1 On Ibn Ḥanbal as “an indispensable authority and resource for the fashioning of authentically Muslim selves,” see Sizgorich, Violence and Belief, 231–71 (quote at 237).

2 This is the most common voweling (al-Dhahabī, Al-Mushtabih, 491) though al-Muʿaddil is also possible (Ibn Ḥajar, Tabṣīr, 1299). For the meanings of this root and its derivatives, see Tyan, “ʿAdl” and sources cited.

3 The beginning of a new chain of transmitters that will intersect with the previous one is sometimes indicated by the letter ḥāʾ. As the usage is inconsistent, I have not duplicated it.

4 Not otherwise attested but possibly a variant of Mihrāwī, “of Mihrawān,” a region near Hamadhān (al-Samʿānī, Al-Ansāb, 5:415). Al-Turkī emends to the more common al-Harawī (of Herat).

5 The capital of what was then the province of Khurasan. Marv, now called Mary, is today a city in west-central Turkmenistan.

6 “Full-blooded” means that he was born into the tribe, as opposed to joining it by entering into a patronage relationship with one of its members, as non-Arab converts to Islam sometimes did (though far less commonly than previously thought). See Bernards and Nawas, eds., Patronate, esp. Bulliet, “Conversion-Based Patronage,” 246–62.

7 Ibn Ḥanbal’s ancestors had come from Arabia and settled in the newly founded city of Basra, then moved east with the Arab conquests and settled in Marv.

8 A major province of the Abbasid Empire. It included the regions today called northeastern Iran, northern Afghanistan, southern Turkmenistan, and southern Uzbekistan.

9 A town that lay on what is today the border between Iran and Turkmenistan. The modern town is on the Iranian side.

10 The revolution that brought the Abbasid dynasty to power began in the 740s in Khurasan. Those who joined it, and their descendants, enjoyed particular privileges under the new regime.

Though Ibn Ḥanbal’s uncle Isḥāq was later to invoke this connection, it evidently “meant nothing to Ibn Ḥanbal himself” (Cook, Commanding Right, 111).

11 Dhū l-Qarnayn is a figure in the Qurʾan (Q Kahf 18:83ff.) sometimes identified with Alexander the Great. Hadith reports in which the Prophet Muḥammad gives personal advice based on detailed knowledge of future events are generally agreed to be later fabrications; see al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 15n4.

12 For discussion of Ibn Ḥanbal’s lineage and its social meanings, see Hurvitz, Formation, 27ff., and Cook, Commanding Right, 110–11. Another source, Ibn al-Dāʿī, gives a different lineage for Ibn Ḥanbal, calling him a member of the clan of Zuhayr ibn Ḥurqūṣ. This ancestry would appear to link him with the Khārijī Ḥurqūṣ ibn Zuhayr, as well as with an obscure group of sectarians called the Hurqūṣiyyah, who seem to have held a view of God denounced by critics as anthropomorphic (van Ess, Theologie, 3:449–51).

13 This is the prophet Abraham.

14 Al-Turkī takes the subject here to be ʿAbd al-Malik and emends the text to ʿalayhi and yuḍīfuhum:

“He would show them hospitality.” Although this reading does seem more plausible, I have retained the feminine forms that appear in SH and D and translated accordingly.

15 The “One-Eyed Tigris” (dijlah al-ʿawrāʾ) is an old name for the waterway now called Shatt al- Arab, where the Tigris and Euphrates converge and empty into the Persian Gulf. But the Shatt al-Arab flows past Basra, not Baghdad. The reference may therefore be to the family’s ancestral home in Basra. Yet the context suggests that what is meant is a place in Baghdad, perhaps the Upper Harbor, where the Trench of Ṭāhir joined the Tigris (Cook, Commanding Right, 108n96, and Le Strange, Baghdad, map 5). A place in the southeastern Iraqi province of Maysān was called Rijlat al-ʿAwrāʾ (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, ʿ-W-R ).

16 Or possibly “how well he carries himself when he goes out.” 17 Literally, “I began frequenting the dīwān,” perhaps the courier and intelligence service, which was headed by his paternal uncle. The following reports may represent memories of his unwillingness to work there (Hurvitz, Formation, 30, and Melchert, Ahmad, 3). Dīwān can also mean registry of persons entitled to a pension, which Ibn Ḥanbal might have been, given his grandfather’s service to the state (Hurvitz, Formation, 27 and 170n12).

18 Ṭāq: usually “arch,” but here evidently an arched recess with a shelf in it; see Anvarī, Farhang, under ṭāqche and ṭāq (2), definition 3.

19 Evidently the uniform worn by official couriers.

20 In later life, Ibn Ḥanbal shunned representatives of the state, either because he considered the Abbasid dynasty illegitimate, or because he questioned their use of public funds, or both. It seems odd for him to have held this view as a child (Hurvitz, Formation, 42).

21 To judge by his punctuation, al-Turkī takes this to mean “As if I would do that!” 22 Q Baqarah 2:156, which describes the long-suffering as “those who, when affliction strikes them, say, ‘We are of God and to Him we return.’” 23 Tawarraʿ, translated here as “to have scruples,” more specifically means to refrain from acts permitted in themselves but which might accidentally entail a violation of God’s commandments. Perhaps Ibn Ḥanbal does not want to deliver the dispatches because he does not know what is in them, or perhaps he had already come to believe that contact with representatives of the Abbasid regime for any reason was bad. See chapter 49 of this book, and further Ibn Ḥanbal, Kitāb al-Waraʿ; Kinberg, “What is Meant by Zuhd”; Cooperson, Classical, 112–17.

24 Ibn Ḥanbal, like present-day speakers of Arabic, counted his age from one instead of zero as one does in English. Here, then, he would be nineteen in English rather than twenty. I thank Omar Issa Attar for pointing this out to me.

25 This and several subsequent chapters contain a great many personal names. In most cases, they are the names of Ibn Ḥanbal’s fellow Hadith-men. Recurring names of particular importance are listed in the key figures section at the end of the book. Background information essential to understanding a particular story is included in the notes.

26 The jurist Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798), a disciple of Abū Ḥanīfah, based his verdicts on raʾy (reason, judgment, opinion) rather than Hadith and served as judge under al-Rashīd. In both these respects—use of raʾy and service to the state—Abū Yūsuf took positions entirely opposed to those later advocated by Ibn Ḥanbal. Ibn Ḥanbal thus appears to have been rather more openminded in his youth than he was to become in later life, when he evidently tried to downplay his association with Abū Yūsuf (Hurvitz, Formation, 44–49).

27 As in English, speakers often abbreviate dates. In this chapter, the missing element is always 100.

28 Here Ibn Ḥanbal is using the death dates of well-known Hadith transmitters to date the events of his life. Death dates were important because they helped establish whether Transmitter A could have heard reports from Transmitter B.

29 These titles refer to collections of Hadith reports on particular topics, in this case the proper conduct of funerals and the correct performance of the pilgrimage rites. Hushaym may have been unusual in his practice of teaching Hadith by category (Melchert, Ahmad, 33). On funerals as occasions for the negotiation of boundaries between faith communities, see Sizgorich, Violence and Belief, 238–62.

30 A town near the Mediterranean coast in what is today southeastern Turkey. In this period, it lay on or near the Byzantine frontier, and thus attracted ascetics (such as Ibn al-Mubārak) and other Muslims who wished to prove themselves against the Byzantines.

31 The years referred to here correspond to 795–808 of the Gregorian calendar.

32 At the end of the prayer, most Muslims turn to the right and then to the left, each time pronouncing the greeting al-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu l-lāh (“peace be upon you and the mercy of God”). Some, however, say it only once, to the right, a practice that Ibn Ḥanbal finds unusual.

33 Practicing kalām (literally, “talking”), or speculative theology. Ibn Ḥanbal, at least in his mature years, roundly rejected the practice (see chapter 13 of this book), though he may have been more accepting of it early in his career (Hurvitz, Formation, 45ff.).

34 A name of Hudbah ibn Khālid al-Qaysī (Ibn Ḥajar, Tabṣīr, 1451).

35 Here a variant text adds “And I went in ’95”; see al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 31n4.

36 These years correspond to the period AD 802 to 815 or 816.

37 A distance of approximately 950 kilometers or 590 miles (http://www.mapcrow.info).

38 This report is an unusually transparent invention. There is no other reference to Ibn Ḥanbal’s traveling by sea, much less being shipwrecked. The topos of the gnomic graffito, often translated from an ancient language, is common in premodern Arabic tales (Crone and Moreh, Book of Strangers).

39 Two rakʿahs or sequences of movements and recitations. Ritual prayers consist of specified numbers of cycles (Toorawa, “Prayer”).

40 The “station of Abraham,” a place near the eastern wall of the Kaaba in Mecca. According to tradition, Abraham prayed there after building the shrine, leaving the rock he had been using as a step-stool to reach the upper part of the walls. Today the rock that stands on the spot is enclosed by a cupola.

41 Making a resolution (niyyah) is a legally meaningful act, as when, for example, one declares (mentally) one’s intention to pray.

42 That is, Ibn Sinān sold the fur on Ibn Ḥanbal’s behalf and gave him the proceeds to use as spending money.

43 Al-Raqqah is a town on the upper Euphrates, located in what is now eastern Syria.

44 Jubbah is defined as “a coat-like outer garment worn by both sexes” and translated “tunic” (Y. K.

Stillman, “Libās”). A jubbah of felt would presumably have been scratchy and uncomfortable.

As the next line suggests, some jubab were evidently padded.

45 This name, though given fully voweled in H, is not otherwise attested. It may be a variant of al- ʿIrfī, which is attested; see al-Samʿānī, Al-Ansāb 4:180; cf. al-Dhahabī, Al-Mushtabih, 357.

46 Mudhākarah: the practice of “instructive conversation … in which the parties … exchanged their knowledge to their mutual benefit, as well as to that of the audience, if any.” A mudhākarah could also become a contest in which speakers would respond to challenges from the audience or from each other (Makdisi, “Rise of Humanism,” 208–9; Schoeler, Genesis, 42).

47 Sulaymān ibn Dāwūd al-Shādhakūnī, also called Ibn al-Shādhakūnī, a name apparently meaning “maker of Yemenī quilts” (see 45.4).

48 It seems that Khalaf was sitting on a platform, bench, or stoop, and Ibn Ḥanbal could have joined him there, or on some corresponding item of masonry or furniture, but chose to sit on the ground.

49 The first part of this sentence may also mean “I named Hadith reports to him and he supplied them with alternative isnāds.” I thank Christopher Melchert and Geert Jan van Gelder for their help with this passage.

50 That is, Ibn Ḥanbal could provide the isnād of each report when he heard it, but al-Muʿayṭī was afraid to try for fear of making a mistake. I thank Christopher Melchert for improving my translation of this passage.

51 A quire is “any gathering or set of sheets forming part of a complete manuscript or printed book” (OED), which seems a reasonable equivalent of juzʾ, literally “part,” here evidently meaning a list of reports that might later be sewn up with other similar lists to form a volume.

52 Very conjecturally taking one ḥiml to be 266 kilograms; see Ashtor, “Mawāzīn (1).” Ibn Ḥanbal would have left 3225 kilograms (7330 pounds) of paper.

53 I thank Christopher Melchert for checking my reading of this passage.

54 Ibn Ḥanbal here uses kalām (“speech, talking, what someone says”) to refer to the content of a report. The (apparently later) technical term is matn.

55 That is, one whose hair had not yet turned white.

56 On how Ibn Ḥanbal served to police the boundary between Muslims and non-Muslims, see Sizgorich, Violence and Belief, 242–55.

57 My translation of this passage is based on a personal communication from Devin Stewart.

58 Ibn ʿAqīl (d. 513/1119) was a famous jurist and theologian of the Ḥanbalī school. The remainder of this chapter consists of remarks attributed to him, evidently copied by Ibn al-Jawzī from an unidentified written work.

59 This paragraph was kindly translated for me by Joseph Lowry.

60 Ibn Ḥanbal reasons that two circumambulations on foot are equivalent to one performed on all fours.

61 That is, he would not be liable for that amount of her value added because of her ability to sing.

Having established this principle by referring to cases of usurpation, Ibn Ḥanbal applies it to a case of inheritance. The translation and explanation of this passage are based on personal communications from Devin Stewart and Joseph Lowry.

62 In assessments of merit, ghaḍḍa min normally means “to disparage,” but if this meaning is adopted the sentence would mean the opposite of what Ibn al-Jawzī clearly intends to say. The copyists also seem to have been unsure of the sense. Al-Turkī tries to solve the problem by using punctuation to indicate a rhetorical question. Technically, however, this would require an interrogative particle of some kind. I am grateful to Tahera Qutbuddin for suggesting that the verb be understood in the literal sense of “avert one’s eyes.” 63 Yazīd, following Ḥajjāj, evidently thinks that the lender, by giving up his property without expectation of profit (as would be the case if he had sold or lent it) has no right to be compensated if the item is lost or destroyed. Ibn Ḥanbal does not respond to the implied argument but instead cites a Hadith attributing to the Prophet a different view. The translation and explanation of this passage are based on a personal communication from Joseph Lowry.

64 Al-ʿirq al-madīnī: a parasitic infection known since antiquity and still endemic in a few countries in Africa. The guinea worm, whose larvae enter the body through contaminated water, causes a painful blister as it emerges from the leg or foot (Wikipedia, “Dracunculiasis,” accessed May 5, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis).

65 These telegraphic phrases suggest that Yazīd came to visit Ibn Ḥanbal after the latter had moved from Wāsiṭ back to Baghdad. By “outside,” Ibn Ḥanbal may mean outside Ḥarbiyyah, the northwest Baghdad district where his family was based.

66 Arwaʿ: more careful in avoiding shubuhāt, that is, things or actions permissible in themselves, but dubious by association with a suspected source of illegality or pollution, for example, a gift of food or money from someone whose source of income is unknown (Cooperson, Classical, 112– 17).

67 “The restorer of religion and justice who, according to a widely held Muslim belief, will rule before the end of the world” (Madelung, “Mahdī”).

68 The sea is apparently the proverbial sea of knowledge. Ibn Ḥanbal is therefore a sea creature, albeit one who walks on land. In the other version, he is a land animal that may as well be a fish.

69 An obscure figure, possibly believed to exist only because of a confusion of names, evidently cited here because he is credited for having said “I fought beside the Prophet and killed ninety-nine pagans, but I am not pleased to have killed them, or to have exposed any Muslim.” See Ibn al- Athīr, Usd al-ghābah, 1:186.

