Notes Towards a Deep History of Night and Darkness
The Premodern Night Through an Islamicate Lens, ii.: Nocturnal Ritual in the Ottoman World
It was a dark and deep December night in the little Kurdish village of Yasān, nestled in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. The year was 1723. Here and there a few little points of light leaked out into the black of night in the village, only the heavenly bodies shedding light beyond the circle of the village. In one house that night a woman went into labor, the darkness perhaps broken by the light of a hearth fire, some candles, perhaps a lamp, illumining dimly the interior space that would greet Ṭāḥā al-Kurdī—one of our guides to the Ottoman night in our previous exploration—as he entered the world outside his mother’s womb. In another house in the village that night Ṭaḥa’s father was occupied with reciting poetry for a mawlid ceremony, the ritual in celebration of the birth of Muḥammad, held by Sunni Muslims on the 12th of Rabīʿ al-ʾAwwal, marked by nocturnal gatherings great and small. In the case of Ṭāḥā’s father he had been invited by relatives to perform the ritual recitation of a mawlid text (Ṭāḥā does not specify which, though by the 18th century multiple texts were in circulation). A messenger brought the news of Ṭāḥā’s birth, and his father immediately declared that in honor of the holiday his son would be named Muḥammad, though in keeping with Kurdish custom he would go by the name Ṭāhā since a living relative already bore the name Muḥammad. Ṭāhā’s account ends there, though we can imagine his father crossing the village to greet his newborn son, the lights of the mawlid dimming away and the depth of night settling over the village.1
This little vignette illumines yet more aspects of the history of the night in the early modern world—the life of households as well as ritual and religious life. The first could easily occupy a very long treatment but lies somewhat outside of my competency, so in this essay I will focus on the intersection of night, dark, and ritual practice. The Ottomans were hardly unique in using night and darkness for religious purposes, as indeed it is likely that humans having been making ritual use of night and dark for a very, very long time, perhaps for as long as there have been modern (in the paleo-anthropological sense) humans. Night-time rituals were not only the preserve of cities, as the example Ṭāhā gives in the above story suggests; and by the Kurdish shaykh’s time the stimulating presence of coffee had percolated out to even the remote reaches of the Zagros, providing physiological fuel for ritual activities stretching into the night (as well as other nocturnal activities of rather less religious significance). If things like night-time revels in taverns and coffeeshops, or the policing of the darkened streets by the night-patrol, were primarily or exclusively urban phenomenon, and often weighted towards particular parts of the empire and not others, nocturnal ritual and pious iterations of constructed darkness could be found everywhere. In this installment of our exploration of the history of night and darkness I will explore some examples of these Ottoman religious uses of the dark, both of the night itself and of other forms of darkness.
Ṭāhā’s riḥlah, conveniently enough, also contains a marvelous example of what we might call ‘constructed darkness,’ that of the khalwah, the ‘retreat’ or ‘cell,’ a small enclosed space of prayer, a walled up enclosure of luminous dark, that might be part of a structure or, in some cases, a natural or constructed cave within the earth, creating its own dark space or supplementing as it were that of the night. The role of such spaces in religious practice goes back deep into time, and has had many manifestations in Islamic practice, particularly among sufis. Ṭāḥā relates the story of how his own shaykh, the saintly Dervīsh Muṣṭafā, achieved rapid ascent in spiritual rank through prayerful retreat within constructed darkness. Muṣṭafā was assigned by his shaykh a period of retreat within a khalwah in the Ḥasan Paşa Mosque in Baghdad, with the goal of ‘connecting’ with the spiritual presence and power of the great saint ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī. Muṣṭafā’s shaykh instructed him to remain in his khalwah through the night without any artificial light—darkness, then, akin to that deep within the earth. As Muṣṭafā followed the series of invocations given by his shaykh, his heart focused intently within the darkness, he underwent a succession of powerful visions of light exploding into the space and surrounding him, culminating in his apprehension through ‘Abd al-Qādir’s presence of deep mystical realities.2 The experience of physical darkness serves in this story, as in many others, as a medium for realizing profound illumination.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that ritual was one of the most powerfully transformative powers at work in the Ottoman night, as it was in many premodern (and modern, for that matter) societies. Religious ritual was in itself one of the markers of time divisions within the night, as set times of prayer in the empire’s various religious communities provided boundary-markers for stages of the day’s transition into night and night’s transition into morning. Within Muslim communities, the ‘true’ night was that between the last ṣalāt of the day and the first of the dawn; the space in-between did not have a specific universal shape marked by specific ritual prayers or other actions. In the eyes of the sharī’ah as in those of popular custom generally (at least in urban areas—rural life could entail somewhat different commitments, particularly for pastoral people) sleep was the norm for this period of the night; danger, as we saw in the previous installment, lurked in these deep dark hours, and there were often punitive measures pursued by state and neighborhood authorities to restrict movement in the deep night. Night-time vigils were optional, if valuable and esteemed, but the shape vigil or other ritual actions could take was not prescribed in the same manner as the canonical prayers.
