by vertical supports. The concentration of architectonic support on corner piers liberated the walls so that they could be filled with windows, flooding the interior with light. Sinan had plenty of opportunity to study the great sixth-century Byzantine church that had been converted to a mosque immediately after the conquest of Constantinople of 857/1453, and appears to have deliberately striven to equal and eventually exceed the venerable monument. The Hagia Sophia’s patron Justinian was reputed to have proclaimed, ‘‘Solomon, I have surpassed you!’’ at the church’s inauguration, but a thousand years later Su¨leyman could claim to have surpassed Justinian.

Further Reading

Barkan, O¨mer Lu¨tfi. Su¨leymaniye Cami ve Imareti I˙ ns¸aati (15550–1557). 2 vols. Ankara: Tu ¨rk Raih Kurumu Bası-mevi, 1972–1979.

Bates, Ulku. ‘‘The Patronage of Sultan Su¨leyman: The Su¨leymaniye Complex in Istanbul.’’ In Memoriam A. L. Gabriel, Edebiyet Fakultesi Aras¸tırma Dergisi O¨zel Sayısı. Ankara: Erzurum Atatu ¨rk Universitesi Yayınları, 1978, 65–76.

Goodwin, Godfrey.A History of Ottoman Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.

Kuban, Dog˘an. ‘‘The Style of Sinan’s Domed Structures.’’ Muqarnas4 (1987): 72–97.

Kuran, Aptullah.Sinan: The Grand Old Master of Ottoman Architecture. Washington, DC, and Istanbul, 1987.

Mainstone, R. ‘‘The Suleymaniye Mosque and Hagia Sophia.’’ InUluslararas Mimar Sinan Sempozyumu Bildirileri: Ankara, 24–27 Ekim 1988, edited by Azize

Aktas-Yasa (Atatu¨rk Ku ¨ltu ¨r Merkezi Yayin, 83; Kongreve Sempozyum Bildirileri dizisi, 3). Ankara: Tu¨rk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1996, 221–229.

Necipog˘lu-Kafadar, Gu ¨lru. ‘‘The Su ¨leymaniye Complex in Istanbul: An Interpretation.’’Muqarnas3 (1985): 92–117.

Rogers, J.M. ‘‘The State and the Arts in Ottoman Turkey: The Stones of Su¨leymaniye.’’ International Journal of Middle East Studies14 (1982): 71–86, 283–313.