Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "The Embedment of Islamic Sainthood in the Hagiographical Traditions of Medieval Syria" by Prof. Daphna Ephrat (The Open University of Israel).

Monday, December 14, 2020, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via zoom.

Please contact Alon Ben Yehuda, the Research Group assistant, to receive the Zoom link: alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il

ABSTRACT

My presentation will explore the role of hagiographical narratives in making new places of collective memory that surrounded Sufi saints and connected local communities in medieval Syria to the sacred history and topography of Islam and their own heritage. Specifically, it centers on accounts relayed by the first generation of hagiographical communities in thirteenth-century Syria (corresponding roughly to the Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods). Orbiting around their masters, they perpetuated their charisma and nourished the sacrality of their burial sites. My central thrust is that members of these committed communities served as brokers, mediators, and disseminators of the beliefs in the existence of charismatic figures, God's friends, endowed with divine grace, and in the continuous flow of baraka from their bodies and graves. Narratives about the shaykhs' saintly lives passed on in oral forms and eventually assembled and put into writings by later generations of Syrian historians and hagiographers. This first layer of hagiographical lore was shaped in an environment rich in holy sites and inspired by traditions about the Christian holy men and women that circulated widely.

A close reading of selected accounts from hitherto unexplored saintly vitae will form the basis of the analysis and discussion of the correlation between the Sufi perception of sainthood as metaphysical closeness to God and the concerns and expectations of the local communities at large during a period marked by a popular quest for patron saints against external and internal enemies and a desire to re-sacralize the land for Islam. Legends about the beneficial miracles and heroic deeds of the revered masters bound them to local communities and the glorious history of Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham). Narratives perpetuated their charisma postmortem, embedding them in embodied localities and incorporating their graves into an expanding landscape of Islamic sacred sites centered on the tombs and memorials of biblical prophets, the descendants and companions of the Prophet, and the martyrs of the Counter-Crusade. Thus, as in other pre-modern settings, the relation between local communities and sacred sites was mediated by hagiographical narratives of memorialization.

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Daphna Ephrat, Ph.D. (1993), is associate professor of history at the Open University of Israel. She has written widely on the formation of religious and charismatic leadership, and the shaping of Islamic communities and spaces in the medieval Arab Near East, including Spiritual Wayfarers, Leaders in Piety (Harvard UP, 2009), and Sufi Masters and the Creation in Medieval Syria (forthcoming in ARC Humanities and Amsterdam University Press)