Historicizing the Self: Deciphering the Autobiography of Ibn Ḥajar
Another approach to the issue of literary representations of the self is to ask whether our modern conceptualizations of such terms as “personal,” “private,” and “inner self” are completely applicable to premodern texts, whether they are as obvious and as unchanging as they may at first appear. We live in a time characterized by an intense dichotomy in the conceptualization of the self into public and private. Was this true in earlier periods? Is this true in other cultures? In the post-Freudian western world, for example, sexual acts and sexuality have come to constitute a major portion of the private self and of personal identity and are seen as a window into the subconscious. Did they do so in premodern worldviews, or were they instead similar to table manners, bathing, and toiletry, that is, personal and bodily behaviors that, although private, play no great role in defining the self? Should we instead be looking more closely at recurring elements in premodern texts that may have played significant roles in representing the self similar to the role now played by sex and sexuality? The problematization of terms such as “personal,” “private,” and “inner self” requires of us far more intense study of the changing constraints of literary representation through which such conceptualizations make themselves known.
In the work of Ibn Buluggīn we found many of the qualities modern readers would expect from an autobiography: an author's critical evaluation of his own personality, a retrospective examination of the course of his life, and even a sense of imparting some of the hard-learned lessons of that life to posterity. Far more problematic, however, are those texts that are but brief accounts of the external events of a life and which apparently offer us little of the author's personality. Among later medieval Arab authors, one of the most famous—and driest—of these texts was that of Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 1449). The text constitutes little more than an encyclopedia entry, written in the third person, located in the author's biographical compendium of the judges of Egypt. It is short enough to be cited in its entirety.
Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī: Aḥmad b. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī b. Aḥmad. From the town of ‘Asqalān by origin, Egyptian by birth and upbringing, resident of Cairo. He was born in the month of Sha‘bān in the year A.H. 773 [1372 C.E.] and his father died in the month of Rajab 777 [1375 C.E.]. His mother had already died while he was still a young child, so he was raised an orphan. He did not enter Qur’ān school until he was five years old and only completed memorizing the Qur’ān when he was nine. He was not prepared to pray the tarāwīḥ prayers of the holy month of Ramadan publicly until the year 785 [1383 C.E.], when he had already turned twelve.[14]
His guardian was the famous Ra’īs Zakī al-Dīn Abū Bakr b. Nūr al-Dīn ‘Alī al-Kharrūbī, the head of the merchants' guild in Egypt who had become a neighbor that year and who took him in when he had no one to support him. In that year he studied the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī with the greatest authority in the Ḥijāz, ‘Afīf al-dīn ‘Abd Allāh al-Nishāwarī, the last of the companions of Raḍī al-Dīn al-Ṭabarī, Imām at the Maqām [of Abraham in Mecca]. But he did not complete his studies, for it happened that he did not hear the entire work, though he received a certificate for his teacher's teachings anyway.
― 81 ―He also studied it with Shaykh Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ‘Umar al-Sallāwī al-Dimashqī, who taught beneath the living quarters of al-Kharrūbī in a house which was at the Ṣafā Gate, on the right when heading out towards Ṣafā, known as the House of ‘Aynā’ the Sharīfa [descendant of the Prophet Muhammad], daughter of the Sharīf ‘Ajlān. In this house there is a window which looks out over the Holy Mosque in Mecca and whoever sits there can see the Ka‘ba and the Black Stone in its corner. The reader and the listener used to sit there without a bench beneath the aforementioned window. The teacher of the author [of this autobiography] would sit there along with the others who studied with him. When the reciter read, the teacher would order them to listen until he had finished reading to the very end of the book. But the author [of this autobiography] occasionally went out to take care of some need or other and there was no one taking roll. So my source for [the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī] is Shaykh Najm al-Dīn al-Murjānī, who taught it to me properly much later; I have relied upon him by virtue of my trust in him.