Much as we saw with the intersection of sainthood and darkness, the presence of danger and the very real physical limitations entailed by premodern night absent widespread urban illumination both served to heighten the power and significance of ritual uses of the deep night. Indeed, there is no hard and fast division between the night as the domain of the saint (and of anti-saints) and night as a time of especially potent rituals. To master ritual darkness was often, as we saw above, a step on the path to sainthood, or even a setting for the sudden realization of sanctity and closeness to God, as in the story of Dervīsh Muṣṭafā. Within the context of sufi ṭarīqas creating and integrating ritual litanies—awrād (s. wird)—was often a major component of establishing personal sanctity, and many such litanies and related ceremonies were designed to take place at night, thereby inhabiting a special zone of exclusivity. Such devotions could be individual or collective or both, and did not always remain within an exclusively sufi context, but like other devotional ‘products’ of the sufi milieu tended to spill out into wider society.
One of the more striking instances of such special nocturnal rituals was a ceremony of devotion to Muḥammad called the maḥyā, about which I have written at length elsewhere but which is worth describing here. Established in the very late fifteenth century by a Cairene shaykh of peasant origin, Nūr al-Dīn al-Shūnī, the maḥyā ritual consisted of blessings and invocations upon Muḥammad (taṣliya, an intricate topic in their own right) that took place deep into the night and up to the break of dawn. From its beginnings in Cairo the ritual spread to other Ottoman cities, even as it attracted some censure—that it was an innovation not known to previous generations, or that the necessary expenditure of candles and lamps constituted prohibited extravagance. Despite these criticisms—which were rebutted by prominent members of the ‘ulamā’—and the necessary physiological rigor required for a long liturgical rite straight through the night, the ritual proved quite popular and became effectively institutionalized in many places for many years, at least into the middle of the eighteenth century and perhaps beyond. There were many claims of waking visions of Muḥammad walking amongst the participants, stepping into their circle of light and chanted praise and invocation and bestowing blessings upon the devotees. As a regularly performed ritual it came to mark the night in many Ottoman cities, its setting within the deepest and darkest parts of the night heightening the emotional and spiritual charge the chanted prayers and litanies helped to produce.
