Book

Description

In Baghdad in 910, one of the most brilliant jurists of his age died young. Muhammad ibn Dāwūd al-Zāhirī, son of the founder of the Zāhirī school of law, had debated as an equal with the greatest legal minds of his day and compiled Kitāb al-Zahra, the first great Arabic anthology built on a theory of love. His contemporaries also knew that he loved a young man, Wahb ibn Jāmi, and believed that this love hastened his death. The medieval biographers did not hide this. They recorded it openly, with named witnesses, poems and a famous deathbed scene. Yet they praised him all the more, as a man of learning, piety and scrupulous virtue. How did they do it? Historiography of the Heart takes the biographers, not Ibn Dāwūd, as its subject. It reads the entries of Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Khatīb al-Baghdādī, Yāqūt, Ibn Khallikān and al-Dhahabī as carefully designed texts. It shows how they established his scholarly authority before introducing his love, how they chose their words for desire, how they turned the beloved into a witness who testified before a caliph, and how a disputed hadith on chaste love became the key to the whole story. In their hands, desire resisted became proof of character, and a love between men became evidence of a jurist's probity. The final part brings these medieval narratives into dialogue with modern scholarship on the history of sexuality, queer historiography and the history of emotions. It asks what these frameworks reveal and what they obscure, and it proposes a disciplined way of reading that neither erases desire nor projects modern identities onto the past. Drawing on close readings of classical Arabic sources, given in full with translations, this book offers a new account of how medieval Muslim scholars wrote about love, virtue and authority. It is essential reading for students and scholars of Islamic history, Arabic literature, the history of sexuality and medieval studies.