On the Weird Wild Road with Shaykh Muṣṭafā al-Laṭīfī
An Introduction
I have long been fascinated with the riḥla genre of pre-modern Arabic literature (and its close analogues in Persian and Ottoman Turkish). Riḥla can be translated as ‘travelogue’ or ‘travel narrative,’ and while they certainly capture an important aspect of the genre, such translations do not indicate the full range of meanings such texts often embodied, especially for the period in which I am most interested, the early modern. For these texts are never merely mere itineraries of places visited and conditions on the road (or path, or route—roads as such tended to be thin on the ground in this world!). Rather, they always served some other purpose, had some inner animating logic or feature that drew everything together in the author’s overall purpose, connected to travel from place to place but often fundamentally not really about travel per se. Often, if not always, the riḥla functioned as an autobiographic text, doing whatever rhetorical work a particular author needed—in some cases, attesting to his personal sanctity, to his place within wider scholarly networks of authority and prestige, or justifying to others his unusual path (metaphorically and literally) in the world. Very often riḥla texts were oriented around encounters with holy people and holy places—we might be tempted to call them accounts of pilgrimage, but I’m not sure that is quite the correct phrasing, as I hope to show to some extent in this essay.
Most of the riḥla texts from my period—roughly, 1500 to 1800—can be traced easily to known figures who left other historical traces. However, there is one text, which I first encountered years ago at Princeton in the form of Garrett no. 1342Y, a majmū’a (a collection of multiple discrete texts bound into a single manuscript volume). The riḥla of one Shaykh Muṣṭafā al-Laṭīfī is the first text in this majmū’a manuscript, the whole of which consists of a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated texts, other than their having been of interest to someone for his (or, possible though rather unlikely, her) own idiosyncratic reasons. I honestly do not remember the process whereby I came across this text, though it might well have just been keyword searching. Once I began reading it however I immediately realized that this was something… different.
Like so much else that one encounters in the course of one’s doctoral work, I was unable to make much use of Shaykh Muṣṭafā’s curious account right away, and put it into storage as it were for a while, having only read through a portion of the text. I have since returned to it as part of a larger project of creating digital editions of Islamicate manuscript texts, with the goal of producing editions that draw upon multiple manuscript iterations or versions of a given text and which preserve the dynamic reality of those texts. After casting around for appropriate texts—that is those that both interested me and which had something interesting going in terms of their internal variability—I decided on the manuscripts of Shaykh Muṣṭafā’s riḥla as my Arabic-language contribution. Happily, I found additional digitized copies, and sure enough they showed quite a bit of internal variability, on pretty much every front. I’ll discuss those variations and what they might mean in a later essay (and eventually in a more formal academic publication); in what follows I’ll introduce this work in general terms and where it can take us as a witness to aspects of the Ottoman early modernity that might otherwise remain quite obscure.
Shaykh Muṣṭafā himself is an enigma: I have thus far found a single witness outside of his riḥla itself attesting to him (an entry in an eighteenth century biographical dictionary), and it is pretty much entirely based on that riḥla. On the face of things, Shaykh Muṣṭafā was a sufi shaykh like any other, part of a vast network of what we might call ‘interpersonal sanctity formation and sharing’ in which the primary nodes were individual shaykhs, who usually—but not always!—had an affiliation to a particular sufi ṭarīqa (‘order’ or ‘brotherhood’ are the conventional translations, though the more literal ‘way’ or ‘path’ are probably more apt), but often worn rather loosely. Departed saints were on a continuum with living shaykhs in how they were perceived and visited, both at their burial places and through encounters in the world of dreams; there was no bright line between the living and the dead holy person in this regard, with the same word—ziyāra—describing pious visitation to both departed saints and living holy people, many of which are quite unusual, even downright weird. Like many other riḥla texts, it is structured by acts of ziyāra and the journeys required to go from one area of holy people and places to another. The overall goal of Shaykh Muṣṭafā’s many journeys—which he begins in his native Levant, visiting people and places in Syria and Palestine, then sets out to Iraq, Yemen, and the Hijaz, crisscrossing by his account the outer edges of the Ottoman lands—is formation as a holy person himself, being guided under shaykhs and accumulating barakāt from the cavalcade of living and departed saints he encounters. In the process he visits a lot of mountains, enters so many caves that I have lost count of them, and eats a lot of meals, which he frequently describes in detail. While the details do sometimes move into the fantastic—more on which below—the interest in landscapes and foodscapes is not unique for the genre.
