THE LEGAL PERSONA OF JALAL AL-DIN AL-SUYUTI A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of ...

289 Pages·2012·1.54 MB·English

by  Nelson Hernandez

FRAMING THE JURIST:
THE LEGAL PERSONA OF JALAL AL-DIN AL-SUYUTI

A Dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
of Georgetown University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Arabic

By

Rebecca Skreslet Hernandez, M.A.

Washington, DC
April 20, 2012
Copyright 2012 by Rebecca Skreslet Hernandez
All Rights Reserved

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FRAMING THE JURIST:
THE LEGAL PERSONA OF JALAL AL-DIN AL-SUYUTI

Rebecca Skreslet Hernandez, M.A.

Thesis Advisor: Felicitas M. M. Opwis, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This research looks at attempts by the Egyptian polymath Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) to
frame his authority as a jurist in his legal writings. The research aims to access the multi-faceted
legal persona that the author constructs through his use of the written word. I suggest that al-
Suyūṭī seeks to assert his authority as a superior scholar at a time in which claims to practice
independent legal reasoning (ijtihād) were often met with hostility by members of the scholarly
community.

Each chapter is intended to analyze in detail a different aspect of al-Suyūṭī’s legal persona as
well as a different rhetorical strategy that the author uses to establish, defend, and maintain his
authority. The texts examined as case studies include: a legal opinion (fatwā) concerning
scholarly stipends funded by ‘public’ endowments, a fatwā condemning the study of logic,
independent treatises and sections of the author’s autobiography dealing with the concepts of
ijtihād and tajdīd (religious renewal), and a book on legal precepts (qawā‘id).

I assume that the author’s choice of form and genre is deliberate and that his use of language
speaks to his pragmatic goals. In order to claim the rank of mujtahid (jurist capable of
independent reasoning) and mujaddid (renewer of religion), al-Suyūṭī must speak and act as
such. To understand how al-Suyūṭī uses language to accomplish these goals, I incorporate into
my analysis theories and methodological tools from the realm of sociolinguistics, including
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framing techniques, interdiscursivity, communities of practice, critical discourse analysis, and
pragmatics. Sociolinguistic theories are a valuable means with which to understand not only
what the author wishes to convey but also how he says it and why he chooses to say it in the way
that he does.

Finally, this research allows me to evaluate, to some degree, the relative effectiveness of al-
Suyūṭī’s efforts to frame his persona as a jurist and to negotiate this identity in the world through
practice. I conclude that, while al-Suyūṭī’s framing effort may have failed to convince most of
his contemporaries, he is vindicated by the continuing legacy of his works.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research would not have been possible without the support of so many wonderful
colleagues, family, and friends. First, I would like to thank members of my committee who
generously devoted time to this project, including Felicitas Opwis, John Voll, and Reem
Bassiouney. Dr. Opwis exemplifies what a great advisor can be. She encouraged me when I
needed encouragement and challenged me when I needed to be challenged, all the while
managing to be both professional and caring. Whenever I need to place a figure or intellectual
trend within its historical context, I know that I can rely on the insights of Dr. Voll. I am truly
fortunate to have such an excellent group of mentors. Any errors in the text are, of course,
entirely my own.

In addition to my committee, other colleagues offered valuable insights and advice, including
Jonathan A.C. Brown. I was lucky enough to meet Elizabeth Sartain and to benefit from her
incredible knowledge of al-Suyūṭī’s work during the crucial first stages of the research. I would
also like to thank in particular Shaykh ‘Amr al-Wardānī of Egypt’s Dār al-Iftā’ who helped to
make al-Suyūṭī’s legacy come alive and who carved out many hours of his busy schedule to
discuss the texts with me. This work also continues the legacy of the outstanding academic
mentors who helped to guide my nascent scholarly career, especially Tamara Sonn, Barbara
Stowasser, and Michele Dunne.

This research benefited from a number of grants and research opportunities. I would like to
thank Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for their financial support
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of my graduate studies over the last eight years. A Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS)
fellowship sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education allowed me to pursue language study
and dissertation research in Cairo. Also, a Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Fellowship helped to
support my research during the summer of 2010.

Last but not least, I am grateful for the support of my family and friends. My friend and
colleague Aja Chaker stepped in at a key moment and she along with Rebecca Kallem have been
a great source of strength. I am always thankful for my amazing family, especially my parents,
who patiently read through drafts of this work and who have been constant in their support of
me. I consider them to be my role models, both intellectually and spiritually. This research
would not have been completed in a timely manner without the help of my in-laws, particularly
my marvelous mother-in-law, Roxanne Hernandez. My husband Nelson deserves special
acknowledgement for his unfailing kindness and loving care. Finally, I wish to express
boundless affection for our sweet Helen who was a newborn at the same time that this
dissertation was coming into the world. Your mama loves you!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………….. 1
Chapter One: Literature Review ………………………………………………………………. 27
Chapter Two: Al-Suyūṭī’s Waqf Fatwā ……………………………………………………….. 53
Chapter Three: Al-Suyūṭī’s Logic Fatwā …………………………………………………….. 95
Chapter Four: Al-Suyūṭī’s Tajdīd Genre …………………………………………………….. 138
Chapter Five: Al-Suyūṭī’s Legal Precepts …………………………………………………… 183
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………… 227

