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 ii 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 iii 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. iv 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 v 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! vi 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 vii 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. 1 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.