1. Ibn Samura 1957:213. Faqih al-Nahi was reckoned in the seventh generation of Yemeni jurists. On the town, see art. "Ibb," Encyclopedia of Islam (hereafter the first and second editions will be cited as EI 1 and EI 2; the Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam will be cited as SEI ).

2. Al-Shirazi, died 1083 (all dates are A.D. unless A.H. is indicated). See EI 1, art. "Al-Shirazi." The text was Al-muhadhdhab ; cf., for Yemen, Ibn Samura 1957:126f., 171, 217; al-Khazraji 1911:368, 1914:343-44; al-Burayhi 1983:86. For Yemeni historical materials, see al-Hibshi 1972, 1983; Sayyid 1974:33-34. On the intellectual culture of eleventh-century Baghdad, and shari'a jurisprudence as the "queen" of the scholarly disciplines, see the important study by Makdisi (1981).

3. For the usage of '-m-d root terms to characterize authoritative texts, Ibn Samura 1957:126, al-Nawawi 1882:2, 6, 7; al-Shawkani A.H. 1348, 2:394; I. al-Akwa' 1980:9-10. Some texts had Al-mu'tamad , "the relied upon," as a title; in al-Nawawi's work, the subtitle was Wa 'umdat al-muftiin .

4. The writing of Bakhtin (1981:342f.) on "authoritative discourse" is relevant here: "The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers."

5. There are early exceptions--e.g., for the Shafi'i school, Al-Mukhtasar of al-Muzani (d. 877).

6. Ibn Khaldun 1958, 3:290-91.

7. The Arabic term malaka (pl. malakat ) is a borrowing via translation of the Greek exis , which was also translated into Latin as habitus (Rosenthal

1958:lxxxiv). For Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1984), a comparable notion of ''habitus" is the central concept in his poststructuralist sociology of practice. Similarities between the two analytic usages include an emphasis on the bodily basis and implicit qualities of the dispositions involved, reference to language models, and emphasis on the importance of repetition/practice for inculcation and reproduction. For Ibn Khaldun a distinct habitus pertains to each art or "craft," a concept that includes scholarship as one of many varieties. As a person is decisively "colored" by a habitus, the acquisition of one makes that of another difficult or impossible. For Bourdieu (1984:170-75) there is a separate habitus associated with each of the class-based ''conditions of existence" of modern societies. Drawing on the cultural specificity of Ibn Khaldun and the poststructuralism of Bourdieu, I examine the internal differentiation and cross-genre and cross-institution homologies of a textual habitus, a set of generative dispositions structuring (and structured by) discursive practices.

8. SEI , art. "Al-Shafi'i"; for a biography by a Yemeni, see Ibn Samura 1957:134-42.

9. Zabara 1979:347-48.

10. All citations are from the three-volume Arabic text of Van Den Berg (al-Nawawi 1882-83-84); cf. art. "Al-Nawawi" in SEI .

11. Keyzer (Keijzer) trans. (Abu Shuja' 1859). I have used the Arabic text of the Van Den Berg translation of the commentary by al-Ghazzi (1894) with the Mukhtasar of Abu Shuja' embedded. For the biography of Abu Shuja', see the article in EI 2.

12. Burton 1893, 1:103n.

13. Al-Nawawi 1914.

14. See Calder 1990, for references and for discussion of how the Prophet's illiteracy became a figure in discursive theory.

15. Hurgronje 1931:168n.

16. See Graham 1985, 1987; Fischer and Abedi 1990a, 1990b.

17. EI 2, art. "Kira'a."

18. Cited in Juynboll 1969 and 1983 in his discussions of tadwin , the recording of hadith. See also Powers 1986.

19. Goldziher, quoted in SEI , art. "Hadith," p. 120.

20. See EI 1 and 2, arts. "Kur'an"; as-Said 1975.

21. Ibn Samura 1957:190-91. Sayf al-Sunna's tomb and an associated, within-the-walls cemetery are well-known landmarks in Ibb town. Many later scholarly biographies refer to burials near Sayf al-Sunna.

22. See the article "Muslim b. al-Hadjdjadj" in SEI . The author of Al-Minhaj was a principal commentator on the Sahih (al-Nawawi 1929).

23. Al-Shafi'i's Risala , trans. Khadduri (al-Shafi''i 1961:239), translation modified; cf. Risala , ed. Shakir (al-Shafi'i 1940:370-71).

24. While it is generally recognized that early Semites invented the pho-

netic alphabet, it has been argued that the Greeks significantly "perfected" it by developing vowel letters (Ong 1982: 89, 91; for a review of recent literature, see Goody 1987: 40ff). Alphabet issues have figured centrally in a much larger claim, however--namely, that "writing has transformed human consciousness" (Ong 1982: 78). How writing has done so, it has been argued, has depended, in part, on the alphabetic technology available. The work of Eric Havelock (1963), comparing the oral versus literate intellectual styles of Homer and Plato, has constituted a crucial point of departure both for Ong and for Goody, the leading anthropological student of literacy and writing. Within literate civilizations, it is maintained, different alphabets have differing capacities to promote such things as ''analytic thought." "It does appear," Ong (1982: 90) writes, "that the Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they developed the first alphabet complete with vowels." He follows Havelock in the view that ''this crucial, more nearly total transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient cultures." Goody, however, has reconsidered his earlier use of the Greek case as a model for cross-cultural comparison. He now finds it "necessary to challenge certain notions about the uniqueness of the West as far as the explanation for the emergence of the 'modern' world is concerned" (1986: xi). In particular, "the 'alphabetic' writing of the Greeks is no longer seen as so unique an achievement" (1987: xvii-xviii). The whole constructed legacy of Greek originality, including the alphabet thesis, has been critiqued by M. Bernal in his Black Athena (1987). For a view of Arabic writing that considers vowels "a peculiar European invention" rather than as "something 'missing' from Arabic," see the discussion of grammatical "movement" in Mitchell 1988: 148-49.

25. The history of the Arabic alphabet is relevant here. The Quran was placed in definitive written form "before the development of an Arabic orthography that could indicate with some precision how a text actually reads"; as a consequence, this early manuscript's "defective consonantal form allows for variant readings not only of internal vowels and inflectional endings, but even of many of the wholly unpointed consonants themselves" (Graham 1985: 34; cf. Ibn Khaldun 1958, 2: 382). For an example of the ensuing interpretive complexities, see Powers 1986.

26. Both are mentioned in the biography of 'Abd al-Rahman al-Haddad (Zabara 1979: 347-48). Among the Malikis of North Africa the text by Ibn Malik was one of several "memorized by all educated men" (Eickelman 1978: 497n).

27. See al-Burayhi (1983: 85, 87, 98, 102) for use in Ibb. Ibn al-Wardi's text was a versification of the manual by al-Qazwini (d. 1266); cf. SEI , art. "Al-Shafi'i," p. 514; and I. al-Akwa' 1980: 9.

28. According to al-'Amri (1985: 191), these categories are eulogy, censure, self-glorification, criticism, and politics.

29. Aside from major manuals, a variety of brief compositions were versified. Two examples are a twentieth-century collection of imamic opinions (al-Shamahi 1937 [ A.H. 1356]) and an official schedule of damage awards for physical injuries (Zabara 1956: 66-67). The opening of the former declares that "among the most important of obligations/[is] Memorization of the opinions of the Imam of the Arabs"; the latter begins, "Memorization of knowledge is a facilitation/For its student, so memorize the verse-text/Of injury penalties." Commentaries could also be versified: al-Suyuti's thousand verses are a commentary on an embedded verse text, while the legal manual by Ibn al-Wardi is a verse-commentary on a prose matn he ''decided to versify." On the margins of the Ibn al-Wardi text, an author of other verses explains his treatment of still another text, saying he "versified it, summarizing its expression, rendering simpler its comprehension and its memorization."

Verse both serious and light and on a wide spectrum of subjects has been a constant of highland scholarly activity. A few artful lines by a man of repute could release a torrent of rhymed replies, offerings of augmenting verses, and interstitial flourishes. For a number of years, Ibb literati engaged in a protracted poetry duel with their counterparts from the neighboring town Jibla. When Muhammad al-Shawkani (see chap. 2) passed the night in al-Makhadir just north of Ibb, he composed two verses in praise of the evening scene. In them he introduced a legal metaphor that played on the name of a nearby qat-producing area called al-Bukhari, which is also the name of a famous compiler of hadith. The poem caught the attention of other poets, including two adibs from the al-Basir family of Ibb. One of these set about adding both further verses and interstitial rhymes in a different meter, all based on the original metaphor (see Zabara 1931: 391). Excerpts from the Ibb-Jibla poetic duel are in Zabara (1941: 206ff.). In 1922 Imam Yahya took time from a busy schedule during the fasting month of Ramadan to compose a long poem on the virtues of qat (Rihani 1930: 210-11). Gatherings to chew qat and to hear the lines of old poets sung by musicians have always been a frequent pastime in Ibb. In Arabian society generally, poetry is "a major art, perhaps the supreme art" (Serjeant 1951:1), and its "tribal" practitioners have begun to receive the attention they deserve (Caton 1990; Dresch 1989; Meeker 1979).

30. Khadduri, trans., in al-Shafi'i 1961: 15. On the similar composition of al-Shafi'i's longer work, Al-Umm , see al-Mahmassani 1961: 28. For a general discussion of this phenomenon, see Pederson 1984, chap. 3. In a very different intellectual environment, Saussure's Cour de Linguistique Generale was also created from student notes.

31. Imam al-Mahdi Ahmad bin Yahya al-Murtada composed his Kitab al-Azhar during the years 1392-1399 while in jail (al-Shawkani A.H. 1348, 1: 126).

32. Rosenthal (1947: 7) notes that "the historian and theologian entirely relies upon written material. Memorized knowledge has no longer any place in his work." The conventional classifications of the Muslim intellectual disci-

plines are also relevant to the boundaries of the recitational complex. See EI 2, art. "' Ilm "; al-Azmeh 1986: 146-97. On medicine in Ibb, see chap. 4, n. 16.

33. In his ground-breaking work on Muslim education in Morocco, Eickelman characterized the pedagogical style as "intermediate between oral and written systems of transmission of knowledge. Its key texts existed in written form but were conveyed orally, to be written down and memorized by students" (1978: 487; 1985). Al-Azmeh (1986: 155) terms such systems "composite."

34. Al-Shafi'i 1961: 265. I have modified the translation; cf. al-Shafi'i 1940: 431.

35. Al-Shafi'i 1961: 239-40. Translation slightly modified; cf. al-Shafi'i 1940: 371.

36. Ibn Samura (1957: 157) mentions a man who had five hundred volumes, and al-Akwa' (1980: 194) one with two thousand. As al-Akwa' (1980: 7) notes, it was common for rulers and powerful individuals to establish libraries in connection with the schools they founded. (On library reform, see chap. 6.) Small personal libraries were common in Ibb, although many were lost when the town was plundered in 1948. For a survey of all aspects of the Muslim culture of the book, see Pederson 1984. On calligraphy in particular, see EI 2, art. "Khatt," and Schimmel (1970; 1984), which include extensive bibliographies.

37. Al-Khazraji 1911: 56.

38. Cf. Ibn Khaldun 1981: 755, where the collation process is described as al-riwaya wa al-dabt , i.e., "oral recitation and checking."

39. Cf. Beeston 1983: 24. Bakhtin (1981) discusses the protective framing of authoritative discourse.

40. In the case of Al-Minhaj , two important commentaries studied in Yemen are by Ibn Hajar 1897 and al-Ramli 1967; in that of Al-Mukhtasar , the main commentary is by al-Ghazzi 1894, and an important gloss is by al-Bajuri 1974.

41. For details, see SEI , art. "Al-Shafi'i."

42. Two well-known Prophetic hadiths elaborate this assumption: "Difference of opinion in my community is a [manifestation of Divine] mercy," and "My community will become divided into seventy-three sects."

43. Al-Nawawi 1883: 4. Here and in other citations of al-Nawawi and of Abu Shuja'/al-Ghazzi (1894), I have consulted the French and (in the case of Al-Minhaj ) the English renderings but have generally made my own more literal translations.

44. According to the doctrine of abrogating and abrogated sections, there are some contradictory positions in the Quran. In the exegesis ( tafsir ) literature, the sacred text is opened up to the interpretive efforts of human commentators. The definitive written text of the Quran was established, and enforced by 'Uthman (cf. EI 2, art. "Kur'an"; as-Said 1975), and seven standard recitations were later authorized (ibid.; EI 1, art. "Tadjwid").

43. Al-Nawawi 1883: 4. Here and in other citations of al-Nawawi and of Abu Shuja'/al-Ghazzi (1894), I have consulted the French and (in the case of Al-Minhaj ) the English renderings but have generally made my own more literal translations.

44. According to the doctrine of abrogating and abrogated sections, there are some contradictory positions in the Quran. In the exegesis ( tafsir ) literature, the sacred text is opened up to the interpretive efforts of human commentators. The definitive written text of the Quran was established, and enforced by 'Uthman (cf. EI 2, art. "Kur'an"; as-Said 1975), and seven standard recitations were later authorized (ibid.; EI 1, art. "Tadjwid").