The Maʿrifat al-madhāhib (“Knowledge of the Sects”), sometimes entitled Tadhkirat al-madhāhib, is a short schematic overview of the seventy-two Islamic sects that enjoyed wide diffusion in both Arabic and Persian manuscripts from at least the eleventh century of the Hegira. It belongs, in genre, more to popular than to learned literature; various authors are named in the manuscripts, sometimes Abū Ḥanīfa. The work is identified by Voorhoeve as the third principal source of the *Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān* of Nuruddin ar-Raniri: it supplied Raniri with his schematic classification of the seventy-two sects into six groups of twelve, and with the names and dogmas of the individual sects.
Content and structure
The Maʿrifat al-madhāhib sets out the tradition of the seventy-three sects — that is, the seventy-two doomed plus one saved — that has been transmitted in various hadith. The seventy-two are presented as sprung from six original groups, each of which is subdivided into twelve. In the names of the sects and in the dogmas attributed to them, only minor divergences appear from one manuscript to another. After the seventy-two sects, some manuscripts add seven further sects drawn from a work of Abū’l-Qāsim ar-Rāzī — a mystic who died in 378 H — and one sect drawn from the *al-Fiqh al-akbar* of Abū Ḥanīfa. No other authorities are cited. The catalogues record no dated manuscript older than the eleventh century H, but an adaptation by Ibn Kamāl Pasha shows that the tract already existed around 900 H.
Manuscripts
Voorhoeve lists the following manuscripts of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib:
Arabic:
- Calcutta, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Ivanow 1726 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, author: Abū Ḥanīfa; copied in the 12th century H.
- Calcutta, Curzon Collection, Ivanow 672 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, anonymous; dated H. 1285.
- Rāmpūr, cat. I, 322 no. 305b — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Abū Ḥanīfa; undated.
- Rāmpūr, cat. I, 716 no. 11 — same as above.
- London, India Office Library, Levy 2033 — Tadhkirat al-madhāhib, author: Ibn ar-Rarrādj; 18th century.
- Berlin, in the margin of Spr. 831 f. 14v–43v (Ahlwardt 2185) — al-Madhāhib, author (or copyist?) Muḥammad ʿAẓīm al-ʿĀlamābādī; undated.
- Leningrad, A. M. Buch. 957 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Abū Ḥanīfa; undated.
- Gotha 849, 1 — no title, anonymous; H. 1115.
- Gotha 851, 1 — no title, anonymous; modern manuscript.
The last two Gotha manuscripts were bought by Seetzen in Cairo; the tract, Voorhoeve concludes, was therefore diffused not only in India and Persia but also in Egypt.
Persian:
- Calcutta, Curzon Collection, Ivanow 399(1) — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, author: Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ghazālī; undated. This manuscript diverges in the names of the six head-sects (Rāfiḍiyya, Khārijīyya, Jabriyya, Qadariyya, Muʿattiliyya, Mushabbihiyya).
- London, India Office Library, Ethé 1920(11) — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ghazālī; copied H. 1055 at Surat.
- London, India Office Library 2548 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Maḥmūd Ṭāhir; undated.
- London, India Office Library 2549 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ghazālī; H. 1137.
- In a manuscript of Abū’l-Maʿālī’s Kitāb Bayān al-adyān used by Schefer for his edition in the Chrestomathie persane, a list of sects at the beginning does not correspond to the text of the work; the names in this list are, save for a transposition and a lacuna, the same as in Maʿrifat al-madhāhib.
The seven sects added on the authority of Abū’l-Qāsim ar-Rāzī are all found in a small Arabic treatise of three pages in which he is named as author (London, India Office Library, Levy 1777).