70 The narrator seems to have forgotten that he was supposed to be presenting the paper, or perhaps he refused to do so and has omitted to say so. Alternatively, the preceding “give” (aʿṭihi) might be read as a first-person jussive (uʿṭihi) “let me give,” though such a form would be unusual here.

71 The Arabic is a general word meaning (among other things) “cover.” More specifically it can be a lid (e.g., of an inkpot; see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 135) and a wrapper for musical instruments (Dwight Reynolds, personal communication). Here it may refer to a folder or envelope for carrying documents (Nuha Khoury, personal communication). It may, however, also refer to a stack of paper of a certain size (Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 35; cf. the modern term ṭabqat waraq in Clarity et al., Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic). Given the various possibilities, I have chosen the vague term “sheaf” in the sense of a “cluster or bundle of things tied up together; a quantity of things set thick together” (OED). Cf. also the kharīṭah in which Ibn Ḥanbal carries his kutub (4.20).

72 Among proto-Sunnis, to support the community (al-jamāʿah) meant preferring unity over schism, meaning (for example) that one should accept all past caliphs as legitimate rulers. This position distinguished the proto-Sunnis from groups such as the Shiʿa and the Khawārij.

73 Most of the reports in this chapter are intended to show that Ibn Ḥanbal transmitted certain Hadithreports, many of them reports of special significance to the early Sunni movement. As the points at issue are explained elsewhere in this book, I have retained only those reports that describe Ibn Ḥanbal directly.

74 There are several versions of this report as told by these transmitters. All say that the Prophet saw his Lord in the form of a young, beardless boy. Some commentators explain “seeing” figuratively rather than literally. See al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 110n1, and Williams, “Aspects of the Creed.” 75 This chapter is simply a list of names and I have omitted all of it except for the last section, which names several of the women in Ibn Ḥanbal’s circle.

76 Atqā: having more taqwā, or what in this period seems to have been a kind of intense anxiety intended to prevent complacency (Melchert, “Exaggerated Fear”).

77 On writing Hadith, see Cook, “Opponents,” Melchert, Ahmad, 24–33, and Schoeler, Genesis, 47– 50.

78 The Apostasy was the abandonment of Islam by certain Arab tribes after the death of the Prophet; Abū Bakr brought them back into the fold by force. For more on this theme, see Sizgorich, Violence and Belief, 23–38.

79 ʿAlī was condemned for giving in to the Inquisition.

80 An odd thing to say. The gold would not go into the bellows (kīr), which supplies air, but into or onto the furnace, where it is extracted, or the forge, where it is heated in order to be worked. In premodern times, gold would often acquire a reddish color because of impurities in the smelting process (Wikipedia, “Colored Gold,” accessed April 5, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_gold), though Bishr may be thinking of red-hot gold.

81 A reference to the various prophets who speak truth to power (e.g., Mūsā/Moses before Pharaoh, Q Aʿrāf 7:103ff., Yūnus 10:75ff., Ṭā Hā 20:24ff.).

82 Mutaʿabbid (also ʿābid): a term used by the Hadith-men to refer to those who were not necessarily fellow scholars but practiced austerities and associated with renunciants like Bishr. By using this term to identify certain figures, Ibn Ḥanbal’s biographers seem to be arguing indirectly that even the renunciants of Baghdad acknowledged Ibn Ḥanbal’s superiority.

83 The point at issue here is “whether to raise the hands at saying Allāh akbar, an issue that separated the Ḥanabilah from the Ḥanafiyyah,” the followers of Abū Ḥanīfah (Melchert, review of Virtues, 355).

84 Q Nūr 24:63.

85 Izār: “unsewn close-fitting garment wrapped round the waist and legs and extending upwards as far as the navel, and downwards as far as the middle of the leg or beyond” (Ahsan, Social Life, 34); “a large sheet-like wrap worn both as a mantle and a long loin cloth or waist cloth” (Stillman, “Libās”).

86 A difficult and dubious passage. The manuscripts cannot be reconciled and none gives an entirely satisfactory reading. I have chosen ḥaṭṭihā, “their bringing him low,” that is, his being humiliated by the blows of the whip, because it can be read as antithetical to ṭāra, “he flew”; I have chosen ʿināʾihā “the suffering they caused him” because it plausibly completes the idea.

Al-Turkī has bi-ḥaẓẓihā wa-ghināʾihā, by which he seems to understand “by the good fortune they brought him, and their obviating the need for any further accomplishment.” I am not entirely satisfied with either of our suggestions.

87 The significance of having a twisted or rolled-up breechclout is unclear. It may have suggested austerity or lack of pretense. Ibn Ḥajar, Fatḥ al-bārī, no. 5456, mentions that a fringed breechclout might be rolled up to protect the fringe.

88 See Picken, “Ibn Ḥanbal and al-Muḥāsibī.” 89 Al-ʿaskar, literally “the army camp,” here referring to the Iraqi town that served as the Abbasid capital from 221/836 to 279/892. Ibn Ḥanbal and his family were brought there after the end of the Inquisition.

90 “Those people”: the Abbasid officials carrying out the Inquisition, on which see chapter 66ff.

91 Abū Zurʿah (d. 264/877–88) died some twenty years after Ibn Ḥanbal, so I have put his recollections in the past tense, but the Arabic is ambiguous: he could have said all of this while Ibn Ḥanbal was still alive.

92 A likelier comment, though unattested here, is “The greatest champions of Islam have been Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal during the Inquisition, Abū Bakr during the Apostasy,” etc.

93 The Porch was the place where ʿUmar pushed through the nomination of Abū Bakr as caliph over the objections of the Medinans. ʿUthman, the third caliph, died fighting rebels who had besieged his house. Ṣiffīn was the site of the battle between ʿAlī and Muʿawiyah over the succession.

94 Fāsiq: that is, one who knows, or should know, the right thing to do, and does something else; sometimes rendered as “grave sinner.” 95 Or, to take the variant reading: “He would confront the offender, having turned people against him.” 96 Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb, 1:343.

97 Apparently Ibn Ḥātim recited the reports from memory the first time, and read them from his notes the second time.

98 The point is that not praying for Ibn Ḥanbal is as bad as not joining Muslim fighters on the frontiers.

99 Ibrāhīm has evidently been asked a legal question, and Ibn al-Jawzī cites the answer in full since it contains a reference to Ibn Ḥanbal.

100 Instead of in front, as is normally done.

101 An allusion to two verses that describe those who believe in the Revelation (Q Āl ʿImrān 3:7 and Nisāʾ 4:162).

102 A reference to the Inquisition (see chapter 66ff.).

103 Q Āl ʿImrān 3:173; Māʾidah 5:104; Tawbah 9:59.

104 Al-Turkī declares this, along with the stories that appear in the following chapters, as absurd inventions unworthy of Ibn Ḥanbal, “who stuck close to his texts and rejected fictions and dream-stories,” adding that “those who write his biography would do well to follow his lead” (Manāqib, 2nd ed., 190n2).

105 One of (usually) four figures, each associated with one of the cardinal points, occupying (in some accounts) the third rank in the hierarchy of secret Sufi saints (Goldziher, “Awtād”). Stories of this type appear to have been constructed in order to reconcile the sometimes conflicting claims of those Muslims who (like Ibn Ḥanbal) favored outward conformance to the law based on the literal reading of texts and those who (like the Sufis) privileged experience and encouraged the allegorical reading of texts. This story doubtless dates to a period later than that of al-Shāfīʿī, Ibn Ḥanbal, or Bishr ibn al-Ḥārith, in whose time Sufism was only beginning to emerge as a distinct tradition.

106 See Rippin, “Ṣiddīq.” 107 Q Rūm 30:60.

108 Abdāl or budalāʾ: “one of the degrees in the ṣūfī hierarchical order of saints, who, unknown by the masses … participate by means of their powerful influence in the preservation of the order of the universe.” Their name comes from the fact that “vacancies which occur in each of the classes are filled by the promotion to that class of a member of the class immediately below it” (Goldziher and Kissling, “Abdāl”); cf. the Jewish legend of the thirty-six righteous men whose number must remain constant lest the world be destroyed (Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Lamed Vav Ẓaddikim”). I thank Jay Cooperson for this explanation. In Sufi thought, which was still nascent in Ibn Ḥanbal’s time, there are different accounts of the number and ranking of the abdāl.

Ḥanbalī biographers appear to have taken over the term—without troubling themselves about the technicalities—as a way of praising their heroes. On the relationship between early Ḥanbalism and early Sufism, see Melchert, “Ḥanābila.” 109 That is, you need not fear that it has been wrongly taken from its source and thereby tainted—an important concern for practitioners of waraʿ (scrupulosity).

110 Kāmakh: a fermented grain condiment. Charles Perry has identified two basic varieties: “kāmakh rijāl, also called kāmakh Baghdād, which was semiliquid and tasted rather like Cheddar cheese, and kāmakh aḥmar, which was much the same but with a flavor like blue cheese” (personal communication).

111 Meter: sarīʿ.

112 A mangonel is a device for hurling large projectiles (Kennedy, Armies, index).

113 The word ʿilj: a word that carries the connotations of being non-Arab, non-Muslim, physically formidable, and subordinate to, or fighting against, Muslims.

114 The idea is that praying for Ibn Ḥanbal would make the shot hit its target.

115 Apparently meaning to recite the Qurʾan.

116 On arbitration as an alternative to consulting a qāḍī, or government-appointed judge, see Tillier, Cadis d’Iraq, 301–18.

117 On the problem of utterance, see below, chapter 20.

118 Ar. murjiʾah: those who hold that latter-day Muslims cannot judge the Companions or resolve the disputes that divided them, and that any such resolution must be postponed until Judgment Day.

They also argue (or are accused of arguing) that all believers have the same amount of faith, making it possible for an ordinary Muslim to say that he is as faithful as the angel Gabriel. The standard Sunni position is that faith can increase or decrease, making it possible for some people to have more faith than others.

119 Kāfir: one who commits kufr, originally “ingratitude,” and by extension refusal to believe in, or declare a belief in, God (see further Björkman, “Kāfir” and Adang, “Belief and Unbelief”).

Kāfir is often translated as “unbeliever,” but since that term has no particular resonance in modern English, I have decided in most cases to use “Ingrate,” capitalized to indicate that the word is being used to enact a kind of formal condemnation. I have nevertheless retained “unbelief” for kufr, since “ingratitude,” unlike “ingrate,” is commonly used in English to condemn social rather than creedal faults. On the uses of this term to render “a complicated and confusing world considerably simpler,” see Sizgorich, Violence and Belief, 241.

120 Both manuscripts read kāfir wa-fataḥ al-kāf. Since the latter expression usually means to pronounce a consonant with a short a, al-Turkī emends the first word to read kafar, “he committed unbelief.” Given the preceding report, however, and in light of the facts that (1) Arabic linguistic terminology was not yet standardized and (2) Hadith scholars were not yet expected to study such linguistics as existed, I think it entirely possible that al-Baghawī meant to say that Ibn Ḥanbal said the word kāfir with a long ā, thereby calling the offenders Ingrates. Either way, the point is that Ibn Ḥanbal did not use the noun kufr “unbelief,” a term that would condemn the sin rather than the sinner.

121 Jahm ibn Ṣafwān, d. 128/745, to whom are attributed a number of teachings hateful to Ibn Ḥanbal and his associates, particularly the claim that the prototype of the Qurʾan began to exist only at a particular point in time (van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 2:493–508, 4:625–30; Martin, “Createdness of the Qurʾān”). The people Ibn Ḥanbal associates most strongly with the createdness doctrine are the followers of Jahm, not the Muʿtazilah (Melchert, “Adversaries”).

122 This way of putting it emphasizes that the Qurʾan, being known to God, was inseparable from Him, and thus not an object created by Him at a particular moment in time (Madelung, “Controversy”).

123 Ibn Ḥanbal’s associate Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Muhājir. His name is also given as Būrān (see al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 208n4) and Fawzān (al-Khaṭīb al- Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 10:78 [no. 5190]).

124 Q Ikhlāṣ 112:1.

125 This section addresses the problem of how to understand verses and reports that speak of God as if He possesses attributes such as motion and visibility. Some thinkers, including the so-called followers of Jahm, interpreted such passages metaphorically in order to avoid asserting a likeness between God and His creatures. In the remarks cited here, Ibn Ḥanbal insists that one should not try to explain the passages at all. Some later Ḥanbalīs insisted that a faithful understanding of the texts requires us to believe that God has a physical body. In support of this view they cite arguments reportedly made by Ibn Ḥanbal himself (Ibn Ḥanbal, attr., Radd).

126 Hadith reports like this one, as well as Q Qiyāmah 75:22–23, say that the saved will see God in the afterlife. Sunnis like Ibn Ḥanbal understood this claim literally, while the Muʿtazilah (among others) did not. See Omari, “Beatific Vision,” with further references.

127 Kalām: that is, speculative theology, or dialectic concerning religion. The Arabic term is also the ordinary word for “talking.” On the history of the word, see Cook, “Origins.” 128 Despite Ibn Ḥanbal’s warning to avoid Disputation, some of his followers did engage in kalām, especially when they could do so anonymously (Omari, “Kitāb al-Ḥayda”). On Ibn Ḥanbal’s role in “making the boundaries of the Muslim community a component of the social reality of life within the dār al-Islām,” see Sizgorich, Violence and Belief, 255ff (quotation at 256–57).

129 The doctrines of these groups are explained in the reports that follow.

130 I.e., and does not go on to say “uncreated.” These are the Stoppers. Melchert describes them, along with the Proponents of the Created Utterance (my translation of lafẓiyyah) as “semi-rationalists” who tried to stake out a position between the “traditionalists” (people who, like Ibn Ḥanbal, insisted on citing texts rather than using reason) and the rationalist Secessionists and followers of Jahm (Melchert, “Adversaries”).

131 I.e., if spoken aloud by humans, while the Qurʾan as known to God is uncreated. Those who held this view are the Proponents of Created Utterance.

132 A theologian condemned as a follower of Jahm, d. 218/833; on him, see van Ess, Theologie, 3:175–88.

133 The Muʿtazilah, literally “those who sent themselves apart”: the name applied to scholars who were, broadly speaking, rationalist in their approach. For example, they favored metaphorical explanations for the apparently physical attributes of God. See Omari, “Muʿtazilah,” with further references.

134 Ar. zanādiqah: a term originally applied to Manichean dualists, and later to anyone suspected of secretly adhering to a creed incompatible with Islam.

135 Ar. rāfiḍī: a disparaging term of reference to Shiʿa, referring to their rejection of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and Muʿāwiyah as legitimate caliphs.

