Chapter Two: Holy Women in Holy Texts
One of the most important goals of comparative religion is not simply to detail historical similarities and differences in religious systems but to discover new ways of understanding them.
To that end scholars often assign categories or topical classifications to specific cultural elements, for example, ritual, myth, or mysticism.
Hagiography and gender also serve as comparative categories, although they pose a set of unique problems.
Employing hagiography as a comparative tool is difficult first and foremost because of the debate over how to define this genre, as well as use it as source material. Hagiography in its broadest sense is symbolic literature that presents the holy (Greek, hagios) to both popular and elite audiences in a variety of forms.
Medieval hagiographies were read aloud, memorized, proliferated by scholars, and displayed in pictorial or symbolic compositions for the illiterate population.
In written, oral, and visual form, hagiographies praised the virtues and damned the vices of heroic persons set forth as didactic exempla; yet these texts reviewed the miraculous happenings involving more than just holy people. Hagiography celebrated sacred locales, architectural structures, and holy objects: early Christian hagiographers, for example, popularized Jerusalem as a holy site, the Holy Sepulcher as a holy structure, and bits of the true cross as holy relics.
Jerusalem was not unique in this respect; almost every Christian town publicized its local saint’s site. Shi`ite communities likewise celebrated the Imams’ lives by recounting their miracles and visiting their shrines.
Holiness in one form or another permeated the learning and the physical landscape of medieval life for both Christians and Shi`ite Muslims.
As literature intended to depict cultural ideals symbolically, hagiography is a complex genre in terms of both substance and agenda. On the surface hagiography appears biographical and descriptive; it speaks of life and death, joy and suffering. However, it was not intended primarily to preserve and communicate a historical kernel of truth or recount an objective chronicle of events. Gregory of Tours opted to name his hagiographic collection “Life [Vita] of the Fathers” rather than “Lives [Vitae] of the Fathers.” Gregory explained that “there is a diversity of merits and virtues among [the saints], but the one life of the body sustains them all in this world.”
In Gregory’s compendium the saints’ differences and distinctions disappear as he reveals the underlying holiness that unites them all.
Hagiography is thus fundamentally didactic: it edifies through exemplary displays of piety and holiness; it promulgates sacred narratives and then explains the moral and theological imperatives embedded in them; and it models proper modes of ritual and other cultic practices. Hagiographic discourse aims to resurrect and then reconstruct for its audience examples of holiness or ideal modes of being intended for pious imitation. With this functionalist definition of hagiography in mind, scholars should expect that any hagiographic tradition would be radically determined by the canon of values, beliefs, and authoritative texts particular to the cultural context from which it emerges. This certainly holds true for early Christian and Islamic hagiographic texts, which reflect their (sometimes) radically different ideals of the holy.
Hagiography also includes idealizations of masculine and feminine piety that modern readers might find distressingly misogynistic. Literate men mostly constructed these gender paradigms as very few texts by women exist. These male-authored texts provide the only substantive view of women (and expectations of women) in early Christian and Shi`ite religious communities. By using gender as a point of comparison, it becomes clear that theologians and hagiographers in both traditions limit holy women’s miraculous actions and proscribe holy women’s miraculous bodies to the domestic sphere.
Medieval and Modern Audiences: Christianity Late antique and early medieval Christian hagiographers transformed their saintly characters and sacred landscapes in accordance with Greco-
Roman and biblical formulas.
Some of the most influential early Christian hagiographies sprang from Syria and Egypt during the fourth and fifth centuries.
These texts applauded the efforts of holy men and women who surrendered mundane existence for a higher, angelic life. The era of Christian martyrs had all but ended as Roman emperors legalized Christianity throughout the empire. As martyrs became increasingly unnecessary, ascetics supplied another model of Christian heroism: they mortified their bodies and sought to transcend the problems of the flesh as they struggled against their spiritual enemy, Satan, and his demonic forces.
Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) constructed one of the most important Christian hagiographies in his Life of Anthony, an Egyptian recluse who haunted nearby deserts and caves.
