Her Praise

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"Lady of the women of the worlds"

By Ruth E. Rowe (2008)

[Excerpt]


ABSTRACT

This thesis seeks to explore and survey the different understandings of Fatima bint Muhammad “al-Zahra’” in different Shia social, religious, and political contexts. This investigation situates Fatima within a larger Islamic conceptualization of the saint or holy figure. Her liminal status in close proximity to the divine grants her a potency that facilitates her continued importance to Shia Muslims, though her memory differs in time and place. The contexts for this discussion range from Arabia in the centuries after her death, Safavid and Qajar Persia and modern Iran, and South Asia. Memories of Fatima reflect the concerns of Shia communities, political and religious leaders, and individuals for whom she remains a saint; she serves as a mechanism by which holiness is accessed and communities and persons are created, consolidated, preserved, and understood. For the scholar, Fatima provides invaluable insight into creative religious change through the lens of the Shia Islam.


LADY OF THE WOMEN OF THE WORLDS

A brief introduction

In his prayer-book Mafatih al-jinan, which contains centuries of traditional Shia devotions, ‘Abbas al-Qummi (d. 1941) includes a prayer of salutation to be read at the grave of Fatima al-Zahra’. The daughter of the Prophet Muhammad is described within it as the “lady of the first and last women of the worlds” (sayyidat nisa’ al-‘alamin min alawwalin wa al-akhirin). This is an especially appropriate title for Fatima, given that she has served as a holy figure for many Muslim communities since the 7th century, a saint in many “worlds.” But, Fatima is relevant not only to women in different historical contexts, but to a variety of people: pious persons, kings, politicians, and scholars, among others. Fatima also brings into question the desire of any historian to define a historical figure based on a single life-narrative, and she reflects those worlds over which she is sayyida as much as she is honored by people in them.

This paper is not, in any sense, an exhaustive survey of Fatima’s roles and importance in Shia piety and religious politics. I will provide, instead, a series of examples and varying historical contexts in which there exist paradoxically disparate but contiguous “Fatimas.” It is through an exploration of these contexts that one can understand not only Fatima al-Zahra’ herself, but also the “space,” “text” and historical figure that such a person represents: the “holy subject,” in a sense, because Fatima’s potency, I will argue, is tied inextricably to notions of God and human holiness. Fatima is a tool in Muslim piety that believers can use to relate to God; she exists at the interface between the divine and the profane, as does any saint. In occupying such a space in Shia piety, then, Fatima “lives” unbounded by any “historical,” human lifetime. She is therefore of interest to historians not only for how she was, but for how she is remembered to have been (how she is, how she becomes). It is by means of her memory that notions of Shia identity, community, and power can be elucidated in various historical contexts.

While I will briefly describe early biographies of Fatima and occasionally make mention of her role among Sunni Muslims, this paper will focus upon a survey of her prominence and importance in Shia society and discourse from the birth of the Shia community in the late 7th century to post-revolutionary Islamic thought in Iran at the turn of the 21st century. Fatima is in many ways a figure who is at the center of a negotiation of identity and of past and present within Shia society. This negotiation is, in Fatima’s case, centered on a person within and as tradition. I will explore Fatima as invented tradition, but without implying any inauthenticity in the ways in which she is invoked.

She is a figure in history who is socially creative, who provides a means by which social actors situate themselves within their given present. She was and is a means of engagement with the past, present, and future, whether for political legitimacy, religiosity, or the definition of idealized womanhood. In that sense, Fatima is a historical being whose importance cannot be contained within a single biography, time-period, devotional practice, or even gender. Fatima, in being remembered in countless ways and for various purposes, brings to the fore questions about the nature of the historical subject itself, and specifically the nature of the holy subject. It is with this holiness that one must begin.


HOLY FIGURES AS THE VEILS OF GOD

Regarding Islamic holiness and Fatima’s subsequent role in history

From al-Miswar b. Makhrama, the Messenger of God said:

“Fatima is part of me, so whoever angers her, angers me.”