136 The issue here was one of political legitimacy. According to Shiʿi Muslims, the Prophet’s cousin ʿAlī should have been chosen as caliph over Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, or ʿUthmān. In response, Muslims who disagreed were forced to argue that the three actually chosen were more meritorious than ʿAlī. (A third position was that judgment on the matter should be suspended.)

There were religious implications too, since the Shiʿa accepted only ʿAlī and his descendants as exemplars and rejected reports transmitted by other Companions. On the development of these positions, see Crone, God’s Rule, 3–141.

137 For this report, see 20.28 below, and for references, see al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 214–15n2.

138 Mubtadiʿ, often translated as “innovator,” a word which—in contrast to the Arabic—is a positive one in English. I have used different translations of bidʿah (belief or practice condemned as new and contrary to that of the first Muslims) and its derivatives depending on context. I thank James Mongtomery for suggesting “novelty” as one possibility.

139 That is, the Companions who chose the first four caliphs.

140 Many Muslims ascribed special sanctity to ʿAlī and his family, with some—the Imami Shiʿa— claiming that anyone who did not take certain members of the family as guides and exemplars would not be saved. Ibn Ḥanbal and his associates rejected this view, holding instead that salvation might be attained by following the Qurʾan and the sunnah. At the same time, they did not want to disparage ʿAlī and his family, all of whom belonged to the Prophet’s household.

141 This is the report cited in 20.24.

142 Q Fatḥ 48:29.

143 Q Baqarah 2:141.

144 A term applied to Shiʿa by those who disagreed with them.

145 The remainder of this chapter consists of several very long, itemized accounts of the Sunni creed.

Unlike the short statements that take up the beginning of the chapter, these are too explicitly polemical, and too obviously cobbled together, to seem authentic. Michael Cook has expressed doubts about one creed (Commanding Right, 110–11n232), and Saud AlSarhan has convincingly attributed it and five others to later sources (Early Muslim Traditionalism, 29–48).

AlSarhan concludes that “these creeds are more likely to present traditionalist theology in the third and the fourth/ninth and tenth centuries than Ibn Ḥanbal’s own beliefs,” adding that they nevertheless served to place Ibn Ḥanbal on a par with the pious early Muslims as an authoritative source for right doctrine (ibid., 53). As this abridged edition focuses on the historical Ibn Ḥanbal, I have omitted the long creeds.

146 Muḥdath, or possibly muḥaddith, “Hadith scholar.” 147 Cupping is an operation performed by using a flame to create a vacuum inside a glass vessel and then applying the vessel to the body, sometimes after (or before) making an incision in the skin.

According to the principles of Greco-Islamicate medicine, this operation was supposed to draw noxious vapors out of the body. Cupping was not a respected profession (the poet Abū l- ʿAtāhiyah tried to work as a cupper to mortify himself; see Iṣfahānī, Aghānī, 4:107–9), and a dinar—a whole gold coin—was too much to pay for the operation. In chapter 63, Ibn Ḥanbal’s slave Ḥusn pays a cupper one dirham.

148 Al-Ḥiẓāmī is not otherwise identified. Ibn Abī Duʾād was adviser to the caliph al-Maʾmūn and chief judge under the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim. He was disgraced under al-Mutawakkil and died in 240/854. He is decried in Sunni sources as the force behind the Inquisition. See van Ess, Theologie, 3:481–502; Tillier, Cadis, index; Turner, “Aḥmad b. Abī Duʾād.” 149 His wird: that is, a voluntary prayer regularly performed in addition to the regular ritual prayers.

150 That is, spiritual experience, as opposed to studying the Law, which is what Ibn Ḥanbal does.

151 This report seems an invention intended to legitimate al-Muḥāsibī’s teachings using Ibn Ḥanbal as a foil, with the last remark being a counter-invention by a skeptical Ḥanbalī transmitter. Al- Dhahabī and Melchert agree that the story “simply does not sound right” (“Adversaries,” 244, with a reference to al-Dhahabī, Mīzān al-iʿtidāl, 1:430).

152 A well that forms part of the mosque complex in Mecca. See J. Chabbi, “Zamzam.” 153 In al-Minā, in Mecca. Ibn Ḥanbal was evidently on pilgrimage, making the year 814 rather than 813 (the other possibility given the hijrī date).

154 This last expression is unfamiliar and the translation is conjectural.

155 Kitāb al-Fawāʾid, a vague title used in many fields. Schacht translates the term as it appears in the title of a later fiqh work as “difficult details” (“Ibn Nujaym”).

156 As several reports in the Manāqib indicate, Ibn Ḥanbal’s house opened onto a place of prayer commonly referred to as his mosque.

157 Perhaps Kitāb al-Waraʿ wa l-īmān [Book of scrupulousness and faith] (Sezgin, GAS, 1:506), though the published Kitāb al-Waraʿ contains Ibn Ḥanbal’s answers to questions about permissible food and the like, and nothing about faith.

158 Sezgin credits Ibn Ḥanbal with a Kitāb al-Ashribah al-ṣaghīr [Smaller book on drinks] (ibid.). This was probably a collection of Hadith reports or of Ibn Ḥanbal’s responsa regarding the permissibility of various drinks.

159 Melchert takes this report as evidence of Ibn Ḥanbal’s experimentation with arranging Hadith by topic; see Ahmad, 39–40.

160 It is not clear whose servant he was, but he may have been the attendant of some exalted personage, as the point of the story seems to be that Ibn Ḥanbal dismissed him in order to teach the ragged stranger some Hadith reports.

161 Mushammir can also mean “bustling” or “worldly-wise.” 162 A modern (as of 1967) list of his works, whether printed or in manuscript, as well as secondary studies of them, appears in Sezgin, GAS, 1:502–9.

163 On the arguments made in this period for and against writing down “knowledge” (i.e., knowledge of Hadith and related matters), see Cook, “Opponents.” 164 Extant and much published, and containing, in modern printings, at least 26,000 reports. See Sezgin, GAS, 1:504–6; Melchert, Aḥmad, 39–48; Melchert, “Musnad.” 165 Such a work would have listed Hadith reports that clarify particular verses. However, Sezgin finds no such work attributed to Aḥmad. Melchert cites the biographer al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) as doubting that it ever existed, arguing that if it did, it would have left some traces in the literature (Siyar, 13:522). Melchert suggests that tenth-century Ḥanbalīs might have attributed a commentary to their exemplar out of “anxiety not to be outdone by al-Ṭabarī,” compiler of the enormous Jāmiʿ al-bayān (Melchert, “Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and the Qurʾān,” 24).

166 These are the verses whose legal implications override, or are overridden by, other verses. This work, if it existed, has apparently not survived; Sezgin does not mention it.

167 Not in Sezgin and apparently lost; the translation is conjectural. A work by the same title by Ibn Ḥanbal’s contemporary al-Bukhārī is an alphabetical list of Hadith transmitters and their dates of death.

168 Presumably Shuʿbah ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 160/776?) a Basran transmitter credited with pioneering the evaluation of other transmitters for their reliability; see Juynboll, “Shuʿbah ibn al-Ḥadjdjādj.” The work is not in Sezgin and is apparently lost.

169 The last four items listed seem not to have survived. Sezgin (GAS, 1:506–9) attributes several more works to him, of which the most important are Kitāb al-Sunnah [On the Prophet’s exemplary way of life], Kitāb al-Zuhd [On renunciation], Kitāb (or Risālat) al-Ṣalāh [On prayer], Kitāb al- Waraʿ wa l-īmān [Scrupulousness and faith], Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā l-zanādiqah wa l-jahmiyyah [Rebuttal of the heretics and the followers of Jahm] (a book that, being full of kalām, was doubtless written by someone else; see al-Dhahabī, Siyar, 11:286–87, and Omari, “Kitāb al- Ḥayda,” 442–46), Kitāb ʿIlal al-ḥadīth [Defects in hadith] (mentioned in chapter 98), Al- Masāʾil [Responsa], and Al-ʿAqīdah [The creed].

170 I thank Joseph Lowry for help with this passage. Presumably Ibn Ḥanbal would have found Mālik’s compilation of Hadith reports acceptable but would have objected to Sufyān’s rationalist inclinations (see Raddatz, “Sufyān al-Thawrī”).

171 The original adds “and his aversion thereto,” which is not part of the title as given in the table of contents.

172 This passage appears to be the author’s indirect excuse for doing exactly what Ibn Ḥanbal forbade people to do. It is not entirely clear where Ibn al-Jawzī begins speaking; the paragraph break is my best guess.

173 Inkpots during this period were evidently round and made of glass. Examples from later periods were decorated with copper, silver, and gold, and scholars are described as showing them off.

Ibn Ḥanbal may also be referring to boxes used to carry inkpots and pens (Baer, “Dawāt”).

174 “His people” (al-qawm) could also be translated “any given group,” but the question seems to be about the proto-Sunni Hadith scholars and renunciants.

175 Scholarly and pious works alike contain many imaginative translations of raqāʾiq. The most concrete meaning of the word is “thin places” or “tender spots.” Given the subjects discussed in this chapter, I am inclined to think it refers to points where the spiritual seeker is likely to commit an error of omission. Note also the expression raqīq al-dīn (“weak in respect of religion”) (Lane, Lexicon, s.v. R-Q-Q).

176 Q Raʿd 13:28.

177 People would carry objects in their sleeves, which served as pockets do today; see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:161.

178 The reference here is to the exegesis of Q 69, Sūrat al-Ḥāqqah. Threatened with death, Abraham reportedly refused to ask for help from the angel Gabriel, trusting instead in God alone; see al- Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 271–72n4.

179 That is, in an attitude of ritual prayer.

180 “To be fearful” (yattaqī) can mean both “to be fearful of God” and “to guard against forbidden objects and actions.” 181 “The heart” (al-qalb) often corresponds to what we might call “consciousness” or “the self.” It should be distinguished from nafs, which is often translated “soul,” but for renunciants usually means the place where base urges and unworthy desires come from.

182 Sickly and powerless Abbasid caliph, reigned 334–63/946–74.

183 Lawzīnaj: ground nuts spread on extremely thin bread then rolled and drenched in syrup (Perry, Baghdad Cookery, 99–100).

184 The point seems to be that the present world is as trivial a pleasure as a bite of dessert.

185 That is, to find the living transmitter closest to the source of the report and ask him to recite it, rather than getting it from one of his auditors.

186 Meter: ṭawīl.

187 Literally, “it was as if fire [or Hell] was burning between his eyes,” which might also mean that he had a burning gaze.

188 Meter: ṭawīl.

189 Meter: basīṭ.

190 “Riches”: literally, “a female camel and her offspring.” 191 Meter: kāmil. Other citations of this poem do not credit it to Ibn Ḥanbal. See al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 282n2.

192 Ilā means “to” in the sense of “toward,” while li- means “of,” “for,” or “belonging to,” though it can also mean “to” when a pronoun suffix is attached (as in qultu lahu, “I said to him”). Li- is still used for ilā in many varieties of Arabic.

193 It is not clear here who the various verbs and pronouns refer to, and some words may be missing or assumed. One possibility is that Abū Bakr told the boy where to find the narrator, who then asked Ibn Ḥanbal’s permission to bring him inside.

194 The speaker here may be Ibn al-Jawzī or one of the transmitters in the chain.

195 Hair removal was a matter of sunnah; see Reinhart, “Shaʿr (2).” The glove may have been similar to the kāsah used in traditional bathhouses: “The friction-glove is made of a mixture of woollen and goat’s hair threads sewn together and arranged so as to form a rough surface. This vigorous friction enables the top layer of skin, together with the dirt … accumulated in the pores, to be rubbed off in greyish rolls” (Sourdel-Thomine, “Ḥammām”).

196 On the contrast between Ibn Ḥanbal’s reported kindness and the rigidity of the doctrines attributed to him, see Sizgorich, Violence and Belief, 271.

197 Or, counting from one instead of zero, “I was about seven years old the first time. I was nine when he died.” 198 On consumption of fruits and nuts, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:246.

199 Al-Turkī gives Sakānah, a place name, but SH has sukkānihi, “his tenants,” which seems more likely, as Ibn Ḥanbal was a landlord (see chapter 40).

200 Maṣliyyah, for which al-Baghdādī gives the following recipe: “The way to make it is to cut up fat meat and boil it as usual, and remove the scum. When it is done, throw on a handful of chopped onion, a little salt, ground dry coriander, cumin, pepper, sticks of cinnamon and mastic. When its liquid has dried up and the fat appears, take dried whey, pound it fine, throw hot water on it and macerate it well by hand until it becomes like sour yogurt [in appearance] and of the same consistency, then throw it in the pot. Grind a little garlic and throw it in the pot with bunches of fresh mint. Sprinkle some finely ground cinnamon on the surface. Then wipe the sides of the pot with a clean cloth, leave it on the fire awhile to grow quiet and take it up” (Perry, Baghdad Cookery, 44).

201 Khabīṣ: a pudding made of the pith of a semolina loaf torn up and then breaded, fried in sesame oil, and stirred with refined sugar. Different varieties might include saffron, rosewater, honey, poppy seeds, pistachios, camphor, molasses, gourd, and carrots (Perry, Baghdad Cookery, 95– 97).

202 A roundabout way of saying “That’s enough!” 203 Literally, “That is a scrupulosity that makes things dark,” apparently from aẓlama ʿalaynā l-bayt, “he darkened our house,” meaning “he said things we didn’t want to hear” (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. Ẓ-L-M). One of the principles of waraʿ was refusal to use anything without the owner’s permission.

204 That is, he could then say “He isn’t here,” meaning “He isn’t in my hand,” and thus avoid lying outright. I thank Tahera Qutbuddin for this explanation.

205 This story refers to an incident (covered in chapter 73) in which Ibn Ḥanbal was denounced to the authorities for allegedly harboring a member of the family of ʿAlī who had been active against the Abbasid regime.

206 Salām ʿalaykum, perhaps a reference to Q Furqān 25:63: «The true servants of the Gracious One are those who walk upon the earth with humility and when they are addressed by the ignorant ones, their response is, “Peace”» (salām).

207 The question seems to be coming from an official charged with rooting out crypto-Manicheans, as was done under the caliph al-Mahdī. In any case, the questioner seems to have no idea who he’s talking to.

208 For a detailed account of the difficulties of being a landlord in ninth-century Iraq, see al-Jāḥiẓ, Al- Bukhalāʾ, 81–90; trans. Serjeant, Misers, 67–75. For a discussion of renting based on the Cairo Geniza, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:91–97.