But of all of the ritual uses of the night in the Ottoman world, for Muslim communities one of if not the most important and resonant was the celebration of the birth of Muḥammad, the mawlid.3 The precise details of the ceremony could vary considerably from place to place and period to period, and often included daytime features, such as fairs, all culminating in the performance of a poetic mawlid text describing the birth of Muḥammad and extolling the Prophet. The following passage, from a travel narrative of the famous Damascene shaykh and saint ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), describes a city-wide mawlid in Jerusalem, akin in some ways to the mawlid ceremony depicted above in Constantinople but of a rather more egalitarian audience:
That night was the night of the exalted prophetic mawlid, so we came to the al-Aqṣā Mosque, that mosque whose virtues and blessings are innumerable, and we sat gazing upon the samā’ of the blessed mawlid,4 and when the evening call to prayer was given we prayed the evening ṣalāt with the congregation, through the help of God—exalted and blessed is He. So many of these candles had been lit and so many of these lamps were ablaze that one’s vision and sight were in utter awe. The kursī was set up before the miḥrāb, and the noble and exalted head of the sayyids of mawlids5 ascended it, al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Ṣamad, brother of the pride of the notables al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Laṭīf Efendī. He recited portions of the exalted Qur’an proper and meet for the occasion. The people had gathered together according to their various social strata, from among the prominent scholars and the elite, the ‘ulamā’ and the virtuous, the imāms of the miḥrābs and the minbārs, the elite and the common from among the men, as well as the married women who were gathered together in one portion of the mosque, with their sons and daughters. Then he began the recitation of the noble mawlid, a group of muezzins around him joining in the intonation with a fine voice. Then they distributed to all of those gathered various kinds of sweets, candied nuts, and sweet-smelling aromatics, then came with rose-water and censers of incense. It was an exalted moment in time in which humility and divine witnessing were realized…6
As ‘Abd al-Ghanī’s description indicates, and as can be gathered from the relatively rare but often very vocal opponents of the practice, the mawlid was a remarkably integrative ceremony, in a way that probably no other experience of the night was, bringing many different kinds of people together in a single ritual setting, and taking place virtually everywhere in the empire, from the halls of the highest temporal power all the way down to remote villages. And not only Arabic speakers: mawlid texts in Ottoman Turkish were created early in the empire’s history, and had wide purchase socially, not just among urban men but among Turkish-speaking women in villages. In ‘Abd al-Ghanī’s above description virtually all classes of Muslims are present, including women and children who would be excluded or relegated to an inferior position in many other religious settings. While they were clearly segregated into their own section they were still participants, not just in a religious ritual but in a ritual that required them to be outside of their homes well into the night, no small thing for an Ottoman woman of high standing. It would be saying to much to say that social distinctions faded away in the dark—they clearly did not—but it is true that they seem to have mattered somewhat less, and that the night could be a space of relative freedom, of a joy and exuberance, that might not always apply in the daytime.
‘Abd al-Ghanī’s account also highlights the sensually rich space created for the ceremony: not only would the ritual space of the mosque have been marked out by brilliant illumination, contrasting sharply with the darkness without, all of the senses would have been engaged: the sounds of the chanted liturgical texts spilling out into the night as well, the air suffused with pleasing scents (which as in many other contexts would have mitigated smells associated with lots of people gathered in a relatively compact space!), sweet tastes on people’s tongues, rose-water sprinkled on their skin. In effect, contained within the space of the mosque and of the surrounding night the ritual would have formed a little self-contained world of sensory vividness and emotional power, bringing together in a shared ‘exalted moment’ people from across the city in a sense of devotional community and belonging.
While I have focused here on specifically Muslim rituals, the Ottoman world would have hosted Christian and Jewish nocturnal rituals as well, following similar ritual logics. I am most personally familiar with what is by far the most striking and potent night-time ritual in Orthodox Christianity, the midnight Paschal service, which even in our age of electric lighting and semi-darkness continues to generate a remarkable and powerful effect through the interplay of deep darkness, gradual, then sudden, illumination, and the physiological effects of staying up late into the night (something that becomes more notable as one ages, particularly for those of us for whom Pascha is the only time of the year we stay up so late, much less stay up so late in a social setting!).
It is vital to note that much of the phenomenological power and potency of ritual at night or in constructed darkness depended, like the relationship between night and sanctity, upon the danger and the difficulty of night. At the risk of belaboring a point made many times now, it is hard for us in the electrified world of late modernity to appreciate such an experience of night, particularly urban night (though even wilderness here in eastern North America is rarely fully dark anymore, the glow of the closest metropolitan area usually visible).