The Moluccan manuscript
Among the Arabic manuscripts, Voorhoeve singles out Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 f. 3v–15v (Catalogus Codicum Orientalium IV, p. 293) as of exceptional importance. The text is provided with an interlinear Malay translation. It agrees completely with the *Tibjān* — not only, with small exceptions, in the names of the sects but also in the dogmas attributed to them; only the refutation of the aberrations, which always follows in the Tibjān, is missing. The agreement is so great that one might suppose one had before one an Arabic preliminary study by Raniri for his Tibjān, or an Arabic excerpt from the Malay Tibjān; but this hypothesis is refuted by the manuscript itself. The paper bears as watermark the arms of Thann in Alsace, recorded by Churchill as occurring in a document of 1612. And on f. 1v there is a note in the same hand as the text: Ini surat tatkala binasa Pulu Ai dalam bulan Rabiʿ al-awwal pada hari Senin dan pada hijrat Rasūl Allāh tūn sē ribu duapuluh tiga tahun dan tiga bulan — that is, “this writing [dates from] the time Pulu Ai was destroyed, in the month Rabīʿ I, on Monday, in the year of the Hijra of the Messenger of God — may God bless him and grant him salvation — one thousand twenty-three years and three months,” i.e. Monday 14 April 1614 (3 Rabīʿ I 1023). The manuscript looks unused; it was probably a copy made on paper brought by a European, shortly after the eruption of the Gunung Api of Pulu Ai in 1614, from an original that was itself somewhat older. The Malay of the interlinear translation is of the old-fashioned kind — using, for instance, pulang for pula. The Arabic is neatly written but full of errors.
The addition of seven sects derived from Abū’l-Qāsim ar-Rāzī and the attribution in the colophon to “Abū Ḥanīfa” (sic!) show that we have here an exemplar of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib with only the beginning missing, and otherwise showing some of the strange deviations that we also find in Raniri.
The Khaufiyya correspondence
The most striking example of the correspondence between the Moluccan manuscript and the Tibjān is found in the case of the Khaufiyya sect of the Jabriyya. The dogma of this sect, in all manuscripts of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib and of Ibn Kamāl Pasha’s adaptation, is: “A friend does not fear his friend. God is the Friend. Therefore man need not fear God” (fear — Arabic khauf — some sect-names are evidently given on the principle lucus a non lucendo). In the *Tibjān* and the Moluccan manuscript, by contrast, three dogmas are recorded for this sect, of which the last only roughly corresponds to that of the other manuscripts: “they fear no eternal punishment.” The second is also connected: “the heaven is real, the hell is not.” But what is one to make of the first dogma: “there are two gods, one on land and one at sea”? In no manuscript is such a belief attributed to any sect. Voorhoeve concludes that this correspondence is sufficient proof that Raniri used either the original of the Moluccan manuscript or a closely related exemplar as the source for the second part of his Tibjān.
Adaptations
The tract was adapted by Ibn Kamāl Pasha (d. 940 H) in his al-Maqālāt fī bayān ahl al-bidʿa waʾd-ḍalalāt, a small work that, despite divergences in detail, is constructed entirely on the schema of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib. Voorhoeve used the Leiden manuscript Cod. Or. 2937 of this adaptation (another manuscript: Gotha 852; perhaps the same: Risāla fī bayān al-firak ad-dālla, GALS II 670 no. 58).
Significance
The Maʿrifat al-madhāhib is, after the *Tamhīd* and the *al-Insān al-kāmil*, the third of the sources identified by Voorhoeve for the *Tibjān*. Its identification places the schematic classification of the seventy-two sects in the Tibjān — six groups of twelve — within the tradition of popular Muslim sect-literature that was diffused from Cairo to Calcutta. The Moluccan manuscript of Leiden, with its interlinear Malay translation and its note on the destruction of Pulo Ai in 1614, is itself a document of the first importance for the history of the Malay translation of Arabic scholastic texts in the Indonesian archipelago before Raniri.
See Also
- Abu Hanifa
- Abu’l-Kasim ar-Razi
- Acheh
- Ibn Kamal Pasha
- al-Fikh al-akbar
- al-Insan al-Kamil
- P. Voorhoeve
- Pulo Ai
- Raniri
- Tamhid fi bayan at-tawhid
- Tibjan fi ma’rifat al-adyan
Source
Twee Maleise geschriften van Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī: in facsimile uitgegeven met aantekeningen door P. Voorhoeve. Uitgaven van de Stichting De Goeje, No. 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955. Inleiding §2b (“De bronnen van de Tibjān”), pp. 13–15, where the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib is identified as source III and its manuscripts enumerated.
