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

246 Reviews
Even with these imperfections, Tales of God’s Friends surely deserves attention.
As the first comprehensive study of hagiography, this anthology is sufficiently
informative and useful. I approve the encouragement of hagiographic
study mainly on two grounds: First, hagiography has not been fully utilized in the
study of Islamic history, mainly because historians have considered this genre as
fiction; however, as we see in this anthology, hagiography offers much useful information
to historians. Second, hagiography is a fruitful approach to the study
on Sufism and saint veneration, which, as I wrote above, require notice today,
when so much attention is paid to Islamism or fundamentalism.
More specifically, I point out the urgent need of an extensive work to cover the
study of saint veneration in Islam. For the last fifteen years, my colleague Yasushi
TONAGA at Kyoto University and I have conducted a joint research on Sufism and
saint veneration in cooperation with some French colleagues at the CNRS. In our
research group, we understand that Sufism and saint veneration are distinct phenomena
that are very easily combined in history. Following this understanding, we
have been troubled by the lack of a comprehensive, solid work on saint veneration,
something of the quality of Les voies d’Allah (1996) on Sufi thought and tariqas. 2 In
studies on Sufism, we can count extensive general works from the classical one
of TRIMINGHAM to the newest one of ABUN-NASR. 3 The editor of Tales of God’s
Friends himself has published the Historical Dictionary of Sufism, 4 which has been a
reference source on my desk since its publication. We need a similar kind of general
work on saint veneration, and this anthology is a good step in that direction.
In general, certain concepts and the framework of this anthology gave me
pause for thought. For example, the term “Friend of God” deserves comment. It is
used instead of the term “saint” and comes from the Arabic expression waliyullah
(wali Allah). I know that some problems arise from the use of the term “saint” as
an equivalent to wali and that the expression “Friend of God,” which is sometimes
used by Muslims themselves, is not an invention of the editor. However, this expression
is employed to refer to Abraham in the Old Testament and in the Qur’an;
thus, “Friend of God” is not free from the influence of Christian thought. If we
consider the original meaning of waliyullah as a “person who stands close to
God,” “Friend of God” itself is merely a conventional translation. Moreover,
waliyullah is not so commonly utilized in the daily life of ordinary Muslims. They
use various local terms, such as pir, faqi, and ishan. By that, I do not mean to re-
2 Alexandre Popovic et Gille Veinstein (ed.), Les voies d’Allah: Les ordres mystiques dans le
monde musulman des origines à aujourd’hui. Paris 1996.
3 J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford 1971; Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, Muslim
Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Islamic Religious Life. New York 2007.
4 John Renard, Historical Dictionary of Sufism. Lanham, Toronto, and London 2005.