209 The Black Land is the alluvial plain on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. When it was conquered, ʿUmar reportedly ordered that it remain in the hands of those who cultivated it, with the tax revenues going to the Muslim treasury (al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 306n3). Ibn Ḥanbal is evidently trying to apply this command by paying zakāt on the house.

210 This passage is obscure. Among other things, the pronouns do not agree properly for gender. The reading is my best guess.

211 That is, collect the ears of grain missed by the sickle at harvest time. He seems to have done this while traveling to Tarsus to be interrogated by al-Maʾmūn (see chapter 67).

212 Or “a good number of dirhams.” 213 In the Cairo Geniza, cheap shoes are often described as costing a quarter of a dinar (Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:164).

214 Ibn Ḥanbal’s concubine; see chapter 63.

215 None of the manuscripts gives a satisfactory reading of this word. Al-Turkī gives it as yarubbuhā, although no dictionary definition of this word seems to fit.

216 References exist to numerous devices for raising water, conveying it from one place to another, and dispensing it; see, e.g., Hill, “Māʾ” and “Nāʿūra”; Guthrie, Arab Social Life, 136–39; Cooperson, Classical, 170n97. It being impossible to tell from this brief allusion exactly what is meant, I have used the vaguest possible English word, “conduit,” meaning “a structure from which water is distributed or made to issue” (OED).

217 Dusūt: not explained in the works I have consulted; I have translated based on context.

218 This passage is unclear to me. It may be an expression of a theme common in renunciant writings, namely that a relaxation of standards, even for what seems to be good cause, sends one down a slippery slope toward wastefulness and corruption.

219 It is unclear whether miqrāḍ here means scissors, shears, or (as in modern Arabic) nail clippers.

220 That is, 1/12 of a dirham.

221 For rental amounts paid for dwellings and commercial premises in Egypt between 1040 and 1250, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:93–97, 291–96.

222 That a tree trunk is meant becomes clear in the next section.

223 That is, 9 and 1/3 dirhams.

224 Namely to acquire blessings from an object that had belonged to Aḥmad.

225 To explain his kindness Ibn Ḥanbal makes the excuse that the dog “might retaliate by the evil eye” (Melchert, Ibn Ḥanbal, 5).

226 The son of his slave Ḥusn; see chapter 64.

227 Apparently the Persian name Chobin.

228 Kinberg explains renunciation as the result of scrupulous avoidance (waraʿ) of anything possibly against the Law (Kinberg, “What is Meant by Zuhd”). Melchert, by contrast, argues that “right religion in the zuhd tradition was not mainly about precisely following a lot of rules, although renunciants usually did precisely follow a lot of rules; rather, it was about an attitude, above all this unremitting seriousness about life. The threat of death and judgment was to be taken seriously. Time was not to be wasted on frivolous entertainments but directed to the performance of duties” (Melchert, “Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and the Qurʾān,” 72).

229 The meanings of qindīl and sirāj as reconstructed by Goitein from the Cairo Geniza seem to make sense here (Mediterranean Society, 4:135–36).

230 Khalūq is described as a thick yellow perfume. It may be based on saffron, which can also be used to make incense.

231 Q Ṭā Hā 20:131. The whole verse reads «Do not regard the worldly benefits We have given some of them, for with these We seek only to test them. The provision of your Lord is better and more lasting.» 232 A unit of weight with various definitions. One early definition sets it equal to sixty grains of barley; see Ashtor, “Mawāzīn (1),” and Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. M-K-K.

233 None of the manuscripts agree on what was painted, and none gives a word that makes sense.

Following the parallel text in Ibn Ḥanbal, Zuhd, 191, I have emended to saqāʾif, plural of saqīfah, “any broad piece of wood … with which one may form a roof” (Lane, Lexicon, s.v. SQ- F).

234 This passage is very terse and the pronoun references are ambiguous. The translation is therefore conjectural.

235 This story refers to the period after the end of the Inquisition, when the caliph al-Mutawakkil welcomed Hadith scholars to the palace. Al-Miṣrī and his companions thought it acceptable to enjoy whatever privileges the caliph offered, but Aḥmad, whose objections to Abbasid rule went beyond matters of dogma, did not. He was also old and ill at the time, which seems to be why he was lying down.

236 Umm walad: a concubine who has borne her master a child.

237 This incident evidently took place after Ibn Ḥanbal was stricken with paralysis.

238 The point seems to be that Ibn Ḥanbal did not realize that his life of austerity was undermining his health.

239 That is, the slave who had borne one of his sons.

240 Literally “a grain,” a coin or measure of weight equivalent to 1/48 of a dirham (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. M-K-K). It and the qiṭʿah (“scrap”) seem to be the smallest units mentioned in the Virtues.

241 The custom seems to have been to visit the bathhouse once a week. Ibn Ḥanbal may have shunned bathing because it was a pleasurable activity, usually undertaken with friends; “a vow to forego this amenity was a severe means of self-castigation” (Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 5:96–97).

242 “Ibn Ḥanbal is perhaps the only ordinary citizen of third/ninth century Baghdad whose life we can place in its concrete surroundings” (Cook, Commanding Right, 108); Cook provides an evocative summary of what the Virtues and other sources tell us about Ibn Ḥanbal’s home and neighborhood (108–10). Beyond Baghdad, a great deal of detailed information on houses and furnishings appears in Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:105–50; although Goitein’s documents are Egyptian and date almost entirely from a later period, the Geniza Jews’ attitudes toward comfort, luxury, and abstinence provide an instructive background to this chapter.

243 It was a common Iraqi custom to sleep on the roof in the summer.

244 References to the shādhikūnah (so voweled in SH) or shādhakūnah (Maṭlūb, Muʿjam, 76) indicate that it was made in Yemen, that people sat on it, that it was large, and that it was stitched (muḍarrabah; see al-Samʿānī, Al-Ansāb, 3:371). “Quilt” is my best guess.

245 The bardaʿah or bardhaʿah is variously described as a a saddle-cloth, a pad stuffed with straw, a mattress, or a pad placed atop a mattress (Lane, Lexicon, s. v. B-R-Dh; Sadan, “Mafrūshāt”; Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:115).

246 On hangings, curtains, and drapes, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:119–22.

247 Two of the MSS, and following them al-Turkī, read yuʿazzīnī, evidently meaning that Ibn Ḥanbal tried to console al-Zuhrī by saying that he had borrowed money to build the door (or gate). But ʿazzā usually means to offer condolences to the bereaved; I therefore follow SH in reading yuʿaddīnī. I also read bi l-dayn over SH’s plausible bil-labin “in brick,” because Ibn Ḥanbal later says, apparently speaking of the same structure, that he had to go into debt to build it because he refused to take money from his son (49.12).

248 On the kānūn, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:136.

249 This incident took place during Ibn Ḥanbal’s confinement at the house of Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm, the emir or governor of Baghdad. Ibn Ḥanbal’s family was evidently responsible for his upkeep, perhaps because he refused to eat food provided by anyone else. The meal described here was Ibn Ḥanbal’s ifṭār, or fast-breaking meal during Ramadan.

250 Normally one would eat meat during the festival. Al-Turkī reads this as a question meaning something like “But what good were they?” From other passages (49.17 and 49.22), however, it seems that Ibn Ḥanbal was fond of beans.

251 On this spread (kāmakh), see 18.3.

252 Made by boiling almonds and crushing them.

253 The translation of clothing terms in this chapter must be taken as conjectural. We have some idea what Iraqi dress may have looked like, at least in later periods, from the illustrations for al- Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt (see Grabar, Illustrations and Guthrie, Arab Social Life). We have some actual garments (or parts of garments) from this period, though not from Iraq (see e.g., Fluck, “Dress Styles”; Colburn, “Materials”; Evans, Byzantium and Islam, 164–71), and we have many attested words for items of clothing, both from dictionaries (see, e.g., Maṭlūb, Muʿjam) and from documentary sources (Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:150–200). Unfortunately it is only occasionally possible to match a word with a particular garment, or depiction of one. For many items, finally, there do not seem to be precisely equivalent items in English.

254 Bayn al-thawbayn, apparently meaning of a length between that of the usual inner and the usual outer garment.

255 Goitein translates milḥafah or malḥafah as “wrap” (Mediterranean Society, 4:157).

256 Goitein insists that a qamīṣ is a robe (ibid, 4:156). The OED, however, calls a robe “an outer garment,” which this object is clearly not. I have chosen “tunic,” which means “a garment resembling a shirt or gown … over which a loose mantle or cloak was worn” (OED), and is the term used by historians of material culture to describe the shirt-like garments that have survived from early Islamic times (see, e.g., Evans, Byzantium and Islam, 168–69).

257 Qalansuwwah: “the cap worn under the turban, equivalent to the modern ṭarbūsh” (Dozy, Noms, 366).

258 The word muʿaqqad, literally “many-knotted,” is explained as “a kind of striped garment from Hajar”; see Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. ʿ-Q-D.

259 Goitein translates ridāʾ as “coat” (Mediterranean Society, 4:116). “Coat,” however, suggests something worn to keep warm, and Ibn Ḥanbal wore his in the summer (48.5). Guthrie describes the ridāʾ as worn over the shoulder (Arab Social Life, 49). “Mantle,” meaning “a loose sleeveless cloak” (OED), seems a reasonable guess.

260 On the ṭaylasān, see Dozy, Noms, 278–80, and Guthrie, Social Life, 77–78 and plate 8.

261 Approximately three meters, or almost ten feet; see W. Hinz, “Dhirāʿ.” 262 From the city of Marv; see Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. M-R-W .

263 Murabbaʿ means either “square” or “checked.” A kisāʾ “was evidently a simple oblong piece of cloth” (Lane, Lexicon, s.v. K-S-W) and in this case may have been square. The dictionaries also mention washy murabbaʿ, a pattern of checks printed or embroidered on a garment (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. K-ʿ-B).

264 The point seems to be that he did not want to take money from anyone else because he could not be sure of its acceptability.

265 It is unclear what a kaylajah is a fourth of, but it may be possible to derive an answer from the bewildering list of equivalences in Ibn Manẓūr, “Lisān”, s.v. M-K-K.

266 See note at the first appearance of this report in chapter 40.

267 Literally, an aromatic paste made of dried musk, and a red dye used in preparing kidskin shoes.

268 The conversation is apparently about repairing or installing a gate or door on the property where Ibn Ḥanbal rented out rooms. The revenue was apparently divided among the members of the family, among them ʿAbd Allāh. Since he does not approve of the latter’s other sources of income, however, Ibn Ḥanbal cannot allow him to contribute to the upkeep of the property.

269 Since Ṣāliḥ had accepted gifts from the caliph, anything that came from his house was tainted.

270 Q Ibrāhīm 14:45. This is one of the reproaches the damned will hear in the afterlife.

271 The precise nature of the financial arrangement described here is not clear to me.

272 In Egypt banana leaves were used for wrapping purchases (Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 4:246).

273 Al-Turkī takes ḍubnah (or ḍabnah or ḍibnah) to mean “dependents” (Manāqib, 2nd ed., 352n1), but since Yaḥyā was chief judge under al-Maʾmūn, “entourage” (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. Ḍ-BN)

seems more likely.

274 Ibn Ḥanbal did not believe in accepting payment for teaching and so refused to accept the gift. I thank Tahera Qutbuddin for correcting an earlier translation of this passage.

275 Ibn Ḥanbal seems to be applying the principle that Muslims should not create a nuisance or impediment in a public thoroughfare.

276 Assuming that the text and translation are accurate here, “S” (the letter sīn) may have needed correction because its abbreviated form is a simple line that is not always readily legible as a distinct letter. I thank Devin Stewart for discussing this passage with me.

277 This was a much-discussed problem, and Ibn Ḥanbal apparently thought it better not to answer for fear of being wrong. See al-Turkī, Manāqib, 2nd ed., 358n2.

278 The point seems to be that there was only one.

279 Ibn Ḥanbal’s disapproval of figured fabrics (Ibn Ḥanbal, Waraʿ, 141–43) suggests that he would have objected to the floral and vegetal patterns extremely common in surviving examples of plaster decoration from this period (see, e.g., Mietke, “Vine Rinceaux”). The palace may also have been decorated with paintings of hunting scenes, drinking parties, musicians, dancers, and the like (see, e.g., Ballian, “Country Estates”).

280 The reluctance of pious scholars to assume judgeships is a common topos of biography. Tillier, Cadis d’Iraq, 652ff., offers, in addition to references to the older literature, a striking new interpretation of these refusals as ritual exchanges between learned men and the authorities.

281 This story gives the impression of being invented to praise Ibn Ḥanbal at al-Shāfiʿī’s expense; see Cooperson, Classical, 149–51.

282 Al-Amīn took office in 809/193, when Ibn Ḥanbal would have been thirty or thirty-one.

283 The proper name of the caliph al-Amīn. During this period, pious Hadith-men seem to have avoided calling the Abbasid caliphs by their titles, since many of them considered the dynasty illegitimate.

284 Al-Ribāṭī must have accepted the patronage of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ṭāhir, governor of Khurasan, which to Ibn Ḥanbal’s way of thinking meant compromising himself as a Muslim and as a scholar.

285 The speaker is surprised that an Arab—that is, a descendant of the original Muslim conquerors—is poor. Indeed, Ibn Ḥanbal belonged to a prestigious tribe and his relatives occupied positions in the Abbasid administration (see chapters 1–3).

286 The problem was not the chair itself but the fact that it was decorated with silver, as becomes clear in the next report. I thank Hossein Modarressi for clarifying this point.

287 Al-Sawwāq seems to mean a banquet (apparently known to his audience) held in a house near the Bāb al-Muqayyir, which may mean “Pitch-Worker’s Gate” but not “Pitched Gate,” pace Le Strange, Baghdad, 224–26. The gate was located in al-Mukharrim, a quarter of northeast Baghdad.

288 Ibn Ḥanbal’s ascetic contemporary Bishr ibn al-Ḥārith the Barefoot (see Glossary).

289 Identified by al-Turkī as Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam ibn Nāfiʿ al-Warrāq (d. 251/865–66).

290 Akhāfu an takraha l-rijl, so voweled in H, which al-Turkī evidently understands to mean “I’m afraid you don’t like crowds.” For this unusual meaning of rijl, see Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, R-J-L.

291 The rest of the thought apparently being “even when he’s alone.” 292 The various political interpretations of this term (discussed in Nagel, “Qurrāʾ,” and Shah, “Quest”)

are based on references to earlier periods and none makes obvious sense here. From the passage itself it is clear that the qurrāʾ, whatever else they may have been, were associated, in Ibn Ḥanbal’s milieu, with pious shabbiness.