J. Schacht, “On the popular literature of the sects,” Studia Islamica I, pp. 23 ff.
The Maʿrifat al-madhāhib (“Knowledge of the Sects”), sometimes entitled Tadhkirat al-madhāhib, is a short schematic overview of the seventy-two Islamic sects that enjoyed wide diffusion in both Arabic and Persian manuscripts from at least the eleventh century of the Hegira. It belongs, in genre, more to popular than to learned literature; various authors are named in the manuscripts, sometimes Abū Ḥanīfa. The work is identified by Voorhoeve as the third principal source of the *Tibjān fī maʿrifat al-adyān* of Nuruddin ar-Raniri: it supplied Raniri with his schematic classification of the seventy-two sects into six groups of twelve, and with the names and dogmas of the individual sects.
Content and structure
The Maʿrifat al-madhāhib sets out the tradition of the seventy-three sects — that is, the seventy-two doomed plus one saved — that has been transmitted in various hadith. The seventy-two are presented as sprung from six original groups, each of which is subdivided into twelve. In the names of the sects and in the dogmas attributed to them, only minor divergences appear from one manuscript to another. After the seventy-two sects, some manuscripts add seven further sects drawn from a work of Abū’l-Qāsim ar-Rāzī — a mystic who died in 378 H — and one sect drawn from the *al-Fiqh al-akbar* of Abū Ḥanīfa. No other authorities are cited. The catalogues record no dated manuscript older than the eleventh century H, but an adaptation by Ibn Kamāl Pasha shows that the tract already existed around 900 H.
Manuscripts
Voorhoeve lists the following manuscripts of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib:
Arabic:
- Calcutta, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Ivanow 1726 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, author: Abū Ḥanīfa; copied in the 12th century H.
- Calcutta, Curzon Collection, Ivanow 672 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, anonymous; dated H. 1285.
- Rāmpūr, cat. I, 322 no. 305b — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Abū Ḥanīfa; undated.
- Rāmpūr, cat. I, 716 no. 11 — same as above.
- London, India Office Library, Levy 2033 — Tadhkirat al-madhāhib, author: Ibn ar-Rarrādj; 18th century.
- Berlin, in the margin of Spr. 831 f. 14v–43v (Ahlwardt 2185) — al-Madhāhib, author (or copyist?) Muḥammad ʿAẓīm al-ʿĀlamābādī; undated.
- Leningrad, A. M. Buch. 957 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Abū Ḥanīfa; undated.
- Gotha 849, 1 — no title, anonymous; H. 1115.
- Gotha 851, 1 — no title, anonymous; modern manuscript.
The last two Gotha manuscripts were bought by Seetzen in Cairo; the tract, Voorhoeve concludes, was therefore diffused not only in India and Persia but also in Egypt.
Persian:
- Calcutta, Curzon Collection, Ivanow 399(1) — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, author: Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ghazālī; undated. This manuscript diverges in the names of the six head-sects (Rāfiḍiyya, Khārijīyya, Jabriyya, Qadariyya, Muʿattiliyya, Mushabbihiyya).
- London, India Office Library, Ethé 1920(11) — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ghazālī; copied H. 1055 at Surat.
- London, India Office Library 2548 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Maḥmūd Ṭāhir; undated.
- London, India Office Library 2549 — Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ghazālī; H. 1137.
- In a manuscript of Abū’l-Maʿālī’s Kitāb Bayān al-adyān used by Schefer for his edition in the Chrestomathie persane, a list of sects at the beginning does not correspond to the text of the work; the names in this list are, save for a transposition and a lacuna, the same as in Maʿrifat al-madhāhib.
The seven sects added on the authority of Abū’l-Qāsim ar-Rāzī are all found in a small Arabic treatise of three pages in which he is named as author (London, India Office Library, Levy 1777).
