by Stuart Kelly
Muhammad ibn Ishaq
{704–767}
IBN HISHAM, WHO died in Baghdad in 833, was a respected grammarian and scholar. His most challenging work was to prepare a definitive edition of the Sirat Rasul Allah, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, written over sixty years previously by Ibn Ishaq. In doing so, and in doing it so diligently, he destroyed Ibn Ishaq’s work.
Islamic historiography involved a complex analysis of oral and written sources. In 610, Muhammad, a forty-year-old merchant of the Quraysh tribe, had been performing his annual meditations outside of Mecca when he was seized by the angel Jibra’el, whose presence filled the whole sky wherever he turned. The angel commanded, “Recite,” and, despite his faltering, Muhammad began to compose the Qur’an. A much later historian, al-Tabari, claims that the Prophet was so frightened, and convinced he was possessed by a djinn, that he nearly committed suicide. Over the next twenty years, Muhammad would be regularly overwhelmed, as the ayas and suras that comprised the Qur’an were given to the world through his lips.
The pagan Quraysh worshiped a god called al-Llah, alongside his three female consorts, al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat. Through trading contacts with Jewish and Christian communities, whom they referred to as “the people of the book,” the Arabians became acutely aware that they had never received a similar, immediate revelation from God. The Qur’an’s haunting, beautiful verses could have no other source than the divine: Muhammad himself retorted to skeptics who asked why he could not perform miracles that the Qur’an was miracle enough. As well as providing them with a holy text, as the Qur’an developed it provided the Arabs with an etiological myth, an origin story that linked them to the historical presence of the “One God.”
Jews and Christians both traced their relationship with God back to Abraham, through his son Isaac. Abraham, however, had an older son, Ishmael, the offspring of his Egyptian concubine Hagar. Ishmael and Hagar were expelled by Abraham’s wife Sarah, and God had twice given them his blessing: like Isaac’s generation, Ishmael will “form a great nation,” and the Lord will “multiply his seed.” He then disappears from the Pentateuch, his nation and seed forgotten. The Qur’an spun out this loose thread, and cast the Quraysh as the aboriginal Abrahamic tribe. The plot the authors rejected, as Jesus might have said, has become an epic.
As this new, monotheistic religion grew in strength, Muhammad’s followers would commit the verses and chapters to memory. After the Prophet’s death, the first and second caliphs (Muhammad’s lieutenant and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, and Umar, who had been ready to kill Muhammad at first, before a Damascene conversion) collected the text together and had it written. The third caliph, Uthman, standardized the Qur’an and destroyed all variant versions.
At the same time, a large number of sayings about the Prophet and his life were in circulation. These hadith were scrupulously examined by scholars, who were keen to establish the authenticity of the aphorisms that had been recorded by those closest to Muhammad. Similarly, the first written records of the life of Muhammad were bolstered by isnads, cited authorities that told where the historian had found each particular incident, like precursors of the footnote. Ibn Hisham would have compared the isnads in Ibn Ishaq’s work to relevant sources, weighed the testimony of hadith, and ensured that nothing ran contrary to the revelation of the Qur’an.
Ibn Hasham took his editorial duties very seriously. He removed those things that were offensive to Muslims, and produced a recension of Ibn Ishaq’s original text: he expanded it where there were alternative, valid traditions and deleted aberrant fables. So we have Ibn Ishaq’s biography, but skewed and squeezed through Ibn Hasham’s academic endeavors. Naturally, one wonders what was removed.
The Sirat Rasul Allah may be hagiography, but it does not stress Muhammad’s greatness by stripping him of his humanity. The Prophet laughs, plays with children, is terrified, furious, and benevolent. He loves, jokes, suffers, and schemes. Secondhand ideas of what constitutes a religiously “offensive” section are challenged at every turn. Ibn Ishaq/Hisham records some comments by Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, Mother of the Faithful, that approach mordant irreverence. When a Qur’anic verse justified the Prophet’s actions, she is supposed to have commented, “Truly thy Lord makes haste to do thy bidding.” On its face, the story of Abdallah ibn Sa’id, who deceitfully altered transcriptions of the Qur’an to test Muhammad’s inspiration, seems a model of lenience. Under the protection of his foster-brother Uthman, he begged for mercy. The Prophet was silent for a long time and then lifted the death penalty, then berated his Companions for not taking the pause as a sign to execute Ibn Sa’id.
