1014–1043: Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr on Christian Love for ʿAlī: Difference between revisions

Indeed, the re-use of these poems by a scholar like Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr draws our attention to literature as a site of normative contestation within Islam. Islam has often been characterized as a law-centered religion with rules, derived from the Qurʾān and ''ḥadīṯ'', that govern Muslim life. But these poems illustrate that the Mālikī legal scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, his sources, and his readers saw a role for poetry and literary anecdote in telling Muslims what it meant to live out their Islam, including their relations with non-Muslims. In particular, the “The Delight of the Learned Soirée” dwells on points of moral ambiguity. The chapter on “fraternizing” first discusses a ''ḥadīṯ ''in which the Prophet Muḥammad warns against greeting non-Muslims, only for Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr to then invest great effort in interpreting the ''ḥadīṯ ''in a way that thoroughly undermines that directive. Numerous other anecdotes in the chapter depict Muslims and non-Muslims consorting amicably; for instance, a Muslim poet consoles his distraught Christian friend, whose nephew has converted to Islam.<ref name="ftn7">Yarbrough, A Muslim Poet.</ref> To be sure, these morally loaded examples are “ambiguous” only against a background in which distrust and hostility between Muslims and non-Muslims was common. Nevertheless, they show that other, more irenic normative examples were available to Muslims, specifically through the media of poetry and literary anecdote. Literature had—as Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr states explicitly—a moral authority of its own.|6=Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr: ''Kitāb ǧawāhir al-ʿulamāʾ'', ed. ʿAwaḍ Wāṣif, Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Miṣr, 1907 (partial and abridged).

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr: ''Bahǧat al-maǧālis wa-uns al-muǧālis'', ed. Maẓhar Ḥaǧǧī, 3 vols, Damascus: Wizārat al-Ṯaqāfa fī l-Ǧumhūriyya al-ʿArabiyya al-Sūriyya, 2005.|7=Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Dāʾūd al-Iṣbahānī al-Ẓāhirī: ''al-Zahra'', ed. Ibrāhīm al-Sāmurrāʾī, al-Zarqāʾ / Jordan: Maktabat al-Manār, 1985.