The Moluccan manuscript
Among the Arabic manuscripts, Voorhoeve singles out Leiden Cod. Or. 1255 f. 3v–15v (Catalogus Codicum Orientalium IV, p. 293) as of exceptional importance. The text is provided with an interlinear Malay translation. It agrees completely with the *Tibjān* — not only, with small exceptions, in the names of the sects but also in the dogmas attributed to them; only the refutation of the aberrations, which always follows in the Tibjān, is missing. The agreement is so great that one might suppose one had before one an Arabic preliminary study by Raniri for his Tibjān, or an Arabic excerpt from the Malay Tibjān; but this hypothesis is refuted by the manuscript itself. The paper bears as watermark the arms of Thann in Alsace, recorded by Churchill as occurring in a document of 1612. And on f. 1v there is a note in the same hand as the text: Ini surat tatkala binasa Pulu Ai dalam bulan Rabiʿ al-awwal pada hari Senin dan pada hijrat Rasūl Allāh tūn sē ribu duapuluh tiga tahun dan tiga bulan — that is, “this writing [dates from] the time Pulu Ai was destroyed, in the month Rabīʿ I, on Monday, in the year of the Hijra of the Messenger of God — may God bless him and grant him salvation — one thousand twenty-three years and three months,” i.e. Monday 14 April 1614 (3 Rabīʿ I 1023). The manuscript looks unused; it was probably a copy made on paper brought by a European, shortly after the eruption of the Gunung Api of Pulu Ai in 1614, from an original that was itself somewhat older. The Malay of the interlinear translation is of the old-fashioned kind — using, for instance, pulang for pula. The Arabic is neatly written but full of errors.
The addition of seven sects derived from Abū’l-Qāsim ar-Rāzī and the attribution in the colophon to “Abū Ḥanīfa” (sic!) show that we have here an exemplar of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib with only the beginning missing, and otherwise showing some of the strange deviations that we also find in Raniri.
The Khaufiyya correspondence
The most striking example of the correspondence between the Moluccan manuscript and the Tibjān is found in the case of the Khaufiyya sect of the Jabriyya. The dogma of this sect, in all manuscripts of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib and of Ibn Kamāl Pasha’s adaptation, is: “A friend does not fear his friend. God is the Friend. Therefore man need not fear God” (fear — Arabic khauf — some sect-names are evidently given on the principle lucus a non lucendo). In the *Tibjān* and the Moluccan manuscript, by contrast, three dogmas are recorded for this sect, of which the last only roughly corresponds to that of the other manuscripts: “they fear no eternal punishment.” The second is also connected: “the heaven is real, the hell is not.” But what is one to make of the first dogma: “there are two gods, one on land and one at sea”? In no manuscript is such a belief attributed to any sect. Voorhoeve concludes that this correspondence is sufficient proof that Raniri used either the original of the Moluccan manuscript or a closely related exemplar as the source for the second part of his Tibjān.
Adaptations
The tract was adapted by Ibn Kamāl Pasha (d. 940 H) in his al-Maqālāt fī bayān ahl al-bidʿa waʾd-ḍalalāt, a small work that, despite divergences in detail, is constructed entirely on the schema of the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib. Voorhoeve used the Leiden manuscript Cod. Or. 2937 of this adaptation (another manuscript: Gotha 852; perhaps the same: Risāla fī bayān al-firak ad-dālla, GALS II 670 no. 58).
Significance
The Maʿrifat al-madhāhib is, after the *Tamhīd* and the *al-Insān al-kāmil*, the third of the sources identified by Voorhoeve for the *Tibjān*. Its identification places the schematic classification of the seventy-two sects in the Tibjān — six groups of twelve — within the tradition of popular Muslim sect-literature that was diffused from Cairo to Calcutta. The Moluccan manuscript of Leiden, with its interlinear Malay translation and its note on the destruction of Pulo Ai in 1614, is itself a document of the first importance for the history of the Malay translation of Arabic scholastic texts in the Indonesian archipelago before Raniri.
See Also
- Abu Hanifa
- Abu’l-Kasim ar-Razi
- Acheh
- Ibn Kamal Pasha
- al-Fikh al-akbar
- al-Insan al-Kamil
- P. Voorhoeve
- Pulo Ai
- Raniri
- Tamhid fi bayan at-tawhid
- Tibjan fi ma’rifat al-adyan
Source
Twee Maleise geschriften van Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī: in facsimile uitgegeven met aantekeningen door P. Voorhoeve. Uitgaven van de Stichting De Goeje, No. 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955. Inleiding §2b (“De bronnen van de Tibjān”), pp. 13–15, where the Maʿrifat al-madhāhib is identified as source III and its manuscripts enumerated.
J. Schacht, “On the popular literature of the sects,” Studia Islamica I, pp. 23 ff.