Appendix One: Waqf Fatwā Translation …………………………………………………….. 249
Appendix Two: Logic Fatwā Translation ……………………………………………………. 252
Appendix Three: Tajdīd Chapter Translation ………………………………………………... 255
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………. 264
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INTRODUCTION

The identity formation of a public intellectual does not occur at random; it takes work.
The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare, looks at the efforts of sixteenth-century European scholars to shape and control
their own identities. He calls this endeavor “self-fashioning,” or the achievement of “a
distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and
behaving.”1 Erving Goffman, speaking from a sociological perspective, would refer to this
process as establishing “footing,” meaning how one positions or aligns oneself in a
conversation.2 Goffman assumes that more goes on during a conversation than a simple speaker-
hearer model of communication. To grasp the full effect of a speaker’s efforts to convey a
“projected self” to several different actual and imagined audiences, one must take into account
the larger context in which the discourse is produced and consumed.
Greenblatt points out the obvious difficulty in attempting to assess the constructed
identity of a sixteenth-century figure who, in the present day, exists only in the literary artifacts
that he or she left behind for others to read. Since we cannot interview the Renaissance or
medieval scholar, we must approach him or her indirectly through interpretation. In interpreting
the text, one should approach it as a living document in dialogue with its social context,
including the context of the interpreter. As Greenblatt puts it: “Language, like other sign
systems, is a collective construction; our interpretive task must be to grasp more sensitively the
consequences of this fact by investigating both the social presence to the world of the literary

1 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 2.
2 Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p. 128.
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text and the social presence of the world in the literary text.”3 Even selecting a limited number
of “resonant texts,” as Greenblatt does, is in itself an act of interpretation imposed on the data.

Aims of the Study
This study looks at attempts by the fifteenth-century jurist, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, to
frame his authority as a superior jurist of his time in his legal writing. The research aims to
access the persona that al-Suyūṭī seeks to convey specifically as a jurist in his legal works and
examines how the author constructs and maintains this authority through his use of language. As
an interpreter of al-Suyūṭī and his world, I chose to analyze in detail a few texts that speak
particularly to the role of the jurist both in al-Suyūṭī’s personal frame of reference as well as
within the larger context of late medieval Mamluk Cairo. The texts on which the study is
focused are ones that the author produced in the midst of conflict and that stirred up further
controversy in their own right. I assume that it is in these moments of crisis that al-Suyūṭī feels
most keenly the need to reinforce his own authority relative to that of his opponents.
The “resonant texts” that I selected for this study are two fatwās (legal opinions) by al-
Suyūṭī written in response to specific issues, various treatises and a section from his
autobiographical work concerning the concepts of ijtihād (independent legal reasoning) and
tajdīd (religious renewal), plus al-Suyūṭī’s full-length book on legal precepts (qawā‘id fiqhiyya).
My strategy in approaching these texts is to look both for internal evidence in the text and
external evidence in the context in order to access the author and his world indirectly.4 Each
chapter is intended to illustrate a different aspect of al-Suyūṭī’s legal persona and contains, I

3 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 5.
4 Kristen Brustad discusses the potential benefits of such an approach in her article, “Imposing Order:
Reading the Conventions of Representation in al-Suyūṭī’s Autobiography,” in Edebiyāt 7:2 (1997), pp.
327-344.
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hope, a balance between detailed textual analysis and “big picture” questions about the historical
and social context within which the author was operating. Taken as a whole, the individual
aspects form a coherent framework within which the jurist situates himself and frames his own
authority.
Al-Suyūṭī makes a good subject for discourse analysis because he has a distinct narrative
and an ardent desire to profess his authority through the written word. While many viewed his
claim to be the mujaddid (renewer) of the age as the final outrage in a series of audacious and
arrogant assertions, it also reads as a tragic plea by a man who “saw himself as the only scholar
capable of preserving knowledge in the face of increasing ignorance.”5 I hypothesize that al-
Suyūṭī’s effort to frame his own legal persona represents an assertion of authority on the part of
the author. The uproar that al-Suyūṭī’s opinions caused among his contemporaries suggests that
he was an active and vocal participant in an ongoing power struggle and, as such, had something
to prove within his own community of scholars. Al-Suyūṭī’s fatwās and treatises read as the
work of a scholar who sought to construct his own identity in the face of a constant discursive
assault on his authority – a conflict that is reflected in his use of language.
In this study, I aim to answer three broad questions: What does al-Suyūṭī want to say?
How does he say it? What was heard then and now? Or, to address the same questions but from
a different angle: What do the results of the study tell us about al-Suyūṭī’s efforts to frame his
own legal persona and to assert his authority as a jurist? In what ways does the methodology
contribute to these results? What implications does the study have for understanding the role of
the jurist during al-Suyūṭī’s era and how is this relevant to the contemporary context?

5 E.M. Sartain, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī: Biography and Background, vol. 1 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1975), p. 115.
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