[al-Bukhari’s Sahih]



How can the temporal tell about the eternal? ...God transcends form and letters.
His speech is outside of letters and voices, but He implements His speech through whatever words, voices, or languages He wills.

[Rumi]


Fatima al-Zahra’, as a Shia figure of devotion, might be said to have as many faces as there are communities and individual believers; her relevance is not limited to or determined by her single, human lifetime. As the wife and mother of imams and the daughter of Muhammad, she occupies a space in sacred genealogy and religious memory that would afford her even a vicarious holiness were she not believed to possess any herself. However, Fatima is not without her own sanctity in the memories and practices of the generations of Muslims who have lived in the millennia after her death. Before discussing specific examples of how Fatima has been remembered in different historical contexts and what such varied memories have facilitated or illustrated, I want to begin with an exploration of how one might conceptualize holiness and the holy person, in addition to how one might study such a person historically. This discussion will provide the theoretical and religious substrate and framework with which I will engage the investigation of Fatima’s historical role and presence.

On the level of Shia piety as one of the Masumeen, the “Infallible Ones,” I would suggest that Fatima serves for Muslims as a human vehicle for God’s holiness on earth. I propose, then, that it is within her role as an Islamic “saint” that she makes accessible the divinity of God to those who lack familial closeness to the Prophet or mystical closeness to God. Margaret Smith, in her work on the celebrated female Sufi Rabia al- Adawiyya (d. 801), notes that before Sufism arose as a mode of Islamic practice, women like Fatima and Amina (the Prophet’s mother) were recognized as saints. What is “saint” in Islam?

And do only Sufis occupy that space? Frederick Denny, in his discussion of Sufi sainthood, notes that the English term “saint” is problematic in describing the Islamic holy person. The Arabic word that is often being translated, wali, is concerned more with the relationship (with God) embodied in the saint than a quality or virtue. However, the early Christian saint – the category of which colours the English-language understanding of the term – was positioned in this intercessory space. Because Sufism developed as a means by which mystics might move closer to God, so must the veneration of those Sufi saints be located in a similar context.8 Sainthood is as much an attribution as a quality, based upon the holy person’s perceived and actualized closeness with God. And surely, not only Sufis can be remembered as occupying such an intermediary space!

[ Note: In Imami Shiasm, the holiest of spiritual leaders are the Fourteen Infallible Ones (or the “Fourteen Very-Pure,” as Henry Corbin translates): Muhammad, Fatima, her husband Ali, their sons al-Hasan and al-Husayn, and the subsequent nine imams. Their holy infallibility, isma, is inherited, and the bloodline’s holiness is guaranteed as it is linked directly to Fatima (and thus her father) and first imam Ali. The original family of Muhammad, Fatima, Ali, al-Hasan, and al-Husayn are also often called the ahl al-kisa’ (“those of the cloak,” based on various hadiths in which Muhammad wraps the other four in his cloak), or, in the South Asian context, the Panjtan Pak for both Imami and Ismaili Shia.
Wali, in Arabic, comes from the verb waliya, “to be close to.”
Thus, when not translated as “saint,” wali has been also translated as “friend” (and wali Allah as “friend of God”). I will discuss the term wali in more detail shortly.]


In this paper I will refer to Fatima as a saint, though she was never a Sufi shaykha. I use the term with the recognition that she has been located historically as an intermediary and intercessory figure whose holiness stems from her liminal position between the created, human world and the divine. Traditionally, it is through saints like Fatima that Muslims have accessed the divine power of God, whether for pious or political reasons.

When a deity cannot be experienced directly by those whose religious practice is not explicitly mystical, figures like Fatima are the loci for an individual or a community’s connection to and experience of that divine reality. To use a metaphorical framework drawn from Islamic discourse, Fatima’s position in Shia religiosity has been, throughout history, like that of a human veil covering a god who might otherwise be inaccessible.

