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The The Lure of a Controversial Prayer 149
and interpretation of the prophetic tradition. He explains the particular ferocity
of the discourse employed against bida^ during that period by the ^ulama#s need
to construct defenses against popular preachers and storytellers, namely „outsiders,“
those who could not be defined as part of the scholarly class. 45 Both historical
and legal sources analyzed in this case suggest that our Muslim scholars
were indeed striving to assert and maintain their authority as premier interpreters
of the Prophet’s sunna 46. At the same time, repeated criticism of jurists that Muslims
falsely believe that the prayer is a sunna attests to the deep concern over
eroding boundaries.
By juxtaposing the historical and legal sources, however, what looked to us
as a power struggle cloaked in textual argumentation, now appears as a complex
ideological debate about when and under what conditions Islamic law could absorb
new practices. In particular, the debate between al-Sulam\ and al-Shahrazur\
exposes the tension between the values of preserving the coherency of Islamic
law as a system of norms, and of preserving the relevance of Islamic law given the
dynamism of Muslim religious life. In sum, the joint perspective of legal studies
and social history 47 – one that explores legal reasoning in its concrete political
and social context – provides us with a much more nuanced understanding of the
development, mass proliferation and ensuing debate over a highly controversial
and extraordinarily potent religious practice. Further study is necessary to understand
the eventual decline and marginalization of the prayer of great rewards
that, in its heyday, seems to have overshadowed even the Prophet’s birthday festival
in its popularity and exuberant participation.
45 A competition widely alluded to in J. Berkey, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in
the Medieval Islamic Near East, Seattle and London 2001. See esp. 93–95.
46 Texts # 7, 8, 9, 13 and 18, that mock the ignorance of those who rally for the prayer, and, in
contrast, stress the erudition and piety of those who oppose it – indeed support this notion.
47 See O. Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, Chapel Hill 2006, xxxv, for an eloquent
recommendation of bringing together these perspectives.