293 The manuscripts read asmārjūn, the Arabic pronunciation of āsemāngūn, meaning “sky-colored” in Persian. Al-Turkī emends to asmān jūn, which is closer to the Persian but not attested in the manuscripts.

294 “They” would appear to be the Abbasid authorities, who tried to court his favor after the Inquisition.

295 Reportedly what ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb said about having served as caliph. Here Ibn Ḥanbal seems to be talking about the Inquisition.

296 Sahl ibn Salāmah was a leader of the vigilante movement that sought to restore law and order in Baghdad after the siege of 813. See al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 8:552/3:1009–10, 572–73/3:1035–36; van Ess, Theologie, 3:173–75.

297 The term ṭunbūr, “long-necked lute,” is sometimes translated using the cognate term “pandore,” which, however, is also used to describe many different forms of medium- and long-necked lutes, as well as certain unrelated European instruments. I thank Dwight Reynolds for explaining these terms. On the pious smashing of musical instruments, see Cook, Commanding Right, 79, 90–91, 98, 100 (where this incident is discussed), 121, 149, 238, 300, 309, 383, 384, and 481.

298 Q Mulk 67:30.

299 Al-Shāfiʿī was a foundational Sunni legal theorist (see Glossary). Supplications at dawn were thought to be especially effective. This report, though not impossible in itself, is the sort of story that was circulated to paper over the differences between jurists who followed al-Shāfiʿī’s approach and those who favored Ibn Ḥanbal’s.

300 This story was clearly invented to make Ibn Ḥanbal look good, to argue that prayer is more important than scholarship, or both. But only the first half of the story makes the point effectively; the second part may have been added to avoid giving offense.

301 The word ṣabr (fortitude, patience) and its various derivatives appear ninety-six times (searched on tanzil.net).

302 Q 18, Sūrat al-Kahf. This chapter deals with the themes of ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, and impatience. It tells several well-known stories. One is that of the People of the Cave, fugitive believers whom God cast into a deep sleep and revived 309 years later as a sign and a test to humankind. Another is that of the ungrateful grower who comes to understand his absolute dependence on God when his crops fail. Yet another is that of Moses’s travels with an unnamed servant of God who commits a series of apparently wicked actions, which are later explained as benevolent. It also contains the story of “the horned one,” often identified as Alexander the Great, and his encounters with various peoples. It ends with a description of the Day of Judgment and a exhortation to the Prophet to proclaim that God is one and to urge humankind to good deeds.

303 The salutation, which ends the prayer, is “Peace be upon you, and the blessing of God.” 304 One should not interrupt someone who is praying, or pass directly in front of him or her.

305 It is not clear who was keeping whom busy, though the preference should perhaps be given to Ibn Ḥanbal as the subject.

306 “The rest”: the nawāfil, or “supererogatory prayers,” that is, optional observances performed in addition to the ritual devotions.

307 Worshippers may choose which chapters to read during their prayers. Several reports say that Ibn Ḥanbal preferred this one. On the chapter itself, see 58.7.

308 That is, transported supernaturally to Mecca. In Sufi biography, the Allies of God can cross great distances instantly and can carry others with them.

309 This awkwardly constructed story was apparently intended to establish cordiality between exemplars of the religious sciences and exemplars of the mystical tradition. See Cooperson, Classical, 138–51, 178–84.

310 Q Sharḥ 94:5–6.

311 Q Fuṣṣilat 41:11.

312 H and SH have mā yaṣnaʿu, “what He does,” though the fatḥah in H may also be a ḍammah, giving mā yuṣnaʿu, “what is done” (thus al-Turkī). Though odd, “what He does” makes sense if Ibn Ḥanbal believed that God has predestined all our actions (see 20.49). Since H and SH represent independent manuscript traditions, I have adopted mā yaṣnaʿu and translated accordingly. But theodicy aside, D’s mā naṣnaʿu, “what we do,” is the most natural reading.

313 H and D have ṭibb, commonly “medicine,” and not attested as a plural of ṭabīb, “physician,” but apparently being used in that sense here.

314 The child’s family seems to have been using a preparation made of fatl, the blossoms of the samur or acacia, to stop the bleeding. For a modern description of how the acacia is used medicinally, see http://www.cloverleaffarmherbs.com/acacia/. I thank Kyle Gamble for suggesting this possibility, which is far likelier than the “twisted cord” of the first edition.

315 “Thirty years” appears to be wrong; see 62.8.

316 Rayḥāna is also identified (see 63.5) as Ibn Ḥanbal’s concubine, though this claim seems less well documented.

317 Literally something cut off or cut out. Here it obviously refers to some kind of footwear but I have not found it attested in other sources.

318 Probably the head of a sheep.

319 This seems to mean that he has just spent the last dirham they have, and that she should not count on him to throw any more celebrations for her. Another possible reading is: “This is all you’ll get from me today.” 320 A dry measure whose value varied greatly by region, from approximately 926.7 grams to 1.6

kilograms (Ashtor, “Mawāzīn, 1”).

321 It is unclear to me whether Ḥusn paid for the fabric or was paid for the work she did when she made the garment. Kirā usually means the rent, but here it seems to mean the fee paid for a service. I thank Isam Eido, Saud AlSarhan, and Julia Bray for discussing this problem with me.

It is also unclear exactly why Ibn Ḥanbal did not want the garment. He may have disliked its being finely woven, or he may have disapproved of the transaction Ḥusn mentions (the ghallah being the money he collected from his tenants).

322 Ibn Ḥanbal decided immediately to use the cloth as a shroud and therefore asked Ḥusn not to cut it, as a shroud is simply a wrapper. At the end, though, she seems to be saying that he cut the cloth in order to use only the coarser part for the shroud.

323 Evidently a now-lost biography of Ibn Ḥanbal.

324 Since Rayḥānah is also given as the name of Ibn Ḥanbal’s second wife (62.4) the most economical explanation of the discrepancy is that al-Munādī mistakenly applied the name to Ḥusn. The details about asking his wife’s permission and following the sunnah may be pious embellishments.

325 Ibn Ḥanbal is referring to Q Aʿrāf 7:172, where God summons the souls of all those yet unborn and has them acknowledge Him as their Lord. Here, then, he is apologizing to his older son for fathering the younger ones. He leaves out the younger al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, who died young (see 63.2), though why he should leave out Muḥammad, the fourth of his young sons, is not clear. Following this understanding of the passage, I have translated based on the text of H, which reads “al-Ḥasan.” For their part, D and SH both read Ḥusn (Ibn Ḥanbal’s concubine)

instead of Ḥasan. If this reading is adopted, the report means that Ibn Ḥanbal is apologizing for buying Ḥusn and fathering Saʿīd.

326 A qanṭarah is a masonry bridge as opposed to one supported by boats or inflated skins. Fūrān is using local shorthand to refer to a market near one such bridge. For a list of the possibilities, see Le Strange, Baghdad, 368, left column.

327 “The gate leading out from the [northwest] suburbs to the shrine of the Kâẓimayn,” and for legal purposes “the northern limit of Western Baghdad.” Le Strange, Baghdad, 115 and map 5.

328 One who measures cloth or plots of land (al-Samʿāni, al-Ansāb, 3:5).

329 Al-Turkī, drawing on a parallel text, emends Aḥmad to aḥmadu l-Lāh, but the original, which appears in all the manuscripts, strikes me as much more plausible.

330 To judge by third/ninth-century works intended to correct writing errors, “bad Arabic” (laḥn) in this period probably did not mean making errors in inflection (iʿrāb), as in the (probably contrived) stories told of early Islamic figures. Rather, it meant making errors such as mixing up Form I and Form IV verbs, or using yāʾ instead of the glottal stop. For examples, see Ibn Qutaybah, Adab al-kātib, passim. For “bad Arabic” as a matter of word choice, see 98.23.

331 Qarāmil: “twisted strips of hair, wool, or silk, used by women to pull back their hair” (Lisān, s.v.

Q-R-M-L ).

332 Ibn al-Jawzī’s claim that the early Muslims held the Revelation to be uncreated is tendentious.

Elsewhere in this volume (72.9–10, 72.13–14) his sources will argue that the subject is off limits precisely because the early Muslims announced no position on the matter.

333 Ibn al-Jawzī sees the Secessionists (Muʿtazilah) as the villains behind the Inquisition, and this is a commonly repeated view, but Ibn Ḥanbal himself casts the Jahmists in that role. See Jadʿān, Miḥnah, 47–109, and Melchert, “Adversaries.” 334 It is unlikely that Ibn Nūḥ, an obscure student of Hadith (see chapter 67), would have been in a position to overhear the caliph say anything. This series of reports was probably invented in the course of the post-Inquisition rapprochement between the Hadith community and the Abbasid regime. The point was to show that, except for two bad eggs—al-Maʾmūn and al-Wāthiq—the caliphs had always held the correct (that is, the Sunni) view of the Qurʾan: that it was not created.

335 Modern scholarship has explained the Inquisition as al-Maʾmūn’s attempt to make the caliphate the source of all guidance in matters of belief and law. This attempt can broadly be characterized as a Shiʿi one. Al-Maʾmūn adopted several other pro-Shiʿa positions, including the nomination of a descendant of ʿAlī as his heir apparent. He did not, however, limit exemplary leadership to ʿAlī’s family. He included his own family, the Abbasids, among the potential imams or guides, and of course believed himself to be the imam in his own time. He seems to have developed these ideas in the course of the civil war between himself and his predecessor, the caliph al- Amīn. Intentionally or not, al-Maʾmūn’s Shiʿi self-positioning brought him into conflict with people like Ibn Ḥanbal, who believed that the Law was to be found in the sunnah rather than in the declarations of individuals. To force the Hadith-men and like-minded jurists to acknowledge his authority, al-Maʾmūn craftily decided to ask them about the createdness of the Qurʾan.

Unlike other points of contention between the two parties, this issue is not mentioned in the Book itself or in the Hadith. The caliph’s plan was thus to force his opponents to engage in the kind of theological argument he was sure he could win. For discussions of the miḥnah and further references, see Patton, Aḥmed ibn Ḥanbal; Sourdel, “Politique religieuse”; Nagel, Rechtleitung, esp. 116–54, 430–46; Lapidus, “Separation”; Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph, esp.

80–96; Jadʿān, Miḥnah, 47–109; Steppat, “From ʿAhd Ardeshir”; Nawas, “The Mihna”; van Ess, Theologie, 3:446–508; Nawas, Al-Maʾmûn, 25–78; Zaman, Religion, 106–18; Cooperson, Classical, 117–38; Hurwitz, Formation, 113–44; Cooperson, Al-Ma’mun, 107–28; Winkelmann- Liebert, “Die miḥna”; Yücesoy, Messianic Beliefs, 128–35; Turner, Inquisition; de Gifis, Shaping, 91–115.

336 Although Yaḥyā served as chief judge under al-Maʾmūn, he argued consistently for proto-Sunni positions. Ḥanbalī biographers therefore tend to treat him as a reliable source.

337 A parallel account by Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s cousin Ḥanbal ibn Isḥāq sheds additional light on Aḥmad’s first encounter with the Inquisition. It begins with a list of the scholars summoned to meet with the caliph in al-Raqqah. (Here Ḥanbal seems to have confused the initial dispatch of scholars to al-Raqqah with the later transport of Ibn Ḥanbal and Ibn Nūḥ to the Byzantine front.

As it stands, his account includes Ibn Ḥanbal among those who made the initial trip and proclaimed the Qurʾan created: see Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 34-36. Van Ess, Theologie, 3:455n23, thinks the editor is wrong to supply Ibn Ḥanbal’s name to complete the text here, though the mistake seems to be Ḥanbal’s, not the editor’s, as the claim is repeated, the second time without emendation. As Ḥanbal’s account continues, in any event, it comes into agreement with our other sources, which say that Ibn Ḥanbal was first questioned in Baghdad.) Ḥanbal’s report quotes his father Isḥāq, who was also Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s uncle, as saying:

At sunset a messenger arrived from the captain of the ward (ṣāḥib al-rabʿ) and took Aḥmad away. I went out with them. The ward captain said: “The chief wants to see you at his place tomorrow.” After we left [the ward captain’s house] I said to Aḥmad: “Why not go into hiding?” “How could I do that?” he replied. “If I did, I’d worry that something might happen to you, or to my children, your children, or the neighbors. I wouldn’t want anyone to suffer on my account. Let’s just see what happens” (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 36).

338 Al-Maʾmūn was in al-Raqqah, having stopped there on his way to the Byzantine front. During his visit to Syria, the caliph may have realized the extent of anti-regime sentiment there, and the extent to which such sentiment correlated with what were to him heretical religious ideas. The trigger may have been his meeting with the Hadith scholar Abū Mushir al-Ghassānī, who at first refused to describe the Qurʾan as created (see 78.19, and van Ess, Theologie, 3:452–53).

339 Ibn Ḥanbal and his circle avoided referring to the Abbasid caliphs by their regnal titles, evidently because they rejected their Shiʿi-millenarian implications. Al-maʾmūn means “the trustworthy” and was a common form of reference to the Prophet.

340 Q Shūrā 42:11.

341 Q Anʿām 6:102; Raʿd 13:16; Zumar 39:62; Ghāfir 40:62. Here al-Maʾmūn puts together parts of different Qurʾanic verses to emphasize that God is fundamentally different from His creations, including the Qurʾan. In this first letter, the full text of which we have from other sources, the caliph also emphasizes his duty to guide the community and protect Islam from the false teachings of the self-proclaimed people of the sunnah (al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:1112–32/8:631–44, and van Ess, Theologie, 3:452–56).

342 That is, Ibn Ḥanbal completed the citation of Q Shūrā 42:11, of which the interrogators recited only the part given above. He thus reminded those present that one cannot simply ignore the passages that seem to describe God as if He has a physical body. He may have believed that God did have a physical body, all of whose attributes, including the voice that had spoken the Qurʾan, were uncreated. Alternatively, he may have been trying to make the point that the problem of attributes could not be resolved by human reason. In any case, Ibn al-Jawzī might not be giving us an entirely reliable account, as he himself was opposed to anthropomorphist interpretations of the Qurʾan (Swartz, “Ḥanbalī Critique”).

343 Called Raḥbat Ṭawq in another telling (see below). Perhaps the same as the place today called al- Raḥbah, which lies on the Euphrates between Baghdad and al-Raqqah.

344 That is, al-Maʾmūn. Some chroniclers state that he contracted a fever after being splashed with cold water, while others say he fell ill after dangling his feet in cold water while eating freshly delivered dates (that is, he presumably caused an imbalance in his humours, according to the Greco-Islamic medical theories of the day). See al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:1134–41/8:646–651.