The religious metaphor of the veil appears in Sufi theological writings, most often with regard to how the earthly world and its inhabitants are positioned in contrast and connection to the divine world and the creator. In his seminal and influential Sufi manual, al-Risala al-qushayriyya, Abu al-Qasim al-Qushayri (d. 1072) of Khorasan devotes a small section to describing the mystic’s understanding of al-satr, the veil. He notes that “the ordinary folk are covered by concealment, whereas the elect are witnessing the permanent self-manifestation [of God].” However, even the elect (the Sufis/mystics) cannot bear direct witness to the True Reality that is God without being “completely annihilated;” even Muhammad asked that his heart be veiled.

Scholar and Sufi Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) also treats Sufis as a spiritual elite able to better perceive a god who is veiled from humanity. He spends a whole chapter of his short, mystical work Mishkat al-anwar (“The Niche of Lights”) to explore the notion of God’s veiled concealment as expressed in an allegedly prophetic hadith: “God has seventy veils of light and darkness; were He to lift them, the august glories of His face would burn up everyone whose eyesight perceived Him.” Al-Ghazali places these veils between God and his creatures (the mahjubun, “the veiled”), and the composition of the veil, hiding God from human view, is dependent upon the human being. These veils are reflective of the person’s soul; if a soul exists in “sheer darkness,” that darkness will veil the person from God, for example. Al-Ghazali’s understanding of the veil locates its origins in the (faulty, non-divine) human experience, though he also recognizes that were the veils absent, as in a pure mystical experience, the face of God would “burn up everything perceived by the sights and insights of the observers.”

Such an annihilation of all phenomena, including self, is not an intended or possible goal for all Muslims. They must then, using Al-Ghazali’s metaphor, live and relate to God within a veiled state by means of those veils, which are symbolic of their apparent separation from God.

Writing in Damascus in 1227, the great Andalusi shaykh Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240) likens Paradise, al-janna, to God’s veil and then that veil to the human being.

God, speaking to his created, says,

And my paradise is nothing other than you, for you veil me with your essence (dhat). For I am not known except by you, just as you are not [existent] except by me. For whoever knows you, knows me, while I am not known [if] you are not known.

God is known via human beings, his creations, a sentiment that is mirrored commonly in other Sufi works; in a popular divine hadith, God claims that he was a hidden treasure and created man to be known.17 In both this hadith and in Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought, humans act as mechanisms by which other human beings might access and comprehend the divine, providing a concept and a form to what is otherwise non-conceptual and formless.
Fatima, saintly in a general sense, occupies this space more explicitly as an intercessor/intermediary to Muslim devotees; it is through her, for example, that God might be known to humanity (and humanity might relate itself to God, ultimately).

Saints and prophets are the result of an inevitable rift between the holy and earthly realms, however much such a rift is illusory for its human presumption of duality. Holy persons are necessary, however, not only because they provide an interface between earth and heaven for the benefit of other human beings, but also in that God cannot be comprehended or experienced by humans without his “veils.” The celebrated Persian poet-shaykh Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) engages this understanding of the veil in his recorded Discourses (Fihi ma fihi). At times he treats the device of the veil metaphorically to indicate all human desires (for food, companionship, etc.), which “veil” and stand as substitute, in a sense, for the ultimate human craving for God. Even the mystic’s desire to experience God is a kind of veil because of its fundamental humanness, 18 though it is a necessity, as normal humans cannot experience God directly: God has created these “veils” for a good purpose. If He showed His beauty without a veil, we would not be able to bear it or benefit from it because we are benefited and strengthened indirectly.

The veils of desire, then, both conceal and connect the divine to human beings. In another discussion, Rumi describes Muhammad’s prophetic “intoxication,” wherein he would speak “while beside himself, [and then say] ‘God spoke;’” while Muhammad’s tongue moved, it was God that directly animated it. The Prophet’s earthly form served as a vehicle for the divine, just as the Qur’an, for instance, serves as such a vehicle in the declaration that it was deliberately composed in the Arabic language to guide believers. Presumably as it implies a duality of believer/God that would, eventually, be dissolved.