Athanasius describes a vicarious martyr, guarding the periphery of human existence against evil while struggling against his interior lusts and desires. In the end Anthony provides his audience with a new Christ figure who prays in the desert, casts out demons, heals the sick, and raises the dead.
Anthony’s hagiographer produces a hero-hermit much like the biblical Elijah, reconstructed in the fourth century, intended to model the miracles and grace of Christ. Indeed, one of the greatest signs of sanctity was imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) wherein holy men and women performed Christ’s miracles after symbolically sharing in his suffering by means of ascetic feats.
As Christianity expanded from the Syrian and Greek East to the Gallo-Roman/Latin West, hagiographers encountered a new audience.
It proved difficult if not impossible to transform urban Gaul into a physical wasteland of caves and demon-inhabited deserts. Western hagiographers thus created a spiritual desert and challenged the Roman elite and Mediterranean nobility to convert to Christianity and to live as Christ through renunciation of wealth and status. Women proved particularly important in this newly imagined desert as the viable patrons of the church who gladly distributed their Roman patrimony among ecclesiastical authorities.
Hagiographers in Gaul expressed innovative ideals of holiness for a new constituency of sinners.
The fourth-century author Sulpicius Severus created perhaps the most influential hagiography in early medieval Gaul. His Life of Martin of Tours transformed a Roman soldier known for his valor into an Old Testament prophet, traveling and preaching throughout Gaul, who only reluctantly accepted the bishop’s office of Tours.
Martin’s life became the hallmark of Western hagiography: the loyal Roman citizen forsakes his mundane wealth to serve his heavenly king. Martin, in typical fashion, healed the sick, exorcised the demon possessed, and practiced profound charity and kindness. At the same time, he assumed the bishop’s mantle and dutifully acknowledged the church’s authority. The hagiographer modified his wandering holy man at first reminiscent of the eastern Anthony into a stable bishop ever mindful of his parish and his flock. A pious Christian but also a good Roman, Martin embodied the ideals of hierarchy and structure.
Merovingian hagiographers inherited the model of Martin and effectively blended their new bishops with this very Roman ideal: Frankish clergy promoted order and hierarchy within both church and state. Merovingian hagiographers were aware also of the saint cults that proliferated throughout Gaul as they addressed popular audiences who increasingly committed themselves to local saints, both living and dead. Merovingian hagiography thus served a pastoral purpose, aimed directly at teaching and educating a general constituency about the developing protocols for the veneration of saints.
Linguists in particular first recognized the pastoral function of Merovingian texts by their distinctive Latin vocabulary: the language is both colloquial and active.
Merovingian hagiographers focused on how to venerate local holy figures and what miraculous results might be expected. They provided models instructing pious petitioners to gather remnants from the cells of saints such as ash, candle wax, or oil; through these contact relics, miraculous healing followed and the saints’ fame spread.
These instructive texts compare dramatically with the later Carolingian hagiographies intended for monastic use; Carolingian Latin indicates more interior action such as meditation and prayer.
In contrast, Merovingian hagiography speaks to a nonmonastic audience, defining innovative notions of holiness associated with the spread of saint veneration.
There is considerable disagreement among modern scholars of medieval Christianity as to what to do with hagiography as a source. European intellectuals generally scoffed at Christian hagiographic sources during the Enlightenment period. Scholars of the ancient world such as David Hume and Edward Gibbon dismissed hagiography as an irrational literature confined to the lower classes that recounted fanciful miracle stories and fantastic displays of a misnamed polytheism.
Beginning only in the 1930s, scholars and theologians began to mine hagiography for details about life, society, and intellectual history. Hippolyte Delehaye and the Bollandists, a group of Jesuit priests dedicated to recovering and categorizing hagiographies, led this movement, although much of their work still attempted to separate the factual from the spurious, the believable from the unbelievable.
During the past two decades, hagiologers have generally disregarded the fact or fiction debate and gleaned information about cultural milieus and gender roles from holy texts.
Most scholars now agree that hagiography was not just a literature intended for a lay, mostly illiterate population; instead, wealthy and poor audiences alike shared a hagiographic corpus that greatly defined their experiences. This literature provided the system of cultural symbols that united western Christendom.
Medieval and Modern Audiences: Islam
Early Shi`ite hagiography reveals an equally dynamic symbolic system at least during the late eighth and ninth century. Shi`ite notions of power and authority increasingly considered `Ali and Fatima’s descendants Imams responsible for their community’s spiritual guidance. Hagiographies explained the Imams’ miraculous births, their infallible lives, and their sublime wisdom. These models of holiness inspired ritual activities surrounding the Imams’ tombs and shrines. Shi`ite hagiographers, for example, encouraged devotees to visit holy places on pilgrimages (ziyara).
Most Shi`ites turned their attention to the shrine of Husayn, `Ali and Fatima’s son who died a martyr’s death at Karbala. Husayn’s body was interred at Karbala, but tradition also placed his head at Karbala, Damascus, Najaf, and Cairo.
All these locales remain important pilgrimage sites where Shi`ites venerate their third Imam.
Locating the mainstream notion of sanctity is more difficult in Islam than in early Christianity. Many Muslim theologians avoid the elevated designation of sainthood, stressing instead that every individual maintains direct access to Allah, thus disallowing the need for a saintly intercessor.
Qur’an 39.44 declares, “To Allah belongs exclusively the right to grant intercession. To Him belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth: in the end, it is to Him that you shall be brought back.” Thus in Islam no centralized clergy propagates and authorizes a genre of literature akin to Christianity’s saints’ lives. Saintly canonization is almost completely within the province of hagiographers and reader response to their products (both oral and written).
Medieval Muslims nonetheless maintained a definite notion of holiness (wilaya) and disseminated those sacred ideals through their own, distinct forms of hagiography. These sacred collections included biographies of the Prophet, battlefield accounts, or, for Shi`ites, descriptions of the Imams and their miraculous powers. The earliest known biography of the Prophet, for example, resembled early Christian tales of desert saints.
Bedouin tribes on the edges of the Arabian peninsula certainly were familiar with Christian veneration of desert holy men and their miracles: historical records indicate that they shared the same deserts and caves as Christian hermits, witnessed their fame, and heard about their miraculous powers. The Prophet’s biographer cast him as a functioning holy man to his community: Muhammad healed the sick, provided righteous judgments, and multiplied food.
Many of the Prophet’s friends and family described in the biographical materials also served as pious models intended for emulation and edification.
While Muslim hagiography might vary in intent and audience - for example, some collections, qisas al-anbiya, or “Tales of the Prophets,” featured miracle stories of the same prophets shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims - most of it has the same format. Accounts of holiness are usually recorded as hadith, one of two genres of sacred texts in Islam, the other being the Qur’an.
Like Christianity, Islam is a religion of the book and reveres a sacred and revealed scripture. The Qur’an confers the direct revelation of Allah through his final messenger, Muhammad. The holy text describes humanity’s virtues and vices, directs the actions of the community (umma), and offers a glimpse of an impending apocalypse.
It also presents a series of prophets and holy men and women for pious Muslims to imitate.
The hadith collections advance their own notions of holiness. Hadith (used here as a collective noun; the proper plural is ahadith) are traditions that relate back to the Prophet Muhammad’s own lifetime, describing his actions and utterances as well as those of his friends, family, and other contemporaries.
The hadith literature functions as hagiography when read as a means of resurrecting a pristine past and endowing Muslims with models of holiness and virtue. Read in this way, hadith literature allows scholars and others to eavesdrop on the earliest Muslim community: the Prophet’s lifestyle and the faithfulness of his friends and family (and the perfidy of his enemies), and directives and patterns outside the Qur’anic framework. Taken together the Qur’an and hadith (the “trodden path,” or sunna), provide models for emulation; scholarly exegesis (tafsir) then attempts to explain and contextualize the sunna so that pious Muslims may follow them.
Islamicists approach hadith literature as carefully as medievalists approach Christian hagiography, and this is not a recent methodological problem. Medieval Muslims themselves devoted an entire science to proving or disproving hadith authenticity. To do this they focused most strenuously on the chain of transmitters, or isnad. The hadith consists of two parts: the tradition itself (matn) and a detailed list of individuals who observed or transmitted the Prophet’s advice or actions (isnad). Scholars and linguists identified the transmitters, reconciled their death dates with times of transmission, and located the hadith in an elaborate spectrum of categories ranging from sound (sahih) to weak (da`if), from precious (`aziz) to forged (mawdu`).
Medieval hadith collections contributed more than personal models of piety and words of wisdom from the Prophet. The central role of hadith was to lay the foundation of Islamic law: Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) carefully reasoned what was obligatory (fard), recommended (mandub), neutral (mubah), reprehensible (makruh), and forbidden (haram). By the late ninth and early tenth century, Islamic scholars generally accepted as canonical the six rigorously scrutinized compendia composed by separate hadith critics: al-Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Da’ud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nisa’i, and Ibn Hanbal. Other scholars compiled their own hadith collections, but these six became the pillars of Sunni piety and law.
Shi`ite Muslims, on the other hand, esteem additional hadith collections as authoritative.
The Shi`ites value above all the traditions that relate back to the Prophet’s family. For Twelver Shi`ites, this includes the twelve Imams, among them `Ali himself. Since the Shi`a regarded `Ali and the Imams as Muhammad’s rightful successors, they gathered accounts of the Imams’ deeds and sayings for both political and spiritual guidance.
Shi`ites maintain that `Ali and Fatima’s descendants, beginning with their sons Hasan and Husayn, became the sources of true spiritual sustenance to the Islamic community. According to one tradition, Husayn (quoted by Ja`far al-Sadiq, the sixth Imam) proclaimed:
“God created His servants solely that they might know Him, for when they know Him they worship Him and thus free themselves from the worship of anything that is not Him.” Someone then asked: “What is knowledge of God?” “It is, for the people of each age, knowledge of the Imam to whom they owe obeisance.”
For Shi`ites recognition of and dependence on the Imams equaled knowledge of God himself. It was irrelevant if the ruling Umayyad or `Abbasid dynasty acknowledged the Imams as the community’s rightful leaders. Allah required the Shi`a itself to identify the Imam and maintain his sublime teachings through its collective memories and records.
Many Shi`ite hadith collections function, therefore, as a form of political and spiritual rhetoric explaining the cosmological link between the Prophet’s beloved family and the community.
These hadith demonstrate the Shi`a’s sublime authority in heaven even if it is not always recognized on earth.
They also offer adoptive membership into the ahl al-bayt for those who recognize the Imam’s authority. The hadith function as hagiography because they outline a mode of holiness (acceptance into the family), reveal moral and theological imperatives (allegiance to the family), and supply holy models to imitate (the prophets, Imams, and early community members). Like Merovingian hagiography, hadith reconstruct a sacred past in their own dynamically changing context to promote a new identity, namely, the identification of the Imams and an evolving Shi`ism as it distinguished itself from Sunni Islam.
As in Christian hagiography, there exist equally contentious debates about how to use hadith as hagiography. Many Muslims view the Prophet Muhammad with esteem and adoration and therefore strive to achieve a real view of him and his community. Hadith accepted as authentic are windows into that reality and afford a genuine depiction of the Prophet. Many Muslim scholars maintain the historicity of hadith transmission and argue that the earliest community assured hadith veracity. These scholars admit that hadith evolved from an oral to a written genre, but they also insist that skilled, literate scholars held the transmissions to high standards of authentication.
The question of veracity has plagued non-Muslim and secular scholars as well. Since the early twentieth century some Islamicists have recognized that formally written hadith compilations only circulated in the late eighth century. They have argued that these hadith reveal more about eighth-century life than about Muhammad’s own community.