Opponents’ adverse comments are equally commemorated. When the Quraysh first heard of the new monotheism, they were fairly tolerant, and some even offered to pay for medical treatment for the Prophet. As relationships between the Quraysh and the new religionists deteriorated, and economic sanctions against the converts deepened, the wife of Abu Lahab shouted obscene poems at the believers, and children pelted Muhammad with sheep’s uteruses. Ibn Ishaq also retained some of the defamatory verses by the Jewish poet Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, whom Muhammad had assassinated.
The most tempting subject for the censored section must be the notorious Satanic Verses. The much later writers Ibn Sa’d and al-Tabari record that on one occasion, the evil spirit Shaitan managed to interpolate verses that seemed to make concessions to the polytheism of the Quraysh. These verses in Sura 53 sanctioned the worship of al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat as intermediate intercessory gods. Despite the fact that such an accommodation would have settled affairs between the Quraysh and Muhammad, he recanted, and the revised sura had an explicit denunciation of the goddesses as “naught but names yourselves have named.” Sura 53 is mostly in short lines, but contains odd sections in a longer, less embellished style. This may indicate that it was composed at two different times.
It is a good story, but it is only a good story. Given the political tensions at the time of Ibn Ishaq’s writing between the followers of the family of the fourth caliph, Ali (the Shi’a), and the Umayyad dynasty (the Sunni) which had come to power, there could be countless, subtle shadings that Ibn Hisham might have deemed imprudent to preserve.
What we do have, though, is a collection of stories that have an immediacy to the Western reader that the Qur’an, in translation, can appear to lack. Although Thomas Carlyle’s criticism—“a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite insupportible stupidity”—is characteristically overblown and intemperate, even for the blustering voice of nineteenth-century British imperialism, it unfortunately reflects many readers’ lack of empathy.
Contrast this one sublimely startling legend. A poor man was brought before Muhammad, guilty of a misdemeanor. He was told to give alms to the poor, but pointed out that he had nothing to give. Muhammad requisitioned some dates and told him to give them to someone worse off than himself. He replied that no one was as impecunious. So Muhammad laughed and commanded him to eat the dates as a penance. Whatever Ibn Hisham cut out from Ibn Ishaq’s text, that which remained still challenges Western notions of piety.
Ahmad ad-Daqiqi
{932–976}
ALTHOUGH THE POET Ahmad ad-Daqiqi took the Islamic name Abu Mansur Muhammad after the Arab conquest of Persia, tradition has long asserted that he persisted in the Zoroastrian faith. One of the fragments attributed to him claims that there are only four things Daqiqi deemed necessary for happiness:
The ruby lip, the flute’s lament, Crimson wine and the creed of Zoroaster.
As a court poet in Baghdad, his name became synonymous with excellence. “To praise him is to bring dates to Hajar”—or coals to Newcastle—claimed one critic, but ad-Daqiqi did not allow this to go to his head. “My whole life has been spent being patient; I would need another to enjoy reaping its fruits.” Yet his elegant ghazals and quatrains were dwarfed by a project that would have crowned his career.
Daqiqi had completed a thousand lines of his epic before his murder, which told the story of the Iranian kings from Gushtasp to Arjasp, interleaved with lines on the beginnings of the prophet Zoroaster’s mission. Firdawsi acquired these remains, and relates how, in a dream, Daqiqi appeared, seated in a lush garden, with a goblet of wine. The ghost of Daqiqi gave Firdawsi permission to continue the epic on Iranian history, and to incorporate the lines he had written into the poem. Thus, Daqiqi’s fame would not perish.