345 Or al-Mutawakkil, as the storyteller has forgotten to add. The third request—the one not granted— was presumably not to meet al-Muʿtaṣim. The story switches from first to third-person narration in mid-sentence and thus seems to have been garbled in transmission.

346 A town, also known as ʿĀnāh (67.14), on the Tigris in what is now northeastern Iraq, near the Syrian border (Longrigg, “ʿĀna”).

347 An earlier report says that Ibn Ḥanbal got as far as Adana, which is plausible enough given that the news of al-Maʾmūn’s death would not have reached al-Raqqah immediately.

348 A western suburb of Baghdad, located approximately two miles west of the Round City just northeast of the ʿĪsā Canal (Le Strange, Baghdad, index and map 6).

349 ʿUmārah ibn Ḥamzah was a freedman of the Caliph al-Manṣūr. His palace was located on the Trench of Ṭāhir just west of the Upper Harbor on the Tigris (Le Strange, Baghdad, 117 and map 5).

350 There were at least two prisons in use in Baghdad at this time: the Muṭbaq (Le Strange, Baghdad, 27 and map 5) and the Prison of the Syrian Gate (ibid., 130–31 and maps 2, 5, and 6). It is not clear whether the “Commoners’ Prison” was one of these, or another place altogether.

351 I have not been able to identify this street. In any case it seems that the authorities first intended to keep Ibn Ḥanbal confined inside a house, as seems to have been customary with high-profile figures, but then decided to put him in a prison for common criminals.

352 According to Ḥanbal, Ibn Ḥanbal’s fetters were loose enough that he could slip them off, which he did in order to perform his prayers properly (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 38–39).

353 According to the account (ignored by Ibn al-Jawzī) by Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s cousin Ḥanbal, it was Ḥanbal’s father Isḥāq—Aḥmad’s uncle—who persuaded the authorities to put Aḥmad on trial.

The report runs as follows:

With Aḥmad still in prison, my father, Isḥāq ibn Ḥanbal, made the rounds of the commanders and regime figures on his behalf, hoping to get him released. Eventually, seeing that his efforts were leading nowhere, he went directly to Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm. “Commander,” he said, “our families are bound together in a way I’m sure you appreciate. We were neighbors in Marv and my father Ḥanbal was with your grandfather al-Ḥusayn ibn Muṣʿab.” “So I’ve heard.” [My father continued:] I said: “So would the Commander not do something to honor that bond? Your position is one my nephew approves of. He has not denied Revelation; the only disagreement concerns its interpretation. Even so, you have deemed it lawful to keep him confined for a long time. Commander: put him together with some jurists and scholars.” I didn’t say anything to him about Hadith-men and transmitters of reports.

“Would you accept the outcome, whatever it was?” “Yes!” I said. “Let the best argument win.” [My father continued:] “[Later, when I told] Ibn Abī Rabʿī, he said, ‘What have you done?

You want to gather your nephew’s opponents—whatever Debaters and squabblers Ibn Abī Duʾād can find--and let them beat him in a debate? Why didn’t you consult with me first?’” […] Escorted by [Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm’s] chamberlain, I went in to see Aḥmad.

“Your companions have surrendered,” I told him. “You’ve discharged your responsibility before God. Everyone else has given in, and here you are, still locked up!” “Uncle,” he replied, “if those who know remain silent out of fear, and the ignorant remain silent out of ignorance, then when does the truth come out?” Hearing this I stopped trying to change his mind (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 41).

The failure of Isḥāq’s plan, along with his later attempt to talk Ibn Ḥanbal down (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 49), not to mention his alleged complicity in persuading the crowd that Ibn Ḥanbal was unharmed after the flogging (see 69.57), may have made him a persona non grata and his reports distasteful (van Ess, Theologie, 3:461–62).

354 The relevant part of the report reads: “You must know that, when I’m gone, princes will arise.

Anyone who seeks them out, believes their lies, and abets their tyranny is not part of my community nor am I of his.” See al-Turkī, 431n2.

355 Ḥanbal’s account includes a tantalizing detail regarding this episode. The interrogators, he says, came to see Ibn Ḥanbal, carrying with them “a picture of the heavens and the earth, and other things” (ṣūratu al-samawāti wa-l-arḍi wa-ghayru dhālika). Then, Ibn Ḥanbal is quoted as saying, “They asked me something I knew nothing about” (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 42). Al-Maʾmūn is known to have sponsored the drawing of world maps and star charts (Sezgin, GAS, 10:73–149)

so the claim is believable, but one can only speculate about why the interrogators would show those items to Ibn Ḥanbal. Perhaps they hoped to persuade him that the caliph had access to knowledge that could not be derived from the Hadith (Cooperson, Al-Ma’mun, 105).

356 The line of argument implied here runs as follows: If God is not created, none of His attributes, including knowledge, can be created either. Since it is encompassed by God’s knowledge and spoken in His voice, the Qurʾan must also be uncreated.

357 Q Zukhruf 43:3.

358 Q Fīl 105:5. In this verse and the one cited just before, the verb jaʿala, as Ibn Ḥanbal points out, means “to make” in the sense of “cause to have a certain attribute.” It does not mean “to create.” 359 Perhaps the Orchard Gate (or Garden Gate) located on the east side of the Tigris, near the palace of al-Muʿtaṣim (Le Strange, Baghdad, 221, 276, maps 5 and 8). Ibn Ḥanbal seems to have been taken there by boat.

360 That is, on the permissibility of performing one’s ablutions by wiping one’s shoes instead of removing them and washing the feet. This was a distinctively Sunni position. The story itself is obviously contrived. For one thing, protocol did not permit speaking without first being addressed by the caliph.

361 A longer version of this report appears in 69.30. Both reports overlook the twenty-eight months Ibn Ḥanbal spent in prison (69.28) and thus give an incorrect date for his trial, which took place in Ramadan 220/September 835 (van Ess, Theologie, 3:460).

362 According to Ḥanbal’s account, the caliph was surprised that Ibn Ḥanbal was middle-aged: “You told me he was a young man!” (a-laysa zaʿamtum li-annahu ḥadathun). See Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 43.

363 Ibn Ḥanbal (or more likely one of his biographers) is using a report transmitted by Ibn ʿAbbās, the ancestor of the Abbasid caliphs, to argue by implication that the authorities have no business questioning Muslims who profess faith by the definition given here.

364 Q Anʿām 6:120; Raʿd 13:16; Zumar 39:62; Ghāfir 40:62.

365 Q Aḥqāf 46:24–25.

366 The point is that the expression “everything” is not always categorical.

367 Q Anbiyāʾ 21:2.

368 Q Ṣād 38:1. This verse, like several others, begins with the name of an Arabic letter or letters, in this case ṣād.

369 That is, you should seek nearness to God by reciting the Qurʾan. The disputant understands this to imply that God and His word are two distinct entities.

370 I thank Tahera Qutbuddin for suggesting this interpretation of a puzzling passage. After the first hundred thousand I expected miʾatay alf, “two hundred thousand,” which is written almost indistinguishably from miʾat alf, but the manuscripts agree on the latter.

371 Ḥanbal’s account sets this remark in a different light. In his telling, Ibn Abī Duʾād says to Ibn Ḥanbal: “I hear you like to be a leader” (balaghanī annaka tuḥibbu r-riʾāsah; Dhikr, 51), and then the caliph makes his offer to parade Ibn Ḥanbal around as a hero. This question of Ibn Ḥanbal’s popular following is a tantalizing one. Steppat (“From Ahd Ardašīr”) notes that a Persian work on statecraft known to al-Maʾmūn urges rulers to crush any manifestations of religious leadership among the people, and may have inspired the Inquisition. Ḥanbal claims that during the Ibn Ḥanbal’s flogging “people had gathered in the square, the lanes, and elsewhere; the markets had closed and crowds had gathered” (Dhikr, 60). Later Ḥanbalī accounts make much of the crowd, though these accounts are not very persuasive (Winkelmann-Liebert, “Die miḥna,” 246). On the other hand, sources hostile to Ibn Ḥanbal and his followers speak fearfully of their supposed power to command the rabble (Qāḍī, “Earliest Nābita” and Cooperson, “Al- Jāḥiẓ”).

372 This passage is puzzling, as the fast should already have ended after the sunset prayer mentioned just above.

373 That is, the scholars summoned to al-Raqqah at the beginning of the Inquisition (in 212/827–28) to be questioned regarding the Qurʾan (see chapter 76). All of them reportedly agreed to say that it was created.

374 This list is an interpolation by a transmitter or by the author. Only three of these names agree with those listed by al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 1116–67/8:634; cf. Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 34–36. The descendants of the men involved doubtless tried to get their names off such an infamous list (van Ess, Theologie 3:455n23).

375 Q Nisāʾ 4:11.

376 The point is that one needs Hadith in order to understand the Qurʾan properly. This was Ibn Ḥanbal’s reply to those who sought to dismiss Hadith as a source of knowledge.

377 The day began at sunset, so for Ibn Ḥanbal the third night would be followed by the third day.

378 Literally, “my voice became louder than theirs.” The text may indeed mean this, though it seems implausible for him to be depicted as shouting at his opponents.

379 At roughly this point in the parallel account by Ḥanbal, there is mention of an argument that the editor has omitted on the grounds that it contradicts what is known of Ibn Ḥanbal’s opinions (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 55, note 1). As the passage is of some interest, I reproduce it here from the Dār al-kutub manuscript (Taʾrīkh Taymūr no. 2000, microfilm no. 11159, folio no. 16). After wakān min amrihi mā kan, which appears in the printed edition (p. 55), the account continues:

… wa-sami‘tu Abā ‘Abda l-Lāhi yaqūlu wa-ḥtajjū ʿalayya yawmaʾidin qāla tajīʾu l-baqaratu yawma l-qiyāmati wa-tajī’u tabāraka fa-qultu lahum innamā hādhā th-thawābu qāla l- Lāhu wa-jā’a rabbuka wa l-malāku ṣaffan ṣaffan innamā ta’tī qudratuhu innamā l-Qur’ānu amthālun wa-mawāʿiẓu wa-amrun wa-kadhā [sc. wa-hādhā?] fa-kadhā [print edition resumes] wa-qultu l-ʿAbdi r-Raḥmāni … I heard Abu ‘Abd Allāh [Ibn Ḥanbal] say: “They argued against me that day by saying:

‘[Don’t you say that the chapter called] the Cow and the [chapter called] Tabārak will come on the Day of Resurrection?’ “I told them: ‘This [sc. the thing that will come] is only the reward [for reading the Qurʾan].

God [also] says: “Your Lord will come, with the angels arrayed in rows” [Q Fajr 89:22].

[By this is meant] only [that] His power comes. The Qurʾan is only similitudes, exhortations, and commandment; and this [expression] is like that.’” Here ʿAbd al-Raḥmān is accusing Ibn Ḥanbal of holding the anthropomorphist view that the chapters of the Qurʾan would come to life on the Day of Resurrection. The chapters in question (Baqarah and Tabārak or Mulk) seem to have figured as part of the accusation because they mention creatures (cows and birds respectively) that were supposed to take on physical reality.

The argument was that if God had literal, physical eyes and ears, as the Qurʾan seems to say, then the cows and birds (for example) must have a real existence too. In this passage Ibn Ḥanbal rejects the reductio ad absurdem but as a consequence is forced to say that the Qurʾan need not always be taken literally. This is the view that Naghsh, the editor, finds contradictory with Ibn Ḥanbal’s known opinions. (I thank Josef van Ess for helping me understand this passage; any errors are of course mine.)

380 The copyists of D and SH appear not to have understood this passage, but H has a fairly clear nābayi l-khashabatayn, meaning literally “the two tusks” or “eye-teeth” of the posts. Al-Turkī reads nātiʾ, “the part sticking out,” which is plausible in itself but requires emending H.

Although I have not found either term attested as the name for part of a whipping apparatus, the instructions seem clear enough. The person being flogged was suspended from ropes or straps (the latter suggested by Winkelmann-Liebert, “Die miḥnah,” 255) tied around the wrists and attached to the posts by a horizontal peg or bar. Ibn Ḥanbal is being told to hold on to this horizontal element, or the ropes, and pull himself up to ease the tension on his wrists.

381 Cooperson (“Two Abbasid Trials”) argues that al-Muʿtaṣim may here be calling for the unbarbed whips mentioned in the hostile account by al-Jāḥiẓ (Rasāʾil, 3:295–96), in order to minimize Ibn Ḥanbal’s injuries. Winkelmann-Liebert, by contrast, thinks the references to al-Muʿtaṣim’s soft-heartedness are much exaggerated (“Die miḥnah,” 253ff.).

382 Lictors were ancient Roman officials who did many jobs besides flogging, but English does not have another common word for flogger, and “lictor” has the sanction of having been used by Patton in his 1897 rendering of this episode (Aḥmed, 108).

383 On the face of it, this curse suggests that the caliph was angry that the lictors were not striking more forcefully. Winkelmann-Liebert, however, suggests that the caliph was upset about having to flog Ibn Ḥanbal—or at least that the Ḥanbalī biographers wanted to depict him that way (“Die miḥnah,” 255).

384 This account places the trial in a courtyard. Extant examples of Abbasid-era buildings indicate that they consisted of rooms, or complexes of rooms, arranged around a central courtyard (see, for example, Northedge, Historical Topography). Literary sources indicate that the yard was used for formal events and the rooms for intimate gatherings. Al-Muʿtaṣim would have been sitting under a shade; when he got up to address Ibn Ḥanbal, he would have been exposing himself to the sun.

385 Or “I didn’t know what I was doing.” Ḥanbal’s account says: “I passed out and came to more than once [rubbamā lam aʿqil wa-rubbamā ʿaqaltu]. When they hit me again I would pass out and not know [anything], and they would stop hitting me” (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 57). Van Ess has argued that this way of putting things is intended to cover up some act of capitulation on Ibn Ḥanbal’s part, without which he would never have been released (Theologie, 3:465). Three sources (al- Jāḥiẓ, Rasāʾil, 3:295–96; al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, 2:576–77; Ibn al-Murṭaḍā, Tabaqāt, 122–25)

agree that he capitulated. One (al-Jāḥiẓ) even refers to the event as if to a matter of common knowledge (see further Hinds, “Miḥna” and Winkelmann-Liebert, “Die miḥnah,” 267).

