Al-Ādāb al-Sharʿiyya by Ibn Mufliḥ : Traditionalist Ethics in Medieval Islam

Written by Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad Ibn Mufliḥ ibn Muḥammad al-Maqdisī (d. 763/1362), al-Ādāb al-Sharʿiyya (“Divinely Mandated Etiquettes”) is a treasure trove of Islamic moral teachings and a study in late classical traditionalist ethical imagination. During the Mamlūk (r. 648–923/1250–1517) era, grateful for having been spared the Mongol apocalypse, the Sunnī society took a deeply conservative turn, with exceptional scholarly attention paid to the advancement of the sciences of ḥadīth and Sunna, by all legal and theological schools, producing compendia, syntheses, and historical and comparative works unmatched by those produced in any earlier or later period. Judicious compilers from Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mizzī (d. 742/1341), Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348), Tāqī l-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756/1355), Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 770/1370), and ʿImād al-Dīn Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373), to Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449), and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) produced works on ḥadīth, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), and history that juiced the enormous intellectual output of the preceding several centuries, sifting through the monumental ḥadīth compilations and theological and exegetical studies that they inherited and raising them to new heights of intertextual connectivity and criticism. A few towering minds such as ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām (d. 660/1262), Taqī l-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), and Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī (d. 790/1388), to name a few, produced deeply original works that furnished Islam not only with new scholarly depth, but new frameworks of thinking about the tradition and the community, recentring revelation and revelational sciences in a way that both built on but also challenged the existing paradigms. Among the most addressed subjects in the writings of this period is devotional ethics concerned with etiquette (ādāb), devotion (taʿabbud), psycho-social virtues (ḥusn al-khuluq), and self-purification (tazkiya). If the great Seljūq period (r. 429–590/1037–1194) theologian and jurist Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) had lived in the Mamlūk realm, perhaps he would not have complained of the dry scholasticism of his fellow jurists and theologians that he allegedly found in his own time. Among the most active and accomplished writers in this period are the Damascene Ḥanbalīs, whose numbers and intellectual capacity had recently swelled due to recent migrations from three important Ḥanbalī communities, Ḥarrān (e.g., Ibn Taymiyya’s family), Jerusalem (the Maqdisī family), and Baghdad (Adem 2015). This essay introduces an important etiquette work by the scion of the Maqdisī family, Ibn Mufliḥ, and places it in its intellectual context.

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Published in: Key Classical Works on Islamic Ethics
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
See chapter on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004459472_014