In the second quotation that prefaces this section, Rumi rhetorically asks if it is possible for something temporal to speak of the eternal. How does the earthly describe or access the divine? In his answer, he says that God uses earthly forms – human words and speech, for example – to connect to his creatures. God inspires his prophets and saints so that ordinary people who are caught up in the mundane world might remember the pure nature within them that is ever mindful of God. The function, then, of these holy persons is to remind humans of God and of the fact that his face is everywhere, despite all that veils it from human sight and experience.

[ note: “And God’s is the east and the west: and wherever you turn, there is God’s countenance (wajh). Behold, God is infinite (wasi), all-knowing (alim)” (Qur’an 2:115). ]

Later in the Discourses, Rumi asserts that form is to be attacked as only a shell.
As a veil separating the Sufi from God, form is something to be rent in one’s mystical search for God’s omnipresent face and reality.
At the start of this section I suggested that one could liken holy human beings – “saints” in a generic sense – to veils. One can characterize them as intermediary figures who provide a non-abstract link between the holy (God) and the profane (this world).
However, many of the Sufi shaykhs just discussed consider the veil a hindrance that must be dissolved in the mystical quest for divine union. What role, then, can the saint have as a veil, if the veil might be seen as an obstruction? In Sufi thought, in a very general sense as we have seen, the world and its constructs (desires, speech, even Paradise) serve as conceptualizations that veil the direct reality of God from mankind; this veiling is both a blessing and a cause for forgetfulness. In the ordinary understanding of phenomena, God exists separate from his believers. Mystics are those who seek to bridge or deny this separation, even at the cost of their own “separate” existence from God – but how might others connect to him if theirs is not an explicitly mystical path?

That I have selected a Sufi concept to frame an otherwise largely “exoteric” discussion of Fatima al-Zahra is not without cause. Sufis, as mystics, are personally and directly concerned with experiencing God, an activity that mirrors, in some ways, how Shia Muslims (and lay-people, more generally) relate to their saints: as a means of getting closer to the divine via wholly created and constructed concepts (the saint and his or her charisma). Rumi notes that the body (“form”) is important in that “without it neither can works be effected nor can the goal be reached.” In the 13th century Persian work, Rawda-yi taslim, a compilation of the teachings of Shia scholar Nasir al-Din Tusi(d. 1274), a Shia view of sainthood is put forth with regards to the prophets and imams:
In so far as human beings are unable to be receptive to His Almighty Command without mediation, it was necessary that there should be intermediaries vis-à-vis the Divine Command. Those people whose consciousness (khatir) behaved as does a [translucent] glass held up to the sun were the Prophets.

The likening of prophets to transparent glass through which the light of God is known is parallel to my use of the veil metaphor. The imam, in turn, is that person who allows that prophetic, holy light to be realized in the intellects of gnostics.

Furthermore, the 20th century Iranian religious scholar, Allama Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai (d. 1981), does not hesitate in considering the “esoteric” aspects of Shia Islam. The ‘Allama, who studied (both on his own and with a teacher) the Fusus alhikam of Ibn ‘Arabi, writes that the gnostic is one who sees the world as a mirror of divine Reality, a visible means of comprehending and making apparent the “Invisible Deity.” He notes that such an individual recalls, the Qur’an in mind, that “the world and its phenomena are all and in every aspect signs and portents of God.”

While the Shia tradition has never been wanting for esoteric interpretation, Shia Sufis have been somewhat scarce, comparatively. Shia tariqas (orders) did arise in Persia from the 13th century onward alongside Sunni orders who mystically favored Ali, Fatima’s husband and the first Shia imam, and his family. The sectarian affiliation of these orders was often ambiguous; for example, the Safaviyya order, named for Shaykh Safi al-Din Ishaq (d. 1334), would produce the messianic Shah Isma‘il (d. 1524), the first Safavid emperor who declared Ithna ashari Shiasm the state religion. But the order did not originate as Shia, and when it “changed” is unknown. Nur al-Din Muhammad Nimatullah b. Abdallah (d. 1431), founder of the Shia Nimatullahiyya order, writes in his poems that the selfhood of the world is but the world-as-veil, and that world “arises from the diffusion of His universal Being.” His conception of how creation relates to God (as a mere sign of God’s being) is very much the sort of theology found in Ibn Arabi’s or Rumi’s thought. Can we then conflate Shia and Sufi conceptions of holiness and, then, conceptions of “sainthood?”