The realm of ‘constructed’ or ‘found’ darkness, that of the khalwah or the monk’s cell or the cave devoted to ritual uses, is akin to that of nocturnal darkness but with the important difference that it tended to carry less of the frisson of danger the night held and was generally more personal and interior, a contemplative and quieter darkness than that of the collective ritual. This was true as well of night passed within such a space, a compounding of ritual dark—one did not need to go out onto the potentially dangerous streets to participate, but rather simply needed to stay awake through the night. The khalwah, like the monastic cell, was—and remains—a place of individual ascesis, of personal encounter and formation, embedded in and constituted by social and cultural networks and norms to be sure, but in practice intimate and close.
There are of course also cases that fall in-between: underground ritual spaces that are large enough and popular enough to involve lots of people at a single time. The Tomb of the Theotokos in Jerusalem is one such space, which in the Ottoman period was, like many holy places of a similar nature, piously visited by Christians and Muslims. While on my visit there a few years ago I did not see evidence of Muslim pilgrims in the crowd, and suspect that the inter-confessional nature of pilgrimage there has largely subsided, pious graffiti in Arabic, some of the names clearly those of Muslims, are still visible within the recesses of the cave-tomb. The shrine is now deep inside the earth, the sedimentation of the city having added new layers over the last two millennia; by the time one reaches the bottom level where the tomb of the Theotokos stands most of the illumination is that of candles and lamps. The tomb itself is a further enclosure within the cavern; and like the khalwah it is a place of intimacy, each pilgrim passing through one at a time, seeking encounter with the Theotokos in the warm dark womb of the earth.
I do not know how many such sites would have been accessible to Ottoman pilgrims in the Ottoman period—it is a topic worth additional research, the sacred geography of early modern Ottoman religious life something that holds a lot of promise I think—but my sense is that they were quite common, ranging from the holy springs of Constantinople to cave-shrines of the Levant to any number of built saints’ shrines whose innermost spaces were, by design or architectural necessity, little cores of walled up dark, punctuated only by the flicker of the lamp and candle. Little islands of holy darkness, refuges of intimacy with God and His saints, with an inner logic of enclosure and darkness and contact with the interior of the earth that arguably traces back, in some ways at least, to the Paleolithic and the first traces of ritualized darkness of which we are currently aware. But that is a story for next time.
A few other matters for my readers: in coming days I hope, circumstances permitting, a sustained update on future plans and directions in my career and our family’s trajectory; for now I’ll just note that we are in the initial stages of moving south to the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, and, barring any unforeseen developments, will in a couple months’ time have a house and an acre of land to cultivate, so stay tuned for further information on that front! I am also working on an essay that will intersect with my actual ‘day-job,’ looking at what we can learn by examining side-by-side, among other things, handwritten manuscripts, trace fossils, desire paths, sidewalks, fracking grids, and industrial warfare. And, finally, this series on the night will continue for a couple more installments—I’d like to somehow address the super-contemporary and the distant Paleolithic simultaneously, we’ll see how well I can pull that off.
Ṭāhā ibn Yaḥyá al-Kurdī, Riḥlat al-shaykh Ṭāhā ibn Yaḥyá al-Kurdī: al-tarbīya wa-al-sulūk fī tarājim mashāyikh al-taṣawwuf alladhīn iltaqāhum al-muʿallif fī riḥlatihi al-ʻilmīya wa-al-rūḥīya, ed. by ʻAlī Najm ʻĪsá (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʻIlmīyah, 2007), 29.
Ibid., 50-51.
On the medieval origins and history of mawlid ceremonies, see Marion Holmes Katz, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (London; New York: Routledge, 2007).
This is a bit of an opaque statement but I think it refers to a performance of sufi ritual chant and perhaps dance preceding the mawlid proper.
A sayyid is a legally recognized descendant of Muḥammad; here it seems to be a matter of a veritable guild of mawlid-reciters drawn from the ranks of the sayyids of Jerusalem. It is worth noting that mawlids could be performed at any time of the year although the largest and most important would fall on the calendar date of Muḥammad’s birth.
ʻAbd al-Ghanī ibn Ismāʻīl al-Nābulusī, al-Ḥaqīqa wa al-mijāz fī riḥla balād al-Shām wa Miṣr wa al-Ḥijāz (Damascus: Dār al- Maʻrifa, 1998), vol. 1, 382-3.