Studying, teaching, transmitting knowledge

From the 7th century on, the Arabs conquered wide parts of the Near East and North Africa as well as Central Asia. This new empire needed a legal basis for its governance and administration policies a basis that was provided by Islamic law, whose second source (after the Koran, which sometimes contains only vague allusions on legal subjects) is the prophetic tradition (hadith), which gathers the sayings and doings of Prophet Muhammad, his companions and other prophets. A milieu of transmitters of hadith and later of specialized scholars quickly evolved, already in early Islam. Most modern scholars suggest that the hadith was written down quite early and its canonization had happened by the 10th century CE. The mentioned modern scholars, who carried out wide studies on literacy, scholarship and the early development of hadith, almost all based their work on literary sources, leaving out the direct documentary evidence that exists on Arabic literary papyri. Given the situation of Arabic literary papyri, which are heavily understudied, first a corpus of about 150 texts will be gathered from different papyrus collections worldwide. About 30 of them will be edited and translated. Then all of the texts, including the material published so far elsewhere, will be examined according to formal and inner criteria, the first covering topics like use and re-use of the material, form, mise-en-page, optical structure, and handwriting styles in the papyri. The latter will deal with matters of content, such as orality and literacy in teaching and scholarship, schools of hadith, early discussions of Shiite thought and the way political and/or social circumstances can be mirrored in hadith texts from a time before they were compiled into the big, famous canonical collections we know nowadays. This study will contribute to the questions of how knowledge forming the legal basis for a late antique empire was passed on in its earliest times, how scholars worked and in which way documentary texts can act as witnesses for both historical events and the political situation of their time.

The project "Studying, teaching, transmitting knowledge" was carried out at the University of Cambridge, an institution not only chosen for its international renown, but also for its Library, which hosts the Michaelides collection of Arabic papyri. Those texts, written between the 7th and the 10th century CE, all originally from Egypt, represent the only remaining written source from Early Islamic History currently at our disposal (apart from inscriptions and coins), but disproportionately little attention has been given to literary papyri in the past. Of the generally understudied corpus of Arabic papyri, only 5% are literary papyri. The project's aim was therefore a systematic study of Arabic literary papyri containing hadith (prophetic tradition, the second source of Islam after the Koran), and to analyse the ways they were transmitted, both concerning scribal and scholarly practice. Hadith was chosen as exemplary for literary papyri for: being traditionally made up of accounts each citing its own chain of transmission, secondly there is an ongoing discussion about the oral or written transmission of its contents, and the wide range of topics it covers suggests a likewise broad spectrum of physical realisation for said variety. Hypotheses from past research were mostly confirmed by the study, but also new aspects were brought to light. Among the confirmed, previous findings - though never before verified with papyri - were: Oral and written transmission of texts existed at the same time (writing after dictation and copying from written sources), strictly legal hadith was written in a distinct style, practically all hadith on papyrus comes from scholars' notebooks, much of the Egyptian hadith was transmitted via a Medinese-Syrian chain. Previously identified leading figures of early Egyptian hadith occurred frequently in the papyri. Some new findings, however, only surfaced after the systematic examination of about 150 papyrus texts: Islamic ritual prayer is the most frequently discussed topic, with accounts ranging from technical questions like prayer while travelling or how to pray if one forgets, to moral implications of bragging about prayer. Supplication in private prayer comes second regarding occurrence, with most accounts being recommendations for supplication. Certainly the most surprising discovery was the remainder of a papyrus notebook containing the hitherto oldest known version of the Islamic psalms of David, together with supplications and accounts of hadith that are nowadays only found in marginal Sunni works. What all the texts in this florilegium have in common is their overtly pietistic tone in which death, mourning, loss, and (fear of) the Last Judgment feature abundantly. Upon a closer look at the supplications in hadith papyri, more or less obvious pietistic tendencies appear as a general trait, which means that at least some Egyptian scholars were deeply rooted in the pietistic movement.