0021-1818_islam_98-1-2-i-259

The The Lure of a Controversial Prayer 143
weekly congregational prayers scrupulously took part in it, 8 side by side with
Sufis, and other devout ‘athletes for God’, who adopted the demanding ritual enthusiastically.
9
Put-together, this corpus offers an unusually vivid picture of a medieval case
of an ‘invention of tradition’. Combining our expertise in Islamic law and in Ayyubid
and Mamluk era social history, we suggest here to use this corpus for a detailed
study of popular piety, scholarly polemics, legal discourse and power politics.
Let us begin with the perspective of ‘ordinary’ Muslims, the men and women
who brightly lit their mosques in preparation for the prayer of great rewards and
gathered in them for the performance of numerous prostrations and the repetition
of hundreds of salutations throughout the night. They apparently believed
that they were following the prescriptions of the Prophet. 10 Commoners, and
some madrasa students, loved the communal gathering and eagerly executed the
demanding rituals accompanying it in the expectation of ‘great rewards’, not the
least of the remission of all sins through the intervention of the angels. 11
Most scholars who wrote about the practice agreed that it was, according to
all evidence, a rather late innovation, a bid^a, and a reprehensible one according
to Islamic law. 12 They all repeat, or refer to, al-Turtush\’s narrative, which claims
that it simply appeared one Rajab night in the second half of the fifth/eleventh
century in the Mosque of al-Aqsa. 13 Moreover, much scholarly attention was devoted
to demonstrating the weak or fabricated status of the supporting hadith, including
the identification of the likely fabricator himself.
8 See texts # 7, 13–15.
9 See texts # 13, 15, 10. Given the mixed social composition of the practitioners of the prayer,
and owing to the very normative character of the devotions they engaged in, we eschew the label
of ‘popular culture’, as opposed to ‘high’ or ‘elite’ culture. For the oft-repeated presentation
and refutation of the ‘two-tiered’ model of culture or religion, see a discussion and review of
the literature in J. Berkey, “Popular Culture under the Mamluks: A Historiographical Survey,”
Mamluk Studies Review 9 (2005): 133–146, and Y. Frenkel, “Popular Culture (Islam, Early and
Middle Periods),” Religion Compass 2 (2008): 195–205. 10.1111/j.1749–8171.2007.00048.x.
10 See texts # 5, 12, 19, 22, 25.
11 See texts # 3, 15, 25.
12 See texts # 1, 6, 16–22, 24. Ibn Rajab stresses the late appearance of the prayer, saying:
“Early scholars (al-mutaqaddimun) do not mention it, because it was invented/initiated (uhdithat)
after their days. It appeared for the first time after 400, therefore early scholars did not
know of it and did not say anything about it.” (Ibn Rajab, Lata#if, 228). On the place of hadith in
the later middle ages, see J. Fück, “The Role of Traditionalism in Islam,” in H. Motzki (ed.),
Hadith, Ashgate Variorum 2004, 22; S. C. Lucas, Constructive Critics, Hadith Literature, and the
Articulation of Sunni Islam, Leiden 2004, 101; E. Dickinson, “Ibn al-Sala1 al-Shahrazur\ and the
Isnad,” Journal of the Oriental American Society 122 (2002): 481–505.
13 See text # 4, 5.