“Now I will tell what Daqiqi said, for I am alive and he is as one with the dust.” It took Firdawsi a further thirty-five years to complete The Shah-nameh, or Book of the Kings. He was not wholly reverent to the memory of the poet whose task he adopted and superseded, criticizing the weakness of Daqiqi’s lines, which did not “renew the ancient times.” Firdawsi’s outspokenness would have serious consequences when it was directed at those not yet in the grave.
When Sultan Mahmoud of Ghaznavid received all sixty thousand couplets of The Shah-nameh, his promise to pay a gold coin for each seemed rather rash. Moreover, while Daqiqi had been a courtier, the provincial Firdawsi had labored at his work in the backwater of Tus, and was perhaps unaware that his praise of the Shi’a tradition was unlikely to win favor with the Sunni ministers. The sultan offered instead an equivalent number of silver coins, which Firdawsi disdainfully rejected. He gave the money to the first people he came across, a bath-keeper and a sherbet-seller.
Incensed, the sultan decreed that Firdawsi was to be executed by being trampled on by an elephant. He fled to Herat, dedicated the poem instead to Ispahbad Shahriyar bin Shirwin, and prefaced it with a hundred lines of satirical venom against Mahmoud, calling him the son of a slave. Shahriyar, aware that no good would come of this libel, offered to buy the diatribe at one thousand dirhans per line, and immediately destroyed it. An attempt to reconcile the sultan and Firdawsi would have been successful, if Firdawsi had received the sixty thousand dirhans the sultan sent to him. Instead, the messenger with the money met Firdawsi’s funeral cortège as it entered the city.
The Shah-nameh became the national epic of Persia, a work that “rescued from oblivion and preserved for all time our national history . . . and the Persian language,” as Mirza Muhammad Ali Fernghi said, and it simultaneously saved Daqiqi. Had he lived, Daqiqi might even have eclipsed Firdawsi; as it is, he is engulfed in him.
Dante Alighieri
{1265–1321}
JACOPO AND PIETRO ALIGHIERI had a serious problem. Their father had been working on a poem for nearly thirteen years, an encyclopedic allegory describing his vision of Hell, Purgatory, and the Heavens, entitled the Comedy. An exile from his hometown of Florence, where he had been sentenced to death in absentia, he had wandered around the feuding and fractious states of Italy, from Verona to Tuscany to Urbino and finally to Ravenna, where he came under the protection of Can Grande della Scala. There, Dante sent for Jacopo and Pietro.
The youthful Can Grande was an exceptional military tactician and a generous patron of the arts. He commissioned the building of churches and employed the painter Giotto to decorate them. His chancellor, Benzo d’Alessandria, was a famous humanist scholar. Although he was occasionally as raucous and bawdy as the basest of his infantrymen, Can Grande held Dante Alighieri in profound respect. As the cantos of his masterwork were finished, they were sent to Can Grande, who had them copied and circulated.
Soon after Jacopo and Pietro arrived, their father died, and the final thirteen cantos of the Comedy could not be found. The Paradiso, the culmination of the entire poem, was missing. Dante’s fame as a poet was unparalleled in Italy. The last thing Can Grande would want was an imperfect and unfinished epic. The last thing their father would have wanted was to be cheated of posterity in the same way that his life had been blighted by banishment. There was only one thing for it. Jacopo and Pietro themselves were going to have to complete the Comedy.
How to begin? The poem was so densely structured that at least the lineaments of their projected forgery were easily discernible. They knew for certain that there were thirteen missing cantos. The poem was divided into one hundred cantos: an introduction and then thirty-three each for Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. It was written in terza rima, a form equally imbued with the significance of the number three: each stanza had three lines, with the second line rhyming with the first and third of the next stanza—aba, bcb, cdc . . . The one hundred cantos represented the perfect number, ten, multiplied by itself; or rather the mystical number three, indicative of the Trinity, multiplied by itself, plus one, to signify the unity of God.
Numerology and personal history suffused the entire work. Their father had fallen in love, at the age of nine, with a girl called Beatrice Portinari. She had spurned him, and married another, before dying in 1290; nonetheless, and despite his marriage to Jacopo and Pietro’s mother, he had lauded Beatrice’s indescribable mortal and moral beauty in a sequence of canzoni called The New Life. In the Comedy, she had become a symbol of celestial intervention.
