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THE MAGHRIB IN THE MASHRIQ
Book Title The Maghrib In The Mashriq
Book AuthorMaribel Fierro
Total Pages574
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LanguageEnglish
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The Maghrib in the Mashriq – Knowledge, Travel, and Identity Edited by Maribel Fierro and Mayte Penelas

THE MAGHRIB IN THE MASHRIQ

Book Introduction

In his 1970 book The History of the Maghrib, Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui pointed to the need “to trace the genesis of the concept of the Maghrib and to discover how it took on an objective definition”.4

The Maghrib – the ‘West’ in Arabic – inevitably refers to its pair, the Mashriq – the ‘East’ – and is often used in a binary spatial opposition assumed to convey an inherent meaning on its own.

However, this meaning must nevertheless be contextualized in time, while recognizing that each element, East and West, likewise involves internal boundaries and other possible oppositions. For example, does al-Maghrib include al-Anda-lus?

Can it include Egypt? When do Arabic sources use the term al-Maghrib to refer to the lands that today correspond to parts of Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and why? Moreover, binary oppositions always run the risk of distorting the realities on the ground, which inevitably involve shifting boundaries, cross-currents, and interactions.5

If space and time are basic elements to be discussed when using the terms Maghrib and Mashriq, the latter also convey certain hierarchical assumptions about a cultural, intellectual, and religious center and a periphery, as reflected in the poems quoted above.6

These assumptions, again, need to be fleshed out in all their details and temporal variations and should be opened up to discussion and rethinking.

The study of knowledge exchange and scholarly mobility across regions in the same cultural and/or religious domain often reveals that binary oppositions between innovative centers and imitative peripheries obscure flows of exchange that go both ways, not just from the cen-tres to the peripheries, but also in reverse, and at times using channels that directly connect periphery to periphery, bypassing the center altogether.7 One example among many is the one that follows below.

The Kufan traditionist Abū Bakr Ibn Abī Shayba (159–235 H/775–849 CE) compiled many traditions, Prophetic and otherwise, in his Muṣannaf. 8

The Cordoba Baqī b. Lakehead (201–276 H/817–889 CE) studied this work with its author during his stay in the East on his journey in search of knowledge, at a time when ḥadīth and its science (ʿilm al-ḥadīth) were reluctantly being introduced in al-Andalus. There is a record of the transmission in al-Andalus of Baqī b. Makhlad’s

recension (riwāya) of Ibn Abī Shayba’s Muṣannaf over almost three centuries. Indeed, the text seems to have been central in the training of scholars who were interested in the study of ḥadīth and were critical of traditional Mālikism.9

Why Ibn Abī Shayba’s Muṣannaf disappeared starting in the mid-6th/12th century from the lists of works transmitted, as reflected in the Andalusi fahāris genre, remains a topic for future research,10 but it can most probably be interpreted as a reaction against the Almohad policies that aimed at substituting Mālikism with a return to the sources of Revelation. Baqī b. Makhlad’s recension of the Muṣannaf is of great interest for the study of the local transmission and production of ḥadīth-related knowledge, but it also transcends the local context. As such, it has been described as an “Andalusian11 book that records a Kufan perspective”.12

Two manuscripts of the work are preserved in Turkish libraries (Süleymaniye and Topkapı), another indication of the strong presence that knowledge produced in the Western regions of the Islamic world enjoyed in Ottoman centers of learning.13

Another manuscript is located still further East, in the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, and it was precisely in India that Ibn Abī Shayba’s Muṣannaf was first printed, by ʿAbd al-Khāliq Khān al-Afghānī.

While the figure of the Iraqi Ibn Abī Shayba is of interest for the many scholars of different academic and national backgrounds whose research deals with early Islamic

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