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Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
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26 Feb, 5 tweets, 2 min read
An truly amazing inscription bearing the name ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb. It reads:
[1] God, protect ʿUmar
[2] ibn al-Khaṭṭāb
[3] in the Here-and-now and the Hereaf-
[4] ter. There is no god but God

But is this by the 2nd caliph or someone fond of him? Was ʿUmar even literate?
Early stories of ʿUmar’s conversion to Islam certainly claim that he could neither read nor write. The story is famous: he discovers a copy of some verses from the Qurʾan with his sister, but he needs someone else to read to him what she had written down.
google.com/books/edition/…
However, other accounts claim just the contrary. According to the Medinan historian al-Wāqidī, ʿUmar was among the seventeen men of Quraysh who had learned how to read and to write.
archive.org/details/libere…
*A* truly 😩
**I think a better translation of the line [1] is, "God is the protector (walīy) of ʿUmar"; cf. Q. Baqarah 2:257

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More from @shahanSean

Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
16 Feb
According to a story attr. to Ibn ʿAbbās, one day he heard the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiyah reading Q. Kahf 18:86, «when he reached the setting of the Sun, he found it setting in a hot spring (ʿayn ḥāmiyah)...» Ibn ʿAbbās objected, “Rather it’s «a muddy spring (ʿayn ḥamiʾah)»!”...
The two asked the Jewish convert Kaʿb al-Aḥbār to settle the matter, and Kaʿb sided with Ibn ʿAbbās saying, “The Sun disappears into ṯaʾṭ.” In another version of the story, Kaʿb says basically the same thing, but he claims that he found the answer in “al-kitāb” (the Bible?).
This word ṯaʾṭ is rare in Arabic – mostly I’ve encountered it as an exegetical gloss to ḥamiʾah (excerpts above are from Ṭabarī’s Jāmiʿ). Which makes ones wonder, is there really a biblical parallel to ṯaʾṭ? Maybe. Perhaps Heb. ṭîṭ|mud as in Isaiah 57:20?
Read 4 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
4 Feb
How many ḥadīth are there? Thousands, right?
As usual it depends on who’s counting and how. Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī (d. 275/889) lists two interesting early opinions in his letter to the Meccans about his famous Sunan...
The Meccan al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-Khallāl (d. 242/856+) and Ibn Mubārak (d. 181/797) set the number at ~900. When asked why Abū Yūsuf al-Qāḍī placed the number at ~1,100, Ibn Mubārak retorted, “Abū Yūsuf adopts these defective ones from here and there like weak ḥadīths."...
Abū Dāwūd, of course, put the number higher: ~4,800. He regarded himself as having collected more than anyone else (he didn’t know abt Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s Musnad, which includes around 5,200). The editor of the letter, Abu Ghuddah, provides some other early opinions in a note:
Read 4 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
3 Feb
Ben Sirach 25:2 in the hadith literature.
Ex. 1 from Nasāʾī (sanad saḥīḥ)
"Four God despises: the seller given to making oaths, the boast pauper, the elderly adulterer, and the unjust Imam"
Ex. 2 from Muslim (sanad saḥīḥ)
"Three whom God will not address nor absolve on the Day of Resurrection" - Abū Muʿāwiyah said, "nor regard them"- "and shall have a painful torment: an elderly adulterer, a lying man of property, and boastful pauper."
[sorry that I deleted the original thread; i had accidentally not included my translation of the Nasa'i hadith]
Read 7 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
17 Jan
How to define a drink called nabīdh has come up multiple times on my feed recently. Nabīdh was an intoxicating beverage distinguished from khamr, grape wine, which the Qurʾan prohibits (Q. 5:90). But some say nabīdh wasn’t an intoxicating beverage at all. Why all the confusion?
Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889) already notes the confusion in his Kitāb al-Ashribah; he mentions two ways of defining nabīdh.
"One group says: 'It’s raisin water or date water before they ferment. If that becomes strong and sets, then its khamr. The forebears from ...
the Companions and Followers drank that, making it at the outset of their day and drinking it at its end, making it in the early evening and drinking it with their meals.' They say, 'It was called nabīdh because ...
Read 10 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
4 Jan
The Umayyad governor al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī infamously berated Ibn Masʿūd & his recension of the Qurʾan. He called Ibn Masʿūd’s reading “doggerel like the doggerel of Bedouin (rajazun min rajaz al-aʿrāb).” Such a statement from Ḥajjāj is more than an arcane curiosity...
bc Ḥajjāj played a role in standardizing the text of the Qurʾan under the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik. Ḥajjāj uttered these words in an oration. His full statement: "How astonishing is the slave from Hudhayl [=Ibn Masʿūd]! He claimed to recite a qurʾān from God, but I swear by God ... Image
it is naught but the doggerel of Bedouin! By God, had I met the slave from Hudhayl, I would have struck off his head!” This is the version from Ibn Abī l-Dunyā's (d. 894) al-Ishrāf fī manāzil al-ashrāf.
archive.org/stream/waq3755…
Read 6 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
26 Nov 20
Ibn Qutaybah (d. 889) includes a striking passage in his Taʾwīl muškil al-Qurʾān where he notes that memorizing the text of the Qurʾan was a rare feat among the Companions of the Prophet. “Though the very lights of the earth, masters of creation, and highest aim of knowledge,
most men from [the Companions] could only recite two, three, or four sūrahs – bits and pieces from the Qurʾān – all except for a few of them whom God helped to memorize it all, facilitating its preservation.
Anas b. Mālik said, “The man who could recite al-Baqarah and Āl ʿImrān become a weighty person among us – i.e., he became mighty in our eyes and great in our hearts.”
Al-Shaʿbī said, “Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿAlī – may God show them mercy – never memorized the entire Qurʾān.”
Read 5 tweets

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