Vincent Cornell, in his seminal work on Moroccan Sufism, notes that it is essential to understand sainthood as it functions socially and doctrinally, and he distinguishes (but does not separate) an individual’s state of being a saint (walaya) from how his or her saintly actions are experienced by others (wilaya). In that sense, we can see the wali as a person who has sainthood from within and is given sainthood by his or her followers.

The holy person exists, then, in a circle of affirming and re-affirming relationships with the divine and mundane worlds. Ibn Arabi discusses walaya, in particular, at length in his writings, and he locates it as a spiritual position occupied by those saints (awliya) in following Muhammad’s prophetic example, though the former cannot be prophets themselves. So, “sainthood” is based upon both a connection to the divine and also the ordinary people who seek that connection and accomplish it by the mediation of others.

As I mentioned briefly above, the Sufi “saint” is often translated from the Arabic wali (friend), whose holiness results from personal spiritual practice. In Shiasm, the imam is also considered the wali Allah, but by benefit of sacred genealogy, following in Muhammad’s footsteps and acting as an intermediary figure between Muslims and the divine. For example, in a prayer to Fatima in the Mafatih al-jinan, one recites, “Witness, [O Fatima], that I am pure by your walaya and the walaya of the descendents of your house, upon them all may God grant blessings.” Thus, the walaya of the Masumeen, their holy post, is the means by which the Shia Muslim is purified, as they mediate that access to the divine. J. Spencer Trimingham distinguishes Shia and Sufi Islam based on this apparent difference in the conception of human holiness: the Shia require the “mediatory” imam while the Sufis do not, accessing God directly. This distinction ignores, however, the fact that tombs of Sufi saints are venerated by non-Sufis in the same sense that imams’ tombs are often venerated (by non-imams); the Sufi himor herself might not need an intermediary, but those non-mystics venerating his or her memory do. So, we might approach the Shia Masumeen and Sufi shaykhs in a similar manner with regards to what appears to be a parallel if not entirely identical sainthood.

In his consideration of holy “charisma” in Islam, Liyakat N. Takim states, “it is through [the imams] that God can be worshipped and known.” Takim goes on to locate the holy figure – whether Shia, Sunni, or Sufi – in this intermediary position between God and mankind. Takim particularly relies on Rudolf Otto’s articulation of holiness in his consideration of divine charisma. Otto (d. 1937) was an influential Lutheran theologian and philosopher who understood the divine both in terms of its rational/moral aspects and its wholly irrational/”numinous” qualities. Otto views the mystical path to be a particular but not exclusive method of religious experience. It is not only the mystics who might access non-rational holiness in addition to its moral aspects. The numinous divine “comes into being in and amid the sensory data and empirical material of the natural world and cannot anticipate or dispense with those, yet it does not arise out of them, but only by their means.” A prophet is therefore to the religious sphere what the artist is to art; he (or she) is a creative force realizing something non-rational and abstract. I propose, then, that the prophet or saint becomes a means of rationalizing holiness by which the non-mystic relates him- or herself to God/the Holy. In Allama Tabatabai’s words, noted previously, the world mirrors God; thus, it will be through that veil of the world that one can access the numinous divine, if indirectly. Holy persons are positioned in this liminal space of the world-veil.

In the Qur’an, God encourages Muhammad, the exemplar of Islamic sainthood, to say to mankind, “If you love God, follow me, [and] God will love you and forgive you your sins.” A Muslim is encouraged then, to relate to God through obedience to the Prophet’s message and example. Muhammad was divinely inspired in order to guide people, to provide a model by which believers might become close to God (or, mystically-speaking, in us (Otto, 12-13). Fascinatingly, Otto is also concerned with “veils,” though he never uses the term as such. He stresses that all the “Greek words” and categories that he or anyone uses to describe the holy/numinous are not real; the divine is, fundamentally, a priori and non-rational, however much we try to rationalize it to benefit our understanding (Otto, 116). Again, we find that human conceptualization veils God/the divine, though such concepts are necessary. realize their natural closeness to him).