References to taqiyyah, or dissimulation justified by circumstance (e.g., 69.28, and Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 37–38), indeed suggest that the principle was invoked by Ibn Ḥanbal’s partisans to justify a lapse on his part during the trial. And the proliferation of fantastic reports exonerating him (Abū l-ʿArab, Miḥan, 438–44; Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyah, 9:204–5; Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, Ṭabaqāt, 1:437– 43 [the entry on Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Sijzī of the first ṭabaqah]; al-Maqdisī, Miḥnah, 109) implies there was indeed a scandal that needed to be narrated away (Cooperson, Classical, 129–38). However one chooses to evaluate the evidence, three points are worth bearing in mind.

First, the circumstances of the trial—its being held inside the palace, the use of torture, and the lack of sympathetic witnesses—made the facts of the matter almost immediately irretrievable (a point some of the participants seem to have realized; see 69.56). Second, Ibn Ḥanbal made his opposition to rationalist theology and imamic pretentions clear enough on numerous occasions, such that there need be little doubt of his actual views, regardless of what happened at the trial.

Finally, Sunni tradition is unanimous in its conviction that he did not capitulate, so that, even if he did, his having done so has effectively been abolished from history.

386 Ḥanbal gives a more detailed report of Ibn Ḥanbal’s departure:

At sunset, Aḥmad was led out of the house on a mount belonging to Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm and rode to his own house surrounded by the caliph’s officials and his own people. When he reached the gate, I heard ʿAyyāsh, the Master of the Bridge, say, when he saw Aḥmad approaching—I heard ʿAyyāsh say to Isḥāq’s man, with everyone standing there—“Tāzīh tāzīh,” which means “Arab! Arab!” (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 60).

The Persian word tāzīh means “Arab,” and apparently in this case “Arab’s son reared in Persia” (Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary, s.v. tāzīk); I thank John Patrick Flanagan for this reference. Beyond that, though, ʿAyyāsh seems to have meant something else: namely, that he was a rigid, legalistic scholar. This interpretation was suggested to me by Patricia Crone, who notes that Bābak referred to Muslims as yahūd for the same reason: both (he thought) believed in a distant God who issued “an endless stream of restrictive rules” (Crone, Nativist Prophets, 273).

387 Since Ibn Ḥanbal had been fasting all day, he could have eaten, though he is depicted as refusing to consume anything provided for him by the caliph. The second point regards taqiyyah, or “prudential dissimulation,” according to which a Muslim may conceal his beliefs to protect himself from harm. Ibn Ḥanbal is depicted as rejecting this option.

388 Al-hanbāzān: perhaps from Persian hambāz, “companion” or “partner,” here Arabized to mean the two parallel supports of the scaffold.

389 Q Nisāʾ 4:30.

390 This is the first of many reports invented to make Ibn Ḥanbal’s ordeal into a test of the rightness of the Sunni creed.

391 Bilāl ibn Abī Rabāḥ, a slave who was one of the first to accept Islam, is described as suffering tortures at the hands of his masters but nevertheless refusing to recant.

392 Q Tawbah 9:51.

393 The sharply critical biographer Shams al-Din al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) denounces this report as “wrong” and condemns Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī (but not Ibn al-Jawzī) for repeating “abominable fantastications” (khurāfāt samijah) about Ibn Ḥanbal’s ordeal (al-Dhahabī, Siyar, 11:255). See al-Turkī, 488n3, and Cooperson, “Probability.” 394 The most natural reading makes Ibn Ḥanbal the one who would have died. The day was still momentous for the caliph because killing Ibn Ḥanbal would entail being punished in the afterlife. The Arabic sentence can also mean that the caliph is the one who would have died—a possibility worth considering only because of the fantastic nature of these accounts. See also 69.58.

395 As used here, the verb baṭṭala (so voweled in H and D) seems to mean that Ibn Ḥanbal has given the lie to the bandits’ claims to toughness. On this trope, see Cooperson, Classical, 138–41.

396 This sentence displays unusual pronoun agreement: the –hu suffix on ḍarabtu refers to the masculine singular sawṭ, but the verb haddat is feminine singular as if referring to the set of eighty blows.

397 This is the philologist Nifṭawayh (d. 323/935); his History is lost (Bencheikh, “Nifṭawayh”).

398 This (probably invented) story is set in the period after the Inquisition.

399 Apparently meaning: join him in protesting to the caliph over what was being done to Ibn Ḥanbal.

400 Bishr’s extreme asceticism and refusal to teach Hadith distinguished him from Ibn Ḥanbal. Stories like this were invented to help negotiate the conflict between the two visions of piety (Cooperson, Classical, 178–84).

401 Ibn al-Jawzī may have in mind reports claiming that Ibn Ḥanbal did capitulate (see 69.26).

Conversely, he may be thinking of certain pro-Ḥanbalī fictions even less likely than the ones cited here (Cooperson, Classical, 129–38).

402 It is not clear which of the above-named transmitters is speaking here.

403 Catacombers: warriors based in, or near, the maṭāmīr, that is, the underground complexes of Cappadocia, on the Byzantine frontier (Honignmann, Ostgrenze, 46; cf. Eger, Islamic-Byzantine Frontier, 252).

404 A parallel text (al-Dhahabī, Siyar, 11:259; added in brackets by al-Turkī, 459) has here “Some will say he did give in,” which is a plausible addition but not present in our manuscripts.

405 This speech provides a convenient explanation for Ibn Ḥanbal’s release—so convenient, in fact, that it is likely to have been fabricated by one of his partisans.

406 “He” most likely refers to the Caliph al-Muʿtaṣim, though it might also refer to Isḥāq, Ibn Ḥanbal’s uncle, who apparently went along with the trick.

407 The rough cloak would shrink painfully after being drenched.

408 “Rejoice!” may mean “Rejoice in the prospect of entering Paradise,” to which the pious caliph replies that the innocent man would testify against him on the Day of Judgment.

409 A marginal note in D, partially cut off on the left, reads: “These [men] were not beaten under the same circumstances as Aḥmad. Had Aḥmad not stood firm, people would have strayed from right belief. The trials [of these men] are therefore not to be compared to his.” A second marginal comment adds that Ibn Ḥanbal’s trial can be compared only to that of ʿUmar, the second caliph. Ibn Ḥanbal’s achievement is still greater, though, because he, unlike ʿUmar, had no one fighting with him.

410 This seems to be a (rather harsh) reference to al-Muʿtaṣim.

411 Q Shūrā 42:40.

412 Q Shūrā 42:40.

413 Ḥanbal tells us that his name was Abū Ṣubḥ (Dhikr, 61).

414 A reference to the Prophet’s concealing himself in a cave during his flight from Mecca to Medina.

415 Abū Zurʿah seems to be asking “Why did al-Muʿtaṣim flog you instead of beheading you, and why didn’t al-Wāthiq hurt you at all?” Ibn Ḥanbal appears to give him the answer to a different question, namely: “How did you survive the flogging?” 416 This apocryphal story, in its two variants, has a character very much like Ibn Ḥanbal make all of the arguments that Ibn Ḥanbal himself was unable or unwilling to make at his trial. See further van Ess, Theologie, 3:502–4. For much more elaborate fiction, in which al-Maʾmūn himself is bested, see van Ess, Theologie, 3:504–8, and Omari, “Kitāb al-Ḥayda.” 417 Q Nisāʾ 4:86.

418 This putative recording of an insignificant variant seems to be an attempt on the part of the storyteller to give the impression that he is upholding the strictest standards of accurate transmission.

419 All the manuscripts have yaṣbaʾ, “to go from one religion to another.” Al-Turkī, drawing on a parallel text, emends to yaṣbū, “to suffer from youthful ignorance.” This is a plausible reading but has no support in the manuscripts.

420 Addressing a stranger by his name instead of his kunyah (Ibn Abī Duʾād) was rude and dismissive.

421 Q Māʾidah 5:3.

422 What Ibn al-Jawzī does not tell us is that Ibn Ḥanbal was reportedly asked to join a rebellion against al-Wāthiq. During al-Wāthiq’s reign, teachers were ordered to tell their pupils that the Qurʾan was created, and scholars who did not accept the caliph’s teaching were separated from their wives. A number of Baghdad jurisprudents came to Ibn Ḥanbal saying that they no longer acknowledged al-Wāthiq as caliph. Ibn Ḥanbal reportedly urged them not to make a bad situation worse by rejecting their obligation to obey the authorities. It was at this juncture that al-Wāthiq ordered him to make himself scarce (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 69–73).

423 On the end of the Inquisition, see Melchert, “Religious Policies.” The “reports on seeing God” were among those interpreted literally by the Sunnis and figuratively by their rivals; see further Omari, “Beatific Vision.” 424 Meter: kāmil.

425 Q Aʿrāf 7:54.

426 The partisans of ʿAlī—that is, the Shiʿa—believed that the only legitimate religious exemplar, and by extension the ideal leader of the community, was a descendant of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib. During the civil war between al-Amīn and al-Maʾmūn, Shiʿi claimants had rebelled in Kufa, Yemen, and the Hijaz.

427 Here Ibn Ḥanbal seems to be saying that he has not disappeared from public life in order to signal disapproval of the regime, but rather because al-Muʿtaṣim and al-Wāthiq had forbidden him to appear in public.

428 Jadʿān, who thinks of Ibn Ḥanbal as willing to countenance rebellion against the Abbasid regime, suggests that the accusation may have been true (Jadʿān, Miḥnah, 285–90).

429 This is presumably an error for Abū ʿAlī Yaḥyā (al-Turkī, 488n5).

430 The word ijjānah usually means a large shallow drinking bowl, but since it is used here to cover a sizable bag of coins I have chosen the secondary meaning of washtub. It may have been green because it was made of oxidized copper. I thank Paul Cobb, Nancy Khalek, and Noura Elkoussy for their thoughts on this point.

431 Apparently Ibn Ḥanbal did not want to use the light without paying for it, a problem he addresses elsewhere; see Cooperson, Classical, 176.

432 The Arabic says only “after he passed Yaḥyā ibn Harthamah,” leaving it unclear who passed Yaḥyā (a military commander), and what it meant to pass him. The translation is my best guess.

433 Ibn Abī Duʾād, who by this time had fallen out of favor, had pushed for broad adoption of the dogma of the created Qurʾan. Al-Mutawakkil seems to be asking Ibn Ḥanbal to preach in favor of the opposite view and thus make up for the Abbasid adoption of a now-heretical creed.

434 I take this to be the horse’s name. The dictionaries define the word as “the horse that places second in a race,” here perhaps meaning a horse of good but not superior quality. It may be that Yaḥyā is making a joke: muṣallī also happens to mean “engaged in prayer,” which may have struck him as an appropriate name for an animal ridden by Ibn Ḥanbal.

435 Q Ṭā Hā 20:55.

436 Ḥanbal gives a more detailed account of this meeting. Upon seeing Ibn Ḥanbal, the caliph’s mother says to her son: “I beg you: fear God in your dealings with that man. There’s nothing you can offer him to tempt him, and it’s no good trying to keep him here away from his home. So let him go: don’t try and hold him!” Ibn Ḥanbal then enters the presence of the heir apparent, al- Muʿtazz, but fails to address him as “emir.” Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm was reportedly minded to strike Ibn Ḥanbal with his sword, but the prince’s tutor, Ibn Ḥanbal’s former interrogator ʿAbd al- Raḥmān al-Ḍabbī, merely tells the boy, “This is the tutor your father has sent you.” Ibn Ḥanbal then reports: “The boy replied that he would learn whatever I taught him. I was impressed with his clever answer given how little he was” (Ḥanbal, Dhikr, 90).

437 Khayshah: a strip of wet cloth suspended from the ceiling and moved back and forth by a servant to cool a room. The only English word for this seems to be punkah, which comes from Hindi.

438 Yaʿqūb’s request seems to have been a trick intended to find out whether Ibn Ḥanbal indeed refused to teach anyone or just the caliph’s sons.

439 Q Māʾidah 5:1.

440 Q Baqarah 2:156–7: «Those who say, when afflicted with a calamity, “We belong to God and to Him we shall return,” are the ones who will have blessings and mercy from their Lord.» 441 Apparently the stipend granted by al-Mutawakkil.

442 Literally “some knots have slipped off me.” Ibn Ḥanbal may be alluding to a report in which ʿUmar used the word “knots” to mean “appointments to positions of power.” See Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. ʿ-Q-D.

443 I am not entirely satisfied that I understand what huwa muṣaddaq means here, but al-Turkī’s voweling imposes this reading. Other possibilities, e.g., muṣaddiq and muṣṣaddiq, mean payer or collector of the alms-tax, but neither fits the sense or the syntax of the passage.

444 Following the parallel text in Ṣāliḥ, Sīrat al-imām, al-Turkī has “the children of Sāliḥ and ʿAbd Allāh, the two sons of Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥanbal.” 445 This description is not entirely clear to me, but it seems to refer to the sunken-eyed look that accompanies starvation.

446 That is, to exhort and admonish him. On this tradition, see Cook, Commanding Right.

447 Ibn Ḥanbal apparently means that he would remind the caliph of his duty to care for the descendants of the first Muslims.

448 The elaborate courtly style of the first paragraph, the omission of important details, and the direct reference to Ibn Ḥanbal’s view of Disputation all suggest that this letter is a forgery intended to make his doctrine palatable to outsiders.

449 Q Tawbah 9:6.

450 Q Aʿrāf 7:54.

451 A reference to Q Furqān 25:63: «The true servants of the Gracious One are those who walk upon the earth with humility and when they are addressed by the ignorant ones, their response is, “Peace”» (or “Goodbye,” salāman).

452 A less elaborate telling of this story is dismissed as a fabrication by al-Dhahabī, Siyar, 11:321; see Cooperson, “Probability,” 71. The point of the fiction may be to rehabilitate Ibn Rāhawayh, of whom Ibn Ḥanbal disapproved.

453 That is, the property he coveted would appear to testify against him.

454 All the manuscripts read ilā mā d.w.r.nā, which makes no evident sense. Al-Turkī instead gives balaghahu, “and it reached him” (that is, the news reached Ibn Ḥanbal), from a parallel account.

455 Ibn Ḥanbal’s two youngest children.

456 Leading the Muslims into battle, defending the frontier, and dividing up the spoils were among the duties of the imam or head of the community. Since al-Mutawakkil, in Ibn Ḥanbal’s view, was not carrying out these tasks, the money he collected through taxation was misappropriated.

Consequently, any gift of money from the treasury was unacceptable to the scrupulous.

457 Ibn ʿUlayyah reportedly died before the Inquisition; see al-Turkī, 519n1.

458 Q Baqarah 2:156, recited when affliction strikes.

459 The passage in context runs as follows: “God will not guide those who will not believe in the signs of God, and theirs will be a painful punishment. Only those fabricate lies concerning God who do not believe in the signs of God, and these are the liars. As for one who denies God after he has believed—not one who is forced to do it while his heart rests securely in faith, but one who opens his heart to a denial of truth—such as these will have a terrible punishment” (Q Naḥl 16:104–06).

460 In the report, the pagans force ʿAmmār ibn Yāsir to curse the Prophet and praise their deities. He later confesses his misdeed to the Prophet, who tells him that as long as he remained a believer in his heart then no harm was done. The Hadith does not appear in the collections in the form cited here; see al-Turkī, 524n2.

461 Part of a report in which believers are told to act on the parts of the Qurʾan they do understand and to leave the rest for God to clarify. See al-Turkī, 326n1.

462 ʿAlī seems to be trying to protect his shoes and clothing from getting dirty, a matter of concern if one were attending the state-sponsored prayer but presumably not an issue for Ibn Ḥanbal and his ascetic circle.

463 Q Ikhlāṣ 112:1–2. Ṣamad may once have meant “with no hollow” (Gardet, “Allāh”) or “impenetrable,” “dense to the absolute degree” (Böwering, “God”). English translations of the verse vary significantly, rendering ṣamad as, e.g., “the Self-sufficient One” (Wahiduddin Khan), “the Everlasting Refuge” (Arberry), “the eternally besought of all” (Pickthall), “immanently indispensable” (Ahmed Ali), “the Eternal, Absolute” (Yusuf Ali) (all translations at tanzil.net).

Chapter 112 as a whole denies trinitarianism, so ṣamad may (also) carry the sense that God does not consist of distinct persons. In view of the divergent possibilities I have not ventured a translation.

464 Q Dhāriyāt 51:22.

465 Q Dhāriyāt 51:22.

466 It is unclear precisely who is meant.

467 Forty raṭls times four hundred grams, the approximate value of a Baghdad raṭl (Ashtor, “Mawāzīn”).

468 Q Shuʿarāʾ 26:2.

469 An allusion to Q Ikhlāṣ 112:31; Dukhān 44:53.

470 Laylat al-arbiʿāʾ: in the Islamic calendar, the day begins at sunset, so “Wednesday night” in Arabic is Tuesday night in English. But the date seems wrong anyway, as the first of Rabīʿ I 241 [July 20, 855] was a Saturday.

471 It seems to have been ʿAlī ibn al-Jaʿd’s son who came: ʿAlī himself was already dead by this time, and a parallel text has ibn. See al-Turkī, 541n2.

472 The manuscripts insist on uʿṭiyat, which provides the basis for my translation, though I am not certain it is right.

473 According to the common understanding of Q Anfāl 8:59, one who swears an oath and does not fulfill it may make expiation by (among other things) feeding ten destitute persons. See further Lange, “Expiation.” Presumably Ṣāliḥ gave the dates away to the poor. Neither Ibn Ḥanbal nor his biographers tell us what vow it was he broke.

474 Al-Faḍl ibn al-Rabīʿ had been vizier to al-Rashīd and al-Amīn. He survived the civil war during which al-Maʾmūn overthrew al-Amīn, but was thereafter disgraced. His son’s visit to Ibn Ḥanbal in prison shows that the old Abbasid order disapproved of the Inquisition. Like many of al-Maʾmūn’s other initiatives, it undermined the legitimacy of the dynasty by suggesting that only some of its members—specifically, those that behaved like Shiʿi imams—could serve as rulers.

475 Al-rukhaṣ are cases of replacing a commandment “with a less onerous alternative in cases of need or duress” (Katz, “ʿAzīmah and Rukhṣah”). Presumably Ibn Ḥanbal was worried about having failed to complete all his religious duties during his illness and wanted reassurance that he had a good excuse.

476 For an analysis of this story, see Cooperson, “Probability,” 78–81.

477 Unfortunately, this date, which corresponds to July 31, 855, was a Wednesday.

478 Muslim funeral practice requires that a man’s body be wrapped in three pieces of cloth, each of which covers it entirely.

479 The Amānūs or Nur Daǧları mountain range in what is today Turkey, just across the northwest border with Syria. God has given the visitors the power to travel instantly from there in time for the funeral.

480 For a caustic denunciation of this unlikely story, see al-Dhahabī, Siyar, 11:343, and Cooperson, “Probability,” 74–75.

481 The passage in H and SH is garbled. Al-Turkī supplies al-ḥuzn, “sorrow,” giving the more likely meaning that all virtuous households were in mourning. Here I have rendered what is in the manuscripts, garbled though it may be.

482 Or: “We keep them here so people can copy them.” The point, in any case, seems to be that he knows these reports to have been properly transmitted. If they leave his hands, he cannot guarantee their authenticity should others someday wish to copy them.

483 This chapter contains ten poems, some of them very long. Hadith-scholars and their friends are not usually admired for their poetic talents, and these verses are not particularly distinguished. But I have included two examples to give the curious reader a sense of the original chapter.

484 “Aḥmad” means “most praiseworthy.” 485 Meter: sarīʿ.

486 Meter: kāmil.

487 Biographies of exceptional Muslims often describe their posthumous appearances in the dreams of others. The more different people claimed to have had the same dream, the likelier it seemed that it contained a true communication from the deceased. For this reason, this chapter contains many nearly identical accounts of the same dream as reported by different speakers. I have removed as many of these near-duplicates as possible.

488 The original sentence seems patched together here, probably because a transmitter omitted the curse that appears in the version immediately following.

489 Q Zumar 39:74. This is what the blessed say after being admitted to the Garden.

490 The first person singular here and in the corresponding place in the parallel reports could be Ibn Ḥanbal and the one answering could be Sufyān. In 92.12, though, the questioner asks about Miskīnah, who says “If only you knew!” This means that the questioner must still be alive and dreaming rather than dead and in the Garden.

491 The storyteller has God refer to Himself in the third person, as in the Qurʾan. The transmitters of this report evidently thought that hating ʿAlī was a grave fault in a Sunni. The transmitters of the variant immediately preceding either thought otherwise or simply did not wish to repeat God’s supposed cursing of Jarīr.

492 Q Zumar 39:74.

493 Q Anʿām 6:89.

494 Q Anʿām 6:89–90.

495 Q Anʿām 6:89.

496 From Q Baqarah 2:137: «If they believe as you have believed, then are they rightly guided; but if they turn back, then know that they are entrenched in hostility. God will surely suffice to defend you against them, for He is All Hearing, All Knowing.» 497 The text seems garbled here and the variant does not help. The likeliest way for the story to go is:

“I noticed that many of them were carrying spears. The Prophet looked out, as if intending to dispatch an expedition, and saw a spear taller than any of the others.” 498 Or: those whom Ibn Ḥanbal loves.

499 Evidently Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn.

500 “Pelting” is explained as being struck by stones flung from the skies, and “disfigurement” as being changed into an uglier form, such as that of an animal. The report is described as referring to the punishments that will befall Muslims who commit certain transgressions.

501 Apparently Isḥāq ibn Rāhawayh.

502 That is, he was a Ḥanafī or a Shiʿi.

503 The niche is the feature in a mosque that indicates the direction to Mecca. Ibn Ḥanbal seems to be saying, “Keep praying until you die.” 504 A sāq is normally a leg or stalk. Here it is being used as a measure of length but I have not been able to pin down the meaning any more precisely.

505 In this chapter, as in the one preceding, I have omitted nearly identical retellings of the same dream.

506 For the story, see the second report following.

507 Q Baqarah 2:156.

508 The original story may have specified the caliph or governor involved, but later Sunni transmitters seem to have suppressed the name to protect his reputation.

509 The verb used means literally “to grasp someone’s forearm.” The gesture was used (among other things) to show allegiance to a newly appointed caliph.

510 That is, al-Khaḍir appeared to him in a dream.

511 A name for Baghdad, reportedly given because its first mosque was imperfectly aligned toward Mecca.

512 An expression of great esteem, based in the pre-Islamic practice of capturing members of rival tribes and releasing them in exchange for something valuable.

513 A reference to Q Nisāʾ 4:164, where God speaks directly to Moses.

514 A reference to Q Muṭaffifīn 83:18–21: «But, the record of the righteous is [preserved] in the ʿIlliyyīn. And what will make you understand what the ʿIlliyyīn is? A written record, which those angels closest to God will bear witness to.» Some exegetes also explain the word as referring to a high place in the Garden.

515 This seems to be an error for Aḥmad, as Ibn al-Jawzī points out.

516 That is, adopt his positions on law and the like.

517 A respected transmitter of reports from his father, ʿUmar, the second caliph.

518 This report offers a puzzling chronology. Aḥmad ibn Naṣr al-Khuzāʿī, who is sitting with the Prophet, was executed during the reign of al-Wāthiq—that is, long after al-Qawārīrī’s forced capitulation to the Inquisition.

519 A quarter called Dār al-Quṭn (with the article) existed between the ʿĪsā Canal in al-Karkh (Le Strange, Baghdad, 84, and map 4, no. 32).

520 The word ṭūbā appears in Q Raʿd 13:29. Some exegetes explain it as the name of a tree in Paradise while others say that it means simply “bliss.” See Waines, “Tree(s)” and Kinberg, “Paradise.” 521 Q Kahf 18:63ff, where an unnamed servant of God teaches Moses about patience.

522 A reference to two nearly identical verses of the Qurʾan: «Before you also the messengers We sent were but [mortal] men to whom We vouchsafed revelation. Ask the People of the dhikr, if you do not know» (Q Naḥl 16:43 and Anbiyāʾ 21:7). The term ahl al-dhikr in this verse has been explained as “the recipients of previous scriptures.” More generally it can also mean people mindful of God.

523 So says the one manuscript that contains the story, though “he was wearing fine clothes” seems a likelier thing to say here.

524 Ar. mukhannath, originally a man, usually a musician, who dressed and acted like a woman for entertainment. In Ibn Ḥanbal’s time, mukhannathūn associated with the court were famous for “savage mockery, extravagant burlesque, and low sexual humor” (Rowson, “Effeminates,” quotation at 693). The word can also mean “hermaphrodite,” but being a hermaphrodite was not a sin or a crime, so the speaker in this story would not need to be forgiven (at least, not for that).

525 Q Hūd 11:105.

526 In Arab folklore, every human being has a jinni counterpart of the opposite sex.

527 Based on the account in Lane, s.v. T-N-R, it seems we must imagine an oven open at the top which had to be turned over to create a closed space. It must also have had a door on the side for inserting the clover, which apparently served as a fireproof sort of bedding.

528 The historical Harthamah took part in the siege of Baghdad, which ended in the death of the Caliph al-Amīn. But he was himself executed shortly thereafter, during the reign of al-Maʾmūn: that is, several decades before al-Mutawakkil became caliph. Ḥanbalī storytellers seem to have had a confused idea of Abbasid prosopography.

529 Meter: kāmil.

530 This seems to mean that he did not send his son to school or hire a tutor for him but instead preferred to instruct him himself.

531 Unassimilated, this word would be iʾtakhadhtum, which as far as I know is not actually used.

532 For more on Ibn Ḥanbal’s views on recitation, see Melchert, “Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and the Qurʾān,” 25–26.

533 The speaker, al-Shāfiʿī, will defend Mālik ibn Anas, and the challenger will defend Abū Ḥanīfah.

534 The book written in Baghdad is apparently (the first draft of) the Risālah (Epistle, trans. Lowry)

and the one written in Egypt is the Umm.

535 That is, one to clean the face and another to clean the arms as far as the elbows.

536 The Prophet is described as “striking his palms on the ground, blowing on them, and wiping his face and hands” (see references in al-Turkī, 666n1).

537 That is, if having met the Companions necessarily confers precedence, Saʿīd and others should outrank Abū Ḥanīfah.

538 That is, if certain Successors thought more highly of Mālik than they did of the Prophet’s Companions then the premise that one gains precedence simply by having met the Companions cannot be valid.

539 That is, people preferred the word of transmitters more distantly related to the Prophet than Ibn ʿAbbās.

540 Q Nisāʾ 4:3.

541 That is, the person to whom I owe everything in my books is Ibn Ḥanbal. Al-Turkī, 668n5, inserts this phrase for clarity, but it is not there in the manuscripts. The original audience doubtless knew what was meant.

542 In this abridgement I have cut down the number of biographies even further, retaining only those of particular historical or literary importance.

543 To take something from someone min taḥt yadihi (“from under his hand”) elsewhere means to take what one is owed from another party without his knowledge or permission. As that is hardly likely here, I am guessing that a more literal meaning is intended. Possibly, too, the phrase is man taḥt yadihi, “those dependent on him,” but then an additional word would be needed to complete the sentence.

544 I thank Christopher Melchert for suggesting an explanation for this passage.

545 I thank Peter Pormann for explaining the term qiyām al-dam.

546 The “City of Salvation” is Baghdad, so named (in my view) because its Abbasid founders and rulers considered themselves imams, meaning that allegiance to them implied salvation.

Commonly, however, the title is translated as “City of Peace.” 547 A question motivated by waraʿ (scrupulosity): if, for example, the man had taken the water from someone else without permission, it would be wrong to drink it.

548 Muballighūn: people who repeat the words of the prayer leader or lecturer when the crowd is too large for everyone to hear him.

549 This is the oath of assent that formalized the accession of a new caliph. Normally a crowd of dignitaries would be involved.

550 In 469/1077, the Shāfiʿī jurist Abū l-Naṣr ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (d. 514/1120), son of the mystic and theologian ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī, came to Baghdad to teach the speculative theology of al- Ashʿarī. Although the Ashʿarite system was intended to defend the texts and conclusions favored by the Ḥanbalīs, the latter were having none of it, and rioted. Eventually Abū l-Naṣr was sent back to Isfahan. See Halm, “al-Qushayrī.” 551 The ninth of Dhu l-Hijjah 503 [June 29, 1110].

552 Kaʿb ibn Mālik was one of three Helpers reportedly condemned and later forgiven for staying behind during the Prophet’s raid on Tabūk.

553 “… God will make me one of them.” The rest of the sentence does not appear in the manuscripts, perhaps because al-Dīnawarī was too modest to say it, but it does appear in a parallel text from Shadharāt al-dhahab, whence it is supplied by al-Turkī (see 705n1).

554 Meter: ṭawīl.

555 Meter: ṭawīl.

556 Such collections contained reports that not only had short chains of transmitters but also one transmitter, or some other distinctive feature, in common. I thank Devin Stewart for explaining this point.

557 There is some debate about what ummī may have meant in the Qurʾan (for which see Sebastian Günther, “Ummī”). By Ibn al-Jawzī’s time, though, it was understood to mean “illiterate,” meaning that Muḥammad could not have been inspired by reading older scriptures.