© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 7 | doi 10.1163/15700585-12341455 Arabica 64

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 7 | doi 10.1163/15700585-12341455 Arabica 64 (2017) 405-441 brill.com/arab Esotericist Reading Communities and the Early Circulation of the Sufi Occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī’s Works Noah Gardiner Department of Religious Studies, University of South Carolina gardinen@mailbox.sc.edu Abstract The Ifrīqiyan cum Cairene Sufi Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. ca 622/1225 or 630/1232-1233) is a key figure in the history of the Islamicate occult sciences, particularly with regard to the “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ). Drawing on textual and manuscript evidence, this paper examines the role of esotericism—religious secrecy and exclusivity—in al-Būnī’s thought and in the promulgation and early circulation of his works in Egypt and environs. It is argued that al-Būnī intended his works only for elite Sufi initiates, and that, in the century or so after his death, they indeed circulated primarily in “esotericist reading communities,” groups of learned Sufis who guarded their contents from those outside their own circles. This tendency toward esotericism, and the eventual exposure of al-Būnī’s texts to a wider readership, are contextualized in relation to broader developments in late-medieval Mediterranean culture. Keywords Al-Būnī, esotericism, occultism, science of letters, Ayyūbid, Mamlūk, Egypt, Ibn ʿArabī, manuscript culture, Arabic manuscripts, Kabbalah Résumé Le soufi ifrīqiyien puis cairote Aḥmad al-Būnī (m. ca 622/1225 ou 630/1232-1233) est une figure clef de l’histoire des sciences occultes islamiques, en particulier en ce qui concerne la « science des lettres et des noms » (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ). En s’appuyant sur des données textuelles et manuscrites, cet article examine le rôle de l’ésotérisme— 406 Gardiner Arabica 64 (2017) 405-441 le secret et l’exclusivité religieux—dans la pensée d’al-Būnī et dans la promulgation et la diffusion premières de ses œuvres en Égypte et dans les environs. Il est démontré qu’al-Būnī conçut ses travaux uniquement à destination de l’élite des soufis initiés et que, à son époque et dans le siècle qui suivit sa mort, ceux-ci circulèrent principale- ment dans les « communautés lettrées ésotéristes », c’est-à-dire des groupes de soufis érudits qui préservaient leur contenu de ceux qui étaient en dehors de leur propre cercle. Cet engouement pour l’ésotérisme et la propagation des textes d’al-Būnī à long terme auprès d’un public plus large sont contextualisés à la lumière de l’évolution de la culture méditerranéenne à la fin du Moyen Âge. Mots clefs Al-Būnī, ésotérisme, occultisme, science des lettres, Ayyoubides, Mamlouks, Égypte, Ibn ʿArabī, culture manuscrite, manuscrits arabes, Kabbale … I have seen the sage and wise and pious who wagged their tongues and stretched out their hands to write of great and awesome things in their books and letters. But what is written abides in no cabinet, for often it may be lost or its owner may die, and the books thus come into the hands of fools and mockers, and consequently the Name of Heaven is desecrated. Isaac the Blind1 ⸪ Introduction: Written Secrets in the Late-Medieval Mediterranean In a letter written in the mid-1230s CE, the Provençal Kabbalist Isaac the Blind (d. 1235 CE) angrily warns some disciples that Kabbalistic secrets committed to writing are prone to exposure despite the best intentions of their authors. The precise circumstances of his disciples’ transgression are unclear, but Isaac expresses even greater wrath at the Kabbalists of Burgos, who, he asserts, 1  Quoted in Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications, transl. Jackie Feldman, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 71. 407 Esotericist Reading Communities Arabica 64 (2017) 405-441 discuss Kabbalistic teachings “openly in the marketplaces and in the streets,” such that “it is clear that their hearts have turned away from the divine.”2 Kabbalists of Isaac’s mindset were not alone in their concern that holy secrets committed to writing might be disseminated too freely by some of their peers, violating what often were claimed to be ancient traditions of secretive, exclu- sively oral transmission. In roughly the same period, on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, the great Sufi thinker Muḥyī l-Dīn b. ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), an Andalusian who had relocated to the eastern Islamicate world, penned Kitāb al-Mīm wa-l-wāw wa-l-nūn, a brief tract on certain aspects of the myste- rious “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ)—or “lettrism,” as scholars recently have come to call it—a body of Koran-inspired cosmological speculation linked to praxes for the realization of spiritual and material goals through the powers of the letters of the Arabic alphabet and the names of God. In it he warns against anything but the most coded and guarded discussions of lettrism in writing, lest ordinary people misunderstand or abuse this “science of the saints” (ʿilm al-awliyāʾ).3 He particularly discourages writing about those aspects of the science through which one can harness the occult properties (ḫawāṣṣ) of the letters and names in order to operate on the manifest world through talismans and related means. Meanwhile, however, a contemporary of Ibn ʿArabī’s, the Ifrīqiyan cum Cairene Sufi Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. Yūsuf al-Būnī l-Qurašī (d. ca 622/1225 or 630/1232-1233), was composing works that addressed many of those operative, occult aspects of lettrism, works for which he would posthumously come to be (in)famous. Did he fail to share Ibn ʿArabī’s concerns about the exposure of such knowledge to non-initiates? Or was he, as some have implied, a mere magician wrapping himself in the pious cloak of Sufism while peddling popular superstitions?4 2  Ibid.; for another discussion of Isaac’s letter see Eliot Wolfson, “Beyond the Spoken Word: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Medieval Jewish Mysticism”, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, eds Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 176 ff. 3  Ibn ʿArabī, Le Livre du mim, du waw, et du nun [Kitāb al-Mīm wa-l-wāw wa-l-nūn], ed. and transl. (in French) Charles Gilis, Beirut, Editions Albouraq, 2002, p. 56 ff. 4  Denis Gril insists that al-Būnī “was undoubtedly acting deliberately when he published” elements of the science of letters that “others either had kept under greater cover or had limited to oral transmission”; see “The Science of Letters”, in The Meccan Revelations, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz, New York, Pir Press, 2004, p. 143. Chodkiewicz attempts to distance Ibn ʿArabī’s lettrism from that of al-Būnī in his introduction to the same volume, p. 25. For typi- cal mid-20th-c. views on al-Būnī and the quality of his thought, which mostly dismiss him as a mere magician, see Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, Leiden, Brill, 1972, p. 390-391; Albert Dietrich, “al-Būnī, Abu l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. Yūsuf 408 Gardiner Arabica 64 (2017) 405-441 Al-Būnī’s works—and works anachronistically attributed to him, such as the large occult miscellany Šams al-maʿārif al-kubrā—came to be so widely copied and imitated that modern scholarship has long regarded him as a paragon of “popular Islam” and “magic,” and his works as having been the preserve of street-level occult practitioners and their presumably mostly-unlettered clientele.5 In a previous article I have argued against some of these assumptions, demonstrating on the basis of a large survey of Bunian manuscripts that over the course of the Mamlūk period, particularly from the mid-eighth/fourteenth-century onward, when copies seem to suddenly have multiplied, al-Būnī’s works came to find their readership largely among learned elites, eventually reaching into the households of ruling Mamlūk officials.6 In this paper I offer an analysis of the earliest phase of the career of the Bunian corpus—the century or so after al-Būnī’s death, a period from which only a few manuscripts survive—focusing on the role of esotericism in the thought and practices of al-Būnī and his early readers. In doing so I endeavor to draw connections between the content of al-Būnī’s works and his and his readers’ book-practices, i.e. their ways of teaching, reading, and transmitting his works, and to demonstrate the importance of attention to issues of manuscript-culture in studying the spread and reception of lettrism and other occult-scientific discourses.7 My central arguments are that, des- al-Ḳuras̲h̲ī al-Ṣūfī Muḥyī l-Dīn,” EI2; Armand Abel, “La place des sciences occultes dans la décadence”, in Classicisme et déclin culturel dans l’histoire de l’islam, eds Robert Brunschvig and Gustav Edmund von Grunenbaum, Paris, Éditions Besson, 1957, p. 291-318; cf. John Spencer Trimingham’s views on magic in late-medieval Sufism in The Sufi Orders in Islam, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 28. For a reading of al-Būnī that better grasps the origins of his thought see Pierre Lory, “La magie des lettres dans le Shams al-maʿārif d’al Būnī”, Bulletin d’Études Orientales, 39-40 (1987), p. 97-111. 5  E.g. Yahya Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya on Astrology: Annotated Translations of Three Fatwas”, in Magic and Divination in Early Islam, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, p. 280. 6  Noah Gardiner, “Forbidden Knowledge? Notes on the Production, Transmission, and Reception of the Major Works of Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 12 (2012), p. 81-143. 7  The term “manuscript culture(s)” refers to the socially embedded, physically embodied writing and reading practices of particular medieval milieux. The study of manuscript cultures is rooted uploads/Societe et culture/ esotericist-reading-communities-and-the.pdf

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