Annemarie Schimmel locates the figure of the Prophet at the center of Islamic practice, as it is through his being a “beautiful model” (uswa hasana) that Muslims are able to be Muslim through what she terms the “ideal of the imitatio Muhammadi.” Muhammad is the “intermediate principle,” the “suture between the Divine and created world... the isthmus between Necessary and contingent existence.” Muhammad is the ultimate, earthly link between Muslims (as creatures) to God, and so drawing near to Muhammad (by honoring him or following his example) is a means of drawing near to God. “Muhammadan” emulation/practice, as a pious act, is one that is therefore creative, as it is the cultivation of the pious person through contact and interaction with the Prophet’s holy character.

Muhammad’s holiness is not held exclusively in his particular person or memory, however. Indeed, it is through the posthumous perpetuation of his holiness (his baraka, often) that Shia religious identity formed. The Prophet’s role as intermediary between God and mankind is preserved historically in the Fourteen Infallible Ones, who inherited his holy position of mediator between God and mankind by way of his daughter Fatima and his cousin and her husband, Ali b. Abi Talib. Takim notes that for the Shia “religious identity is conceived in terms of devotion to the imams,” who also serve as exemplary models of piety for mankind. Like Muhammad, whose baraka they share and make available on earth, the Fourteen Masumeen function as intermediary figures linking the profane to the divine. Fatima al-Zahra’, though not an imam, is such a figure.

How might we approach Fatima, in particular, as an Islamic saint? Many scholars of Fatima, as I will discuss in the next section, have sought to locate her varying roles in Islamic piety as indicative of a changing ideal of womanhood as espoused by (male) historiographers. In such historiography, female figures are “preserved” historically (by men) as models for women in a given present. Just as Muhammad and the other male Masumeen might be considered moral and pious models for Shia men and remembered in such a light, Fatima is the figure of emulation available for women. Subsequently, some modern historians seek a “true” Fatima underneath layers of what is perceived as a historiographical bias, wanting to reveal Fatima’s “her-story.” Fatima’s being female is thus conceived as a central factor in how she is considered a saint.

Jamal Elias, in his treatment of women mystics in Islam, similarly distinguishes female holiness from male. He describes two paradigms of Muslim womanhood: the profane “female” and the ideal, divine “feminine.” The former is the ordinary woman, subordinate in nature to man, who aspires to emulate the celestial, saintly woman who is characterized by her purity. He discusses an array of women saints in the Islamic tradition who embody the holy feminine, mentioning briefly, for instance, that Fatima is an object of pious contemplation in Shia theosophic thought, whereby an individual (man) might access or know God. Elias asserts that “through contemplating and emulating the example of a saintly woman, an ordinary woman, the trivialized female, can attain the level of glorified feminine.” But, while he focuses on male Sufi views of “woman” (female/feminine), Elias describes Islamic practice as fundamentally gendered, wherein gender is explicit and central to an understanding of God.

[ note: This particular practice is based upon the assertion that “he who knows Fatima knows God,” explicitly supporting her relevance to male mystics seeking closeness to God.]

How critical is Fatima’s gender and her embodiment of Elias’ divine “feminine” to an understanding of her historical positions and functions in Shia piety? This question will be a central consideration throughout this paper. One can argue that Fatima’s gender is important as it relates to women within a greater Muslim community (the Shia in particular) that has developed long after her life and death. I want to suggest, however, that Fatima is also a means of political legitimization and devotional reverence as much as symbol of ideal womanhood. She is a multi-functional, multi-potent subject (both as woman and as human being) and it is through the various ways that she has been “reimagined” that we might more fully understand her role in various negotiated “presents” throughout history... presents of women, men, and communities as a whole.

Historiography, hagiography, and history itself are exercises of the present. Eric Hobsbawm asserts that scholars must constantly encounter...


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