However, unlike other riḥla texts from his world, Shaykh Muṣṭafā’s frequently mixes genres and crosses into rather fantastic territory, more akin to texts of an imaginative literature bent. Some of the stories he tells could be straight from popular epic literature or from folk tale-like dāstāns and their Arabic and Kurdish equivalents; his geography is at times easily traced, at other times it is as if he is a master of ‘folding the earth,’ instantaneous miraculous travel, though he does not say such explicitly. The work is also marked by inserted extended passages of manāqib, hagiographic, literature as well, to the point that the journey narrative recedes into the background for several folios at a time. Strikingly, the longest such section involves the hagiography of Shaykh ‘Adī ibn Musāfir, a saint who today—and I suspect this was true in the seventeenth century as well—is best known as the foundational figure for the Yazidi faith, though his exact role therein is rather murky. Yet there is no sense of ‘heterodox’ danger in Shakyh Muṣṭafā’s account, no felt need to defend what were everyday normal practices in his world without ‘sectarian’ connotations. It is in such contexts that one of the most valuable aspects of Shaykh Muṣṭafā’s work are clear: it offers insights into Islamic practice as it actually was, which often meant a fuzziness around the edges vis-a-vis diverse Islamic traditions and even other religions. Shaykh Muṣṭafā is by all accounts a good Sunni Muslim, such as that would have been understood in his world, and while the Ottoman dynasty appears in the narrative in a positive fashion, it is more notable for its absence, not because Shaykh Muṣṭafā has any bad feelings towards it, rather simply because its power and ideological presence was in fact quite limited for many, perhaps most, people and places within its geographic ambit.
Perhaps the most surprising discovery from this text is the centrality of women across the narrative, women whom Shaykh Muṣṭafā encounters in his journeys, interacts with, seeks blessing and prayers from, dines with, stays with, and, somewhat unusually, names in his account. The following is not his first such encounter in the text, but it is one of the more developed ones and is worth translating in full; it is set in the vicinity of a small village our author encounters during his journey into Yemen from Basra:
[I came across] a person standing in the path, whom I thought was a man. I came closer and said ‘Peace be upon you [using the masculine form of ‘you’]’ and he said ‘Upon you be peace and God’s mercy and His blessings,’ then he said, ‘However, I am not a man, I am a woman, and my name is ‘Ābida!’ I said to her: ‘O ‘Ābida, what do you do here for work?’ She replied: ‘I have a husband who herds goats [or sheep, the word used could indicate either] for wages, while I herd chickens for wages like him [the remainder of this line is very unclear and is marked by absence or high variation across the manuscript witnesses]. Then she pointed and I saw with her more than two hundred birds the size of large geese. I said to her, ‘O sister ‘Ābida, where is the path forward?’ to which she replied, ‘No, I cannot guide you to the path until you have spent the night here with us. Now, return as our guest!’ I replied, ‘God willing I will!’
Then she said, ‘Walk with me,’ so I walked with her as she drove the chickens forward until she came to the houses of the village; she then separated the chickens out so that she sent to each house its chickens, at which I marveled. Finally there were just the chickens she owned remaining, so we went into her house and I sat down in the front part of the house. I had only been sitting for a little while when her husband returned with their goats. When he arrived she stood up before him and kissed him. He had already returned the goats to their owners who took them back from him. When he came to me he said, ‘Peace be upon you and the mercy of God, O guest of ours!’ I replied, ‘And upon you be peace and the mercy of God and His blessings!’ He praised me and said to me, ‘Truly blessings will be poured out on us through you O shaykh! So, what is your name?’ I said to him, ‘Muṣṭafā, and as for you, what is your name?’ to which he replied, ‘Jarīza.’ Then we sat down and his wife came to him and washed his feet and dried them, acting humbly before him and being lowly towards him as if she were a supplicant with a broken heart. I marveled at that humility towards her husband. She then brought forward to each of us pieces of tarmūs made from barley, with milk to drink, which we ate and drank, and I gave praise to God. I spent that night in their home, and the next day prayed the morning canonical prayer together with them, then her husband headed out to his herding.
I said to her, ‘O my sister ‘Ābida, please guide me to the path!’ So she said, ‘Come with me,’ so I did, and she guided me to the path, and I asked her about her humility and lowliness before her husband, to which she answered me, ‘How could I not do that when I have obligations (ḥuqūq) towards him. I hope in my Lord that He will bestow felicity upon me in accordance with keeping what I owe towards Him so that He finds pleasure in me!’ I replied to her, ‘May God be accepting of you!’ To which she replied, ‘Amen!’ Then she showed me the path and said, ‘Travel in the protection and preservation of God!’
A few things worth pointing out about this passage and others like it: one, there is no shock or confusion at the sight of a woman being out of the house working, a reminder that many, perhaps most, women in the pre-modern Islamic world would have worked outside the household, with strict gender-based seclusion, veiling, and the like being more confined to those classes that could afford it and who lived in urban areas. It is also striking that Shaykh Muṣṭafā expresses surprise at ‘Ābida’s service to her husband, something that marks her out as especially pious and perhaps even holy; it is not our author’s expectation that all women should act in such a manner. And while we might imagine that it would be taboo for a married woman to invite a random stranger wandering into her village into her house without her husband present, no trace of such concern is visible here or in other accounts. Instead, Shaykh Muṣṭafā regularly interacts with women, with and without their husbands present or mentioned. In some cases, as here, the expected gender roles of agency are reversed, with the wife, not the husband, being the ‘main character’ in the narrative, the husband rather incidental to the account.
That is not to say that gender norms as we might expect them are totally absent from the narrative—we would expect ‘Ābida to serve food, and indeed she does; she is humble towards her husband though she also functions quite independently from him much of the time, by necessity if nothing else. But the gender norms we might anticipate based on our knowledge of ‘canonical’ Islam and of urban social situations are not present here. And this absence, strikingly, is not just a function of the rural environment, though that is of course crucial: Shakyh Muṣṭafā, though writing for a presumably urban environment, does not feel the need to apologize for these breaches of urban gender norms, nor does he denigrate the rural people he encounters due to some perceived cultural lack or shortcoming in following canonical Islam.
There is a great deal more to be said about this text, and hopefully I will cover some of that here in the coming months. One question that has struck me repeatedly about this work, and which others have raised upon reading it with me, is also rather hard to answer: did any of this stuff really happen? I will be honest, there are points in the narrative that strain credibility and imagination, primarily the increasingly prodigious distances that our saint-seeker crosses in what seems like very little time, distances marked by some truly forbidding desert landscapes. And while some of the holy figures and places he discovers can indeed be verified through other sources, some do seem to strain credibility—how many holy ascetics living in caves with life-giving springs were there out in the wild lands of the eastern Ottoman world, really? By Shaykh Muṣṭafā’s account, the wilderness was a veritable preserve of such figures, you could barely throw a rock into a cave without hitting a holy man. But perhaps my incredulity actually reflects a poor understanding of the actual historical circumstances, and certainly there is precedent for these same lands being positively loaded down with ascetic strivers, it was in this broad region that early Christian asceticism, monasticism, and various curious forms of sainthood (the stylites and dendrites for instance) were born and flourished for centuries. If the early modern Islamic analogues of such figures are much less well-known today, based on other sources of evidence I do not think we should underestimate the numbers and density of such figures, especially in the rural wilds and margins.
All that said, I think the question of fact versus fiction, to put it rather starkly, is a relevant one, in two ways: one, in terms of whether we want to say that this riḥla broadly reflects real people and real events (with allowance made for, let us say, creative license on the part of the author and later redactors), and, two, whether contemporary readers of the text understood it as a description of real people and events or whether they took it as a form of ‘imaginative literature.’ While the latter category was not especially well-defined, it certainly existed, building upon venerable precedent in other genres, genres that themselves often hovered at the line of obvious imaginative elaboration and rootedness in some real historical context. I suspect that later readers and copiers varied in the degree of veracity they understood from the text; certainly, based on the range of variations across manuscripts I’ve been able to chart, exact fidelity to an ‘original’ authorial copy was a low priority. Instead later scribes mixed and matched and reworked with considerable readiness, for reasons not yet clear to me. Such high rates of internal variability might point to the text having been perceived as somewhat imaginative—but not necessarily.
That said, I think for a lot of readers, and likely for the author, this was a veridical text, describing real places and people, even if this might not in fact be the case objectively (and certainly given the rate of textual variation we can be sure that the details as we have them are not entirely ‘true to life,’ whatever that might actually mean). But that being so, we can learn a great deal about actual norms and expectations, that readers could evidently accept or expect the kind of gender relations revealed in the text; a landscape of holy people dwelling in caves and around shrines was not ‘heterodox’ or unusual, but a normal part of the larger social imagination (and practice, even if the details here might not be as descriptive of material reality as we would like).
Still I would like to think that a real Shaykh Muṣṭafā really did encounter ‘Ābida and her enormous chickens somewhere, and that she continued herding those chickens for years to come; as someone who periodically has to herd a much smaller flock of more diminutive such birds, I have nothing but respect for anyone who can wrangle chickens day in and day out!