Tradition, innovation and the social construction of knowledge in the Medieval Islamic Near East

Past & Present, Feb, 1995 by Jonathan P. Berkey

Among historians of the Islamic Near East, medieval Cairo holds a reputation as a centre of learning comparable to that of the "university towns" of Oxford, Paris and Bologna.(1) The city contained literally hundreds of schools, known as madrasas, devoted to instruction in the higher religious and legal sciences. Although their size varied greatly, and their enrolments ranged from a mere dozen to several hundreds, most of these schools were fairly similar: in their curriculum, in their pedagogy, even in their architectural features. Occasionally, however, one of them would have a feature which set it apart, and which gave it a peculiar reputation among the population of the city. One such school was a relatively small one called the "Jawhariyya". Founded in 1430, it made provision for a limited number of students of Islamic law and their professor, as well as for religious functionaries such as prayer leaders and Qur'an readers to tend to the spiritual needs of the students. What distinguished this school was that, in addition to providing a forum for advanced education, it also housed a magical pearl and a talismanic bowl. According to a document appended to the deed of endowment establishing the school, one afflicted with certain diseases of the urinary tract could take this pearl and put it in a silver bowl suitably inscribed with appropriate verses from the Qur'an. The patient then filled the bowl with water and - after removing the pearl, of course - drank the water. This pearl and its accompanying apparatus were apparently stored inside the school, to which people who had nothing else to do with the school's activities would come for a cure.(2)

In themselves, magical pearls and bowls are hardly unusual, holding as they did an important place within Near Eastern popular medicinal traditions. The practice of pouring water over a magical object and into a basin, or into a bowl inscribed with religious inscriptions, and then drinking the water in the hope of curing some persistent disease, is one that can be traced back well into antiquity.(3) What is intriguing, however, is the close spatial proximity of cultural processes and artefacts which, at first glance, seem to be so different: on one hand, the disciplined transmission of religious knowledge, of the legal and theological sciences which lie at the core of the Islamic identity, of what some would call "high" culture; on the other, a medicinal cure clearly drawn from the deep well of folk memory, a cure with only the thinnest Islamic veneer, in the form of those inscribed Qur'anic verses, which barely conceals its pre-Islamic origin.

Historians of the Islamic world have, in recent years, begun to follow the lead of their colleagues in cultural studies more generally in denying that "high" culture and "low" culture form ontologically distinct categories.(4) That is a salutary development, especially inasmuch as both elements of the various polarities whether "high" and "low", or "primitive" and "modern", or "elite" and "folk" - seem, in most Islamic societies, "to be present in varying proportions simultaneously in most specific cultural settings".(5) But it is not enough to observe that "high" and "low" culture could co-exist - that, for example, the study of jurisprudence and the practice of popular medicine could be carried on under the same roof. Acknowledging the complexity of Islamic societies, and the general absence within them of immutable cultural hierarchies, should not obscure from us the creative interaction of competing religious values, and the dynamic process of cultural construction at work at different points in Islamic history.(6)

This process, while susceptible to analysis in many of the same terms which have been used to study the cultural history of European societies, must also be studied with conceptual categories which have a specifically Islamic genealogy. The purpose of this article is to explore the historical role of two sets of polarities - one ("tradition" and "custom") drawn from cultural history generally, the other (sunna, "accepted practice", in particular the idealized practice of the prophet Muhammad, and bid'a, "innovation") peculiar to Islam - in the Islamic Near East (primarily Egypt and Syria) between roughly 1100 and 1500. These sets of polarities, although not precisely homologous, perform for the historian essentially similar functions. I do not mean to reify categories which shifted or dissolved according to the observer's perspective; on the contrary, the evidence analysed here supports the model of Islamic culture as consisting of interrelated and overlapping strata. These polarities were, however, categories which were widely accepted by medieval Islamic writers themselves, and therefore any cultural history of medieval Islamic societies must give some account of them.

In the end, the tension between tradition and custom, between sunna and bid'a, points to a fluidity and a creativity within the social process of constructing knowledge in the medieval Islamic world. Here again, the example of the pearl and bowl at the Jawhariyya madrasa provides an intriguing point of departure. The close and apparently symbiotic (or at least unproblematic) relationship of two very different cultural processes, in an institution established specifically to support the transmission of knowledge, poses fundamental questions about the character of that "knowledge" which medieval Islamic societies prized so highly - questions, that is, about its relationship to broader patterns of cultural life. Not to put too fine a point on it, these are questions about the very definition of what constitutes Islam, since knowledge lies so close to the heart of how Islam would define itself.