Constantine: Friends and Other Strangers

CHAPTER TWO CONSTANTINE: FRIENDS AND OTHER STRANGERS Dreams Twenty-Five-Thirty-Nine 26 Mu!J,arram 852-7 Rabi' I 852 1 April 1448-11 May 1448 During the six documented weeks of his stay in Constantine, Zawawi hectically immersed himself in a farrago of business, per sonal, and spiritual affairs. The death of Safrawi posed a number of dilemmas, most immediately, the question of his spiritual sue- cession and Zawawi's relationship to his sufi brethren. Moreover, just being in Constantine with its assortment of new and stimulat ing people also contributed to Zawawi's frenzied state of activity. From Zawawi's standpoint there were interesting people of possi ble spiritual significance everywhere-in the mosque, at the city gate, at the public fountain. They all found their way into the Tul_ifa either as straightforward entries or as part of Zawawi's dream conversation with Mul_iammad. His domestic arrangements in Constantine at this time were especially complicated, and they induced considerable anxiety in Zawawi. He did not make matters better when he acquired a female slave whose morals were, he al leged, dubious. 1. Sioi FARAJ, THE Pswoo--CHRISTIAN Prior to his death Safrawi told Zawawi about a certain Sidi Faraj in Constantine. Good to his word, Zawawi went to look him up im mediately following Safrawi's funeral. The contrast between his late Shaykh and this new figure could not be stronger. Ever mind ful of the shari'a (Islamic law) and its observance, Shaykh al- Safrawi and his Bijayan followers were representatives of a grow ing movement in Ifriqiya toward formally organized sufi orders. Sidi Faraj, on the other hand, represented a radically different type of sufi. Although Zawawi does not use the term himself, surely he recognized in Sidi Faraj the mallimati. This is the "blame- worthy" sufi, a spiritual free agent, iconoclastic and antinomian, CONSTANTINE: FRIENDS AND OTHER STRANGERS 75 the epitome of Jung's archetypical trickster.1 Along these lines a historian of Fez identifies a nineteenth-century malamati sufi (co incidentally named Mu}:iammad al-Zawawi) whose most notewor thy feature was his huge bulk and appetite; he could eat forty loaves of bread in under an hour. 2 The hallmark of a malamati is outrageous behavior. At the other end of the Islamic world in Harat, Zawawi's Persian contemporary Jami (d. 898/1494) gra ciously described the Malamatiyya as those who practiced in the extreme the sufi ideals of ikhla~ and ~idq, absolute sincerity toward God, while simultaneously hiding their good deeds and their ritual observance from public view. 3 The peculiar Sidi Faraj had no home but lived in the public fountain. In best malamati fashion, he spoke "in a manner in which the Manifest was demolished," identifying himself to Zawawi not as a sufi but as a Christian ( na~rani). "I am one of their supporters," Sidi Faraj declared, "I give them refuge here." Christianity was the proper faith, books of Islamic learning were worthless, and only those willing to convert to Christianity need apply to him. Zawawi later explains how he rationalized Faraj's profession of Christianity. The immediate association which Faraj's profession of Christianity had for Zawawi was that of the Ahl al-Suffa, or People of the Bench.4 The latter were among the Prophet Mu }:iammad's Medinan followers known as the An~ar, or Helpers. Ac cording to Arab etymologists, the word for Christian, na~rani, de rives not from place name Nazareth but from the verb n~ara, to help. Thus, the words for both Christians and An~ar have the same root, and Zawawi cites several Quranic verses in which some form of na~ara appears. 5 By likening Sidi Faraj to the People of 1 Joseph L. Henderson, "Ancient myths and modem man," in C.J.Jung et al., Man and his Symbols (Garden City, NY, 1964) 112-14. 2 MuJ:iammad al-Kattani, Salwat al-anfiis wa-mul_iiiditha al-akyiis bi-man uqbira min al-'ulamii' wa-al-sulal_iii' (Fez, 1316/1898) 3:213. 3 'Abd al-Rahman ibn AJ:imad Jami, Nafal_iiit al-'uns, ed. Mahdi TawJ:iidpur, (Tehran?, 1337) 9-10. The classic treatise on the Malamatiyya is Abu 'Abd al Rahman Sula.mi, Risiilat al-maliimatiyya, in al-Maliimatiyya wa-al-$i1/iyya wa-ahl al futuwa, ed. A. Afifi (Alexandria, 1944) 86-120. For a study of a later Moroccan sufi who conformed to this type, see A.-L. Premare, 'Abd-er-Rahman el-Mejdub: mysticisme populaire, societe et pouvoir au Maroc au 16' siecle (Paris, 1985). 4 W. Montgomery Watt, "Ahl al-Suffa," E/2. 5 Quran 9: 11 7; 3: 123; 110: 1. "The verb na$ara has the connotation of helping a person wronged against his enemy. This is sufficient to explain why the Muslims of Medina were called al-Ansiir (sometimes ansiir al-nabi, 'the helpers of the .

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