She appeared in the sixty-fourth stanza (6 + 4 = 10), which had 145 lines (1 + 4 + 5 = 10), and announced her identity in line 73 (7 + 3 = 10). She should be mentioned by name 63 times (6 + 3 = 9), and her name used as a rhyme only nine times.
The text of the Comedy the brothers possessed broke off at the twentieth canto of the Paradiso. It stranded their father in the Sixth Heaven, that of Jupiter, guardian of the Just. This left the Seventh (the realm of the Contemplatives, governed by Saturn), the Heaven of Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile, and finally the Empyrean. They had still to write in encounters with Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim, and disquisitions on the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love (Beatrice, of course, figuring prominently therein). With such a rigorous and regimented form, the lines would hopefully flow fairly logically. They also, rather more troublingly, had to describe God.
Did their father’s other works suggest any clues, or lines of thought, or possible images? He had written to Can Grande explaining that the poem was called the Comedy since it “began in sorrow”—i.e., Hell—and “ended in joy.” He had intended to write a description of the rules of the literary genre of comedy in his work defending writing in vernacular Italian rather than antique Latin, the De Vulgare Eloquentia. Unfortunately, he never completed the work, though his sons did have his strict taxonomy of types of adjectives.
Dante had also planned to write a work describing the virtues that crowned the Heavens. In the Convivio, or The Banquet, Alighieri Senior provided commentaries and glosses on the canzoni he had written after The New Life. The work was to have comprised an introduction, and then fourteen essays on fourteen poems. They had copies of the poems, including “Tre donne,” a lament for the justice so conspicuously lacking on earth, and “Doglia mi reca,” a panegyric on liberality. Again, however, he had never finished the work, leaving eleven of the essays unwritten. Leaving work unfinished seemed to be a habit.
As for God . . . well, the Bible appeared of little help. Even St. Paul, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, told of a man—himself—“caught up to the Third Heaven,” where he “heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” How much of St. John’s vision in the Book of Revelation should the brothers include, given that the saint had warned that if anyone left out parts of his vision of Heaven, they would be struck from the Book of Life and cast out of the Holy City?
In Florence, at Easter in 1300, their father had had some kind of vision. He had cryptically written to Can Grande of “aliqua ‘quae referre nescit et nequit rediens’”—“things ‘which he who returns has neither knowledge nor power to relate.’” Th
e tongue faltered. Language itself was too human to articulate the divine. The memory was too fleshily fallen to retain the imprint of such an ecstatic insight. Dante had known—all the way through the perverse and insidious tortures of Hell, where he had consigned and condemned his own teacher, cousin, and pope, right up to the pining, refining punishments of Mount Purgatory, where all this mortal pain and confusion was whittled away—where it must all end. But that vision of Heaven had been Dante’s, and not his sons’.
Jacopo seemed less daunted than Pietro about the task in hand. They would have to describe the ineffable in more ways than one; perpetrate a daring act of ventriloquism, throwing their voices as if it were whispering from their father’s sepulchre. And then he spoke.
According to Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, he appeared in a dream to Jacopo, eight months into their elaborate invention. Jacopo asked if he was alive. “Yes, but of the true life, not of ours,” Dante replied. With due filial devotion, Jacopo asked if the Comedy had been completed, and was led to his father’s old bedroom. The shade pointed to the wall, and disappeared. Jacopo and his father’s friend Piero di Giardino investigated, and found a hanging covering the spot that had been indicated. Behind it, in a recess, and nearly illegible with mold, were the final thirteen cantos of the Comedy.
Can Grande, of course, published them. Dante, the embittered, disappointed exile, became the apogee of medieval poetry. Although Boccaccio’s story about the manuscript recovered from beyond the grave has been doubted, dismissed, and even justified as a subconscious realization, a certain air of precarious survival clings to the poem. As Thomas Carlyle expressed it: