Abbasid Caliphate

Han Sian argues that this vision of pious rulership emerged from what he calls homiletic piety, revealing how the moral and emotional world of hortatory preaching shaped ideas about what it meant to rule well.

By placing Ibn al-Jawzi's writing in their historical and political context, including his relationship with, uh, the Abbasid caliphate and his controversial intervention in debates over the cursing of Yazid, Han Sian challenges simplistic distinctions between political quietism and activism, and reveals a thinker who is deeply invested in influencing those who wielded political power.

In our conversation, Han Sian explains why he chose Ibn al-Jawzi as the subject of the book and what we can learn about medieval Islamic politics by taking preachers seriously as political thinkers.

We discuss the concept of homiletic piety and Ibn al-Jawzi's approach to exhorting rulers wh- including the rhetorical strategies that he believed scholars could use to encourage rulers toward greater humility, kindness, and moral responsibility.

We also explore Ibn al-Jawzi's relationship with the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustadi, who...

And, and what his writings reveal about the particular concerns of the ruler to whom they were addressed.

Han Sian discusses the complicated relationship between scholars and political power, including the historical debate over Sharia and Siyasa, or politics, and explains why Ibn al-Jawzi does not fit neatly into the categories of quietis- quietist or activist.

Uh, and one thing I noticed with these books is that, um, even though, uh, you know, they use different sources, you know, maybe more sources than Lambton, uh, had a little more nuance, uh, maybe approached the sources, uh, a bit differently, uh, the bare bones of this kind of might is right narrative more or less stayed the same.

The salik, or wanderer poem, chronicles the thoughts of the outlaw or castaway, again wending through arid landscapes in a state of emotive and philosophical contemplation.

In the great cities of the Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdadi and Damascene and Alexandrian literati of Arabian extraction read these poems and felt romantic connections to their roots.

That was what Bedouin life was like, some well-heeled Abbasids probably thought, riding huge camels through moonlit sandscapes and flexing your imagination and sometimes your biceps to come up with bottomlessly profound verses about what it was to be a person.

And of course, during the real 500s CE, there were tens of thousands of miles of rocky trails and as many hardy and vigorous Arabs riding along them and thinking private, weighty thoughts.

The literature and theology that we read toward this season's close was the product of a world in transition.

Ibn al-Muqaffa's Kalila and Dimna was originally a collection of beast fables from India.

Later, it was translated into Middle Persian, and in the hands of Ibn al-Muqaffa, the wonderful stories of lions and oxen and crows were rendered into Arabic at the dawn of the Abbasid Caliphate.

This caliphate had manifold leaders and wars, but at its heart were the cities of the Sawad, namely Baghdad and Basra, Sawad meaning the black, arable lands of the lower Fertile Crescent.