After that [the author] memorized books of abridgments [mukhtaṣarāt] of the fields of study. It was necessary that someone take him in hand, and this fell to Shaykh Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad b. ‘Isā b. Abī Bakr b. al-Qaṭṭān al-Miṣrī, so [the author] attended his lessons. Al-Qaṭṭān revealed to him works of history while he was still studying in the children's Qur’ān school and filled his mind with many things about the lives [Ar. aḥwāl, lit. “conditions”] of the ḥadīth transmitters.
Meanwhile he also heard lessons from Najm al-Dīn b. Razīn and Ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-Ziftāwī and Zayn al-Dīn b. al-Shiḥna and he looked into the literary arts starting from the year 792 [1390 C.E.]. He composed poetry and wrote odes in praise of the Prophet as well as short occasional pieces.
Then he met with the greatest transmitter [of ḥadīth] of the era, Zayn al-Dīn al-‘Arāqī, in the month of Ramadan in the year 796 [1394 C.E.]. He stayed on with him for ten years while the art of ḥadīth was revealed to him. Before that year had ended, he produced for his Shaykh, the authority [musnid] of Cairo, Abū Isḥāq al-Tanūkhī, the work al-Mi’a al-‘Ushāriyya [a collection of one hundred Prophetic ḥadīth].
The first person to read it in full was the transmitter Abū Zar‘a b. al-Ḥāfiִz al-‘Arāqī [son of his teacher, the famous ḥadīth scholar just mentioned].
Then [the author] traveled to Alexandria and attended lessons from its authorities at that time. Later he went on the pilgrimage and traveled through Yemen. He attended lessons from scholars in Mecca, Medina, Yanbu‘, Zabīd, Ta‘izz, Aden, and other cities and villages.
In Yemen he met the great scholar of Arabic lexicography, a man with- out rival, Majd al-Dīn b. al-Shīrāzī, and received from him one of his most famous works called al-Qāmūs fī al-lugha [Dictionary of the Arabic Language]. He met many of the learned men of those cities and then returned to Cairo. Next he traveled to the Levant and heard lessons from scholars in Qaṭiyya, Gaza, Ramla, Jerusalem, Damascus, al-Ṣāliḥiyya, and other villages and cities.
His stay in Damascus was one hundred days, and what he heard in that period amounted to nearly one thousand fasicles of ḥadīth, among which were some from the great books: al-Mu‘jam al-awsaṭ [The Middle Collection] by al- Ṭabarānī, and Ma‘rifat al-ṣaḥāba [Knowledge of the Companions] by Abū ‘Abd Allāh b. Manda, most of the Musnad of Abū Ya‘lā and others.
Then he returned and completed his own book, Ta‘līq al-ta‘līq, about the lives of the greatest of his teachers, and so others began to take ḥadīth dictation from him. He remained the protégé of Shaykh Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī until he granted him a certificate [to teach law and grant legal opinions]. After al-Bulqīnī granted him a certificate [adhina lahu] he obtained the certificate of Shaykh al-Ḥāfiz Zayn al-Dīn al-‘Arāqī.
― 82 ―Then he began to compose his own works. He dictated al-Arba‘īn al-mutabāyina [Forty Variant Ḥadīth] in the Shaykhūniyya college starting in the year 808 [1406 C.E.], then he dictated from ‘Ushāriyāt al-ṣaḥāba approximately one hundred sessions over a number of years. Then he was given charge of the teaching of ḥadīth at the al-Jamāliyya al-Jadīda college, and he dictated there, but he cut short his dictation when he left in the year 814 [1411 C.E.]. He worked at writing books and was then appointed to the position of shaykh of the Baybarsiyya college, then with the teaching of Shāfi‘ite law at the al-Mu’ayyadiyya al-Jadīda college. Then he was appointed judge on the seventeenth of the month of Muḥarram in the year 827 [1423 C.E.]. Thereafter, he convened a new dictation session from the beginning of the month of Ṣafar of that year until the present.[15]
This is precisely the type of text that helped to generate the image among western scholars of an utterly impersonal auto/biographical tradition. Yet we have only to examine the autobiographies of Ibn Ḥajar's own students to realize that Ibn Ḥajar's text is at the far end of the spectrum in the Arabic tradition in terms of its brevity and laconic style. Even in the case of this text, however, a careful reading reveals several noteworthy features.
First, the author carefully positions himself from the opening passages in a very modest stance concerning his intellectual achievements: he did not enter school until age five, did not finish memorizing the Qur’ān until age nine, did not pray the tarāwīḥ prayers until age twelve, and so forth. His language leads us to believe that he was somehow constantly behind schedule either because of his status as an orphan or because he was a slow student; yet from the information that can be gleaned from contemporary biographies and autobiographies, none of these ages are older than average. We know from other sources that his leading the tarāwīḥ prayers during Ramadan was delayed for a year by a trip to Mecca that he made in the company of his guardian, but it is probable that he is more concerned with projecting a self-effacing attitude.[16]
It is also striking that the only passage with any material detail at all is the one in which he describes his early attempts to master the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī. Suddenly, in this passage we have a house, its location, a window, a view of the Ka‘ba, and students and teacher sitting on the floor beneath that window. Equally sudden is the shift to the first-person voice: “So my source for [the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī] is Shaykh Najm al-Dīn al-Murjānī, who taught me properly much later; I have relied upon him because of my trust in him.”
The terminology of the Arabic passage directly reflects medieval Islamic teaching methods—“I heard this work from,” “I completed my audition of such and such a work,” “I mastered my audition,” “I was granted a certificate to transmit such and such a work”—in which a teacher or reciter read aloud a work that was then taken down in dictation by pupils (hence the use of terms such as “hearing” and “audition”) and discussed; and if a student wished to receive an ijāza, or certification, as a transmitter of that work, he then read the work back to the teacher and answered his questions about the text.[17] The work in question, the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī, is a collection of the traditions [ḥadīth] of the Prophet Muhammad, the field of study in which Ibn Ḥajar himself became the greatest authority of his time. It is not just any collection, however, but one of the canonical “Six Books.”[18] That Ibn Ḥajar should recount to us his failure to master this basic work first from Shaykh al-Nishāwarī and then from Shaykh al-Sallāwī, and both times for completely unsubstantial reasons, is somewhat akin to Einstein recounting that he failed mathematics over and over again in school. And his meticulous description of this particular scene as being literally within sight of the Ka‘ba in Mecca—the single most sacred spot on earth in Islam—adds more than a hint of irony.
Ibn Ḥajar may have had a number of different motivations for narrating these specific events in greater detail than the rest of his text. He may have wished to document meticulously his own authority to transmit this work; given his stature at the time of writing, however, it hardly seems likely that this would have been questioned. Alternatively, he may have been motivated by a desire to establish his own modesty concerning his intellectual achievements in a continuation of the rhetoric of the opening passage. He may even have wished to be an encouraging example to later striving students, particularly those who experienced hardships in childhood and began their schooling at a disadvantage.
When we read this passage against the background of Arabic autobiography as a whole, however, a far more important observation emerges. Among those premodern autobiographical texts that treat the author's childhood, a very large portion recount anecdotes of childhood embarrassments, failings, misbehavior for which they were punished, incidents in which they played the role of fool or were the butt of a joke, and so forth. Even those texts that uncritically laud the adult autobiographer as a major intellectual or spiritual authority often include rather detailed anecdotes of the authors as ordinary and quite fallible children. Over and over again Arabic autobiographers include humorous, often endearing, stories of themselves as children, even when they continue their accounts in the most serious tones when dealing with their adult lives and achievements. It is one of the most enduring and often-repeated motifs of premodern Arabic autobiography.[19]
Al-Tirmidhī (ninth century) begins his autobiography (translated in this volume) by admitting that he had to be pressed to study by his father until he finally acquired the habit and left off childish games and play. He also notes that he was twenty-seven years old when he finally succeeded in memorizing the Qur’ān after a “conversion experience” while returning from the pilgrimage. This late beginning in religious life is all the more remarkable in that the focus of al-Tirmidhī's autobiographical work is to demonstrate his status as a spiritual authority.
Ibn Sīnā (late tenth/early eleventh century) confesses that although he had mastered all of the other sciences, he was unable to comprehend Aristotle's Metaphysics even after having read it “forty times,” until he finally came across a copy of al-Fārābī's commentary that enlightened him. It has been argued that the stages of Ibn Sīnā's education should be read as an allegorical treatise on the intellect;[20] whatever the case, this story, which portrays the hitherto insatiable student as utterly confounded, is one of the most memorable scenes in the narrative.
‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (late twelfth/early thirteenth century) recounts that, despite the best preparation at home, he could understand nothing of the teacher's “incoherent babbling” when his father first took him to school and that only when he was turned over to the teacher's assistant was he able to make sense of the lessons. He later describes in detail the warm friendship and camaraderie that developed between himself and this blind teaching assistant and how they later studied as colleagues under this same teacher (translated in this volume).
Zarrūq (fifteenth century) tells of being caught listening to storytellers in the marketplace and being rebuked by a male relative for his idleness; he never returned to hear their performances. He also recounts that when he experimented with being decorated with henna, he was scolded by a female relative for wearing the mark of a woman and never again adorned himself. He was also reprimanded for reaching out toward the food at a meal before their family's guest had begun to eat. Orphaned at an early age, his grandmother raised him using a number of clever ruses to inculcate good behavior. To encourage him to pray, she placed a dirham coin under his pillow as reward, a trick that also kept him from looking at the possessions or wealth of others with greed or envy. To teach him to appreciate their daily sustenance, she would cook food and hide it, then tell the young Zarrūq that they had no food that day. Together they would pray for God's beneficence and the food would miraculously appear. Zarrūq's childhood memories evoke both the naïveté of youth and the experience of gradually learning right from wrong.
Al-Yūsī (seventeenth century) tells us that he was so bashful about having to excuse himself to answer nature's call while in school and having to relieve himself in the proximity of others that he frequently stayed out of school rather than face that embarrassment. To conceal his ploy, he would wait along the road for his schoolmates and join them as they walked home, pretending that he had spent the entire day with them. The scoldings he received did not change his behavior; rather, the early death of his mother and the resulting emotional crisis he experienced motivated him to conquer this shyness, attend school, and devote himself so assiduously to his studies that his acquaintances found him unrecognizable as his former self.
Yūsuf al-Baḥrānī (eighteenth century) tells of being educated by his father but confesses that he was unfortunately not a very good pupil, as he was at that time still dominated by “the ignorance of youth” (translated in this volume).
Ibn ‘Ajība (eighteenth century) used to get himself and his clothing so wet doing his ablutions before prayer that his mother tricked him into believing that it was permissible to do ablutions with a stone (by Islamic law this is only acceptable when traveling where water is not available and in certain other cases); he did not discover the truth until much later in life. On the whole, Ibn ‘Ajība recounts primarily anecdotes that demonstrate his precocious piety and serious demeanor; some of the gullibility of a child attempting to impress the adults around him, however, still manages to shine through.
‘Alī Mubārak (nineteenth century) describes his childhood misbehavior at length. He constantly ran away from teachers and various employments, eventually even ending up in jail, until he finally found his way into a goverment school in Cairo as a teenager. Mubārak offers numerous explanations for his misadventures and in doing so carefully shepherds our sympathies even when portraying himself as a most troublesome child (translated in this volume).
Mubārak, who went on to play a prominent role in Egypt as an educational reformer, also tells us that his first encounter with geometry left him totally bewildered. The mystical drawings seemed to resemble the strange talismans of folk healers and wandering dervishes. His confusion was only alleviated later by a superlative teacher who opened his mind and heart. He praises at some length the excellent techniques of this teacher. Later, he is again frustrated in his studies as a member of a delegation to France, where Egyptian officials insisted that the delegation be taught engineering in French before they had studied the French language! He also describes the personal study habits he developed in order to succeed.
Jurjī Zaydān (nineteenth century) writes of learning to read, write, and recite the Psalms, at which time his father declared his education to be complete, although he could not understand a word of the text (which may in fact have been in Syriac rather than Arabic). He also describes the ongoing tension between himself and his father concerning the amount of schooling he should have and what occupation he should take up.
Finally, in the most famous avatar of this motif, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (late nineteenth/early twentieth century) relates in detail his experience of memorizing the Qur’ān as a blind child. Despite his great pride in this achievement, through lack of practice he forgot it and to his shame was found out in a very painful moment in front of his father and a guest. He then memorized it again and again forgot it, and finally, only on the third try, did he succeed in memorizing and retaining it.
Ibn Ḥajar thus includes in his fourteenth-century text a motif found in Arabic autobiographies in the centuries both before and after his own. Whether this is due to an awareness of earlier autobiographical writings or to literary convention, or whether it was simply a habit of medieval scholars and teachers to share such anecdotes, we do not know. But again and again, Arabic autobiographers who confess no real failings as adults begin their autobiographies with accounts of childhood failings or embarrassments, portraying themselves as slow or inept students, as having started their schooling late or having lagged behind their classmates in their studies, and as having possessed a child’s naive or ridiculous beliefs. While the inclusion of such anecdotes hardly constitutes deep analysis of psychological development, it is equally clear that the weltanschauung of these authors is far from what has been previously claimed: “a person is viewed as a type rather than an individual and . . . this view is static: there is no awareness of the development of a person's character.”[21] Even the terse scholarly prose of Ibn Ḥajar reveals the inaccuracy of such a statement.
One critical issue emerges from these passages that confide intimate information to the reader about the author's childhood: they establish the autobiographical authority of the text and mark it as distinct from a biography. Such information was known to the author alone. Even if a scholar shared such stories with his closest disciples, out of respect students refrained from including them in their biographical accounts of their teacher. It was apparently unacceptable for anyone but the author himself to present this type of self-effacing anecdote. What might at first glance seem to detract from an autobiographer's authority as an intellectual or religious figure may well have aided in establishing the authority of the autobiographical text. Moreover, as autobiographies were written in either the first-person or third-person voice, such passages may have played a critical role in projecting the autobiographical nature of a text.
Ibn Ḥajar is, moreover, one of many writers who included far more information about his life in his other works than he did in his formal autobiography; in fact, very little of what we know about him comes from this short text.[22] He was, for example, also a poet, and his collected poetic works were disseminated and transmitted along with his scholarly works on ḥadīth and his famous biographical dictionary covering the eighth Islamic century, the first of the great all-inclusive centenary biographical collections.[23]
Despite its brevity and impersonal nature, this text set a powerful precedent. Ibn Ḥajar's credentials as a scholar were unassailable. That he had written a biography of himself, however brief, was immediately noted by his students, who later imitated him. His rival protégés, al-Sakhāwī and al-Suyūṭī, each wrote autobiographies, and al-Sakhāwī's two students, Ibn Dayba‘ and Zarrūq, then each wrote an autobiography. Al-Suyūṭī's student Ibn Ṭūlūn al-Dimashqī wrote an autobiography, and ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī wrote his seven-hundred-page autobiography on the basis of al-Suyūṭī's, carefully excluding all mention of the autobiographies of al-Sakhāwī and his students (the rival lineage) when listing autobiographies by respected predecessors in his introduction. Finally, later writers such as al-‘Aydarūs and Ibn ‘Ajība were able to cite all of these texts as precedents for their own.
Ibn Ḥajar's sketch of his life is clearly meant to be read against the backdrop of his other works; no amount of careful reading will turn this into a detailed portrait of the author's personality. Yet we have seen that a close reading grounded in comparison with other Arabic autobiographies does demonstrate that there is more to this text than first meets the eye. It is noteworthy that such an expanded reading is possible even with an autobiographical text couched in this sparse format. Applying this approach to lengthier, more detailed texts is not only more easily accomplished, but the resulting insights are proportionally greater as well.