This approach fundamentally questions the hadith’s reliability as a historical source for the earliest Islamic period; and, for Muslims, this critique challenges hadith as an authoritative source of sublime direction and models of piety. Other Islamicists have forged a middle ground: hadith reflect the Prophet’s own lifetime, but the standardized method of transmission and compilation must be dated much later. According to this argument, it remains impossible to demonstrate absolutely the hadith’s historicity.
I avoid the question of hadith veracity altogether; instead of expecting the hadith to betray an objective historical reality, I see them as revealing important cultural symbols and notions of holiness relevant to their medieval audiences.
If hadith were deemed important enough to copy, memorize, and scrutinize, then they must disclose valuable clues about the community that treasured them. Even the more obscure, “weak” hadith that “sound” compendia often fail to include are important; they help to recapture the evolutionary nature of Muslim identity by revealing the developing hagiographic tradition. As in Christianity, theology and religious identity evolved over the centuries as leaders, theologians, and scholars formulated and answered questions important for their nascent communities. Even those hadith that were later rejected or considered spurious by Shi`ite scholars reflect the stages of that evolutionary process.
Classical Shi`ite sources are especially difficult to date and ascribe to specific compilers. Although the hadith format provides lists of transmitters, the editors themselves sometimes evade designation. Some extant compendia do give the names of editor and author, such as the tenth-century Kitab al-Irshad (Book of Guidance into the Lives of the Twelve Imams) by Shaykh al-Mufid. Other hadith survive only in later compilations such as that of the seventeenth - century Safavid scholar Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi, Bihar al-anwar (Sea of Lights). Although this collection is rather late, it is indispensable to scholars of Shi`ite Islam.
With the help of scholars such as al-Majlisi, the seventeenth-century Safavids of Persia launched a prolific religious campaign against Sunni and Sufi piety.
Al-Majlisi’s job as a member of the `ulama´ was to collect and distribute hadith that illustrated Shi`ite identity and the holy family’s election since before created time. He intended his collections to serve as a type of propaganda, popularizing a legalistic form of Twelver Shi`ism while disavowing Sunnism and some Sufi orders. He was the first scholar to translate a large number of hadith collections, theologies, and histories into Persian for greater availability to a general audience.
Al-Majlisi’s collection is important for another reason: it includes both the widely accepted, sound hadith and the potentially spurious (or weak) traditions. For example, al-Majlisi repeated many of the earliest Shi`ite sources from al-Kulayni and Ibn Babawayh, renowned tenth-century Shi`ite scholars,
some of which are extant only through his encyclopedic collection. But he also chose hadith that were not included in ordinary compilations of Shi`ite texts. Because of this broad inclusiveness, some scholars doubt its historical veracity. (One colleague referred to the Bihar al-anwar as the “great trash heap of Shi`ite traditions.”)
Because al-Majlisi cast such a wide net in collecting his hadith, he provides scholars with an opportunity to view Shi`ism as it developed and blossomed throughout the classical and medieval periods.
Al-Majlisi quite naturally focused on the Prophet’s family and particularly his daughter Fatima to prove Shi`ite Islam’s superiority over Sunnism and Sufi sm. The traditions range from those of the most mystical bent (which define the holy family in terms of pure light with absolute knowledge)
to those of more practical application (which define the twelfth Imam as the source of all spiritual authority).
This grand collection of hadith also certainly added authority to al-Majlisi’s own position. According to Twelver doctrine, the twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, did not die but went into a sublime hiding, or occultation. During this period of hiddenness, the Shi`ite community relies on the scholars to discern the Imam’s justice. Al-Majlisi was just such a scholar who implicitly designated himself as one of the twelfth Imam’s spokesmen until the final, apocalyptic return. Through his hadith compilations, al-Majlisi justified his own political station while constructing a hagiographic edifice praising the holy family’s spiritual status.
Sources and Gender
As Merovingian Christians and Shi`ite Muslims sought to make sense of their world and to delineate their place in it, they devised and articulated dynamic notions of holiness. For the people of Gaul, the changes in their world involved the political transition from late Roman to Merovingian rule and the spiritual acculturation to a new, unifying Christendom. Shi`ite communities, in many cases bereft of political ascendancy because of a Sunni majority (except for a brief interim in the mid-tenth century), articulated their unique cosmology and loyalties to the Imam and the holy family. In both these cases, discussions of sanctity in hagiographic sources betray both theological and political agendas. On closer examination it becomes clear that gender expectations and the introduction of feminine ideals signaled radical changes in society as well. Both Christian and Muslim cultures supported and preserved the literary products of a male elite, which constructed paradigms of community and holiness via women, in particular Mary and Fatima.
Most extant Christian texts from late antiquity originate from the ecclesiastical sphere. Theologians such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome charted the twists and turns Christian theology would take in terms of asceticism, ideals of marriage, the Trinitarian debate, and the path of Christ’s church (ecclesia).
Late antique authors both reflected and refuted beliefs about the Virgin Mary popularized by anonymous, apocryphal texts. They absorbed, for example, the precept of Mary’s perpetual virginity (both before, during, and after Christ’s birth), yet some cautioned against Mary’s Immaculate Conception, or birth free from sin.
Marian theology, and Christian theology in general, was only slowly evolving.
The early Middle Ages yield a wider variety of sources, although most still come from the ecclesiastical sphere: church councils left records of decisions and debate; bishops wrote histories of their bishoprics (which were more like family trees); priests and popes wrote hagiographies;
and holy men crafted monastic rules for female religious to follow. One of the most prolific authors of Merovingian Gaul was Gregory of Tours; he provided a veritable who’s who among Merovingian bishops in his Ten Books of History and numerous hagiographies of male and female saints.
In early Christian hagiography, few texts written by women survive, and only one of those has a self-identified female author (Baudonivia, who wrote her saint’s life only to complement an earlier redaction by a man, Fortunatus).
Scholars suspect other works might be written by women, especially nuns who had firsthand knowledge of their saint-abbesses.
In most cases male clergy wrote about women.
A similar case arises in classical Islam. Women may have lent considerable time, faith, and even wealth to their respective traditions, but they remained largely silent in the sources. Muslim women’s social expectations depended largely on the geographic locale and ruling elite; yet in most cases women played a sizable role in the establishment of schools and the transmission of knowledge. Like female patrons of Christianity, wealthy wives and mothers commissioned schools and donated land for educational institutions, and with those same sources of wealth, many women acquired personal tutors and received competitive educations.
Also as with Christianity, tradition largely circumscribed women’s practical role in the public classroom as teachers or students; modes of formal education, including Qur’anic studies, remained confined to males.
Any formal training or introduction to Islamic jurisprudence and hadith studies also remained a mostly masculine domain.
Although Muslim scholars restricted women from formal educations, they did not release them from the burden of learning and studying the hadith and models of holiness. Theoretically, women bore the same responsibility as men to understand and follow Islamic teaching. Hadith scholars even recognized several women of the early community as worthy transmitters. Many of these women, such as `A’isha, the Prophet’s youngest wife, lived with Muhammad and had intimate dealings with him. These women like none other could transmit information about the Prophet’s actions, words, and directives because of their association in the domestic sphere.
Women’s official roles largely ended in the domestic sphere, however; while many women acted as hadith transmitters, there are no extant compilations by female scholars and no information about them. Thus our medieval sources are once again written by men about women.
In these male-authored medieval texts about women, gender, and holiness, hagiographers and theologians transformed Mary and Fatima into champions for their pious agenda. Mary marked the boundaries between Christianity and heresy; Fatima led her family to paradise and consigned her enemies to hell. Both communities fashioned a view of piety, politics, and family by manipulating traditional gender roles while still assigning their heroines to the domestic sphere as miraculous mothers and virgins. Today’s readers might be tempted to dismiss much of the hagiographers’ works as too proscriptive if not blatantly misogynistic, but closer examination reveals a more complex agenda.
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Author: Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai
