Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Ahmad al-Buni and His Readers through the Mamluk Period.

Abstract

In this dissertation I address the spread and reception of the works of the North African Sufi, author on the controversial ‘science of letters and names’ (‘ilm al-huruf wa-al-asma’), and putative ‘magician’ Ahmad al-Buni, from the period near the end of his life in Cairo in the first quarter of the seventh/thirteenth century through the end of the Mamluk period in the early-tenth/sixteenth. Beginning from a survey of hundreds of manuscript copies of Bunian works, and drawing on a variety of manuscript paratexts and codical elements as well as on the contents of al-Buni’s texts and contemporary literature, I examine concrete and ideological aspects of the transmission of ‘dangerous’ ideas in a late-medieval Islamic manuscript culture. Beginning with al-Buni’s promulgation of his own works in Cairo, I argue that his written texts were intended for circulation only among closed, secretive communities of learned Sufi readers, but that by the second quarter of the eighth/fourteenth century they had begun to reach a broader readership, and by the ninth/fifteenth had come to circulate widely among influential scholars and bureaucrats, even reaching the courts of ruling Mamluk military elites. Reading literary sources against the evidence of the manuscript corpus, and with careful attention to the book-practices, identities, and motivations of readers, I show that Bunian works continued to gain in popularity even as some authorities denounced them as heretical, and that a bustling ‘occult’ scene was in place in Cairo by the turn of the ninth/fifteenth century. In discussing the career of the corpus I consider questions of al-Buni’s bibliography and the misattribution to him of the famous Shams al-ma‘arif al-kubra. I also address the necessity of contextualizing al-Buni as part of a wave of esotericist Sufis who emigrated from the Islamicate West to Cairo and beyond around the turn of the seventh/thirteenth century, and whose controversial teachings - some with roots in Isma‘ili Shi‘ite thought - were only slowly and contentiously taken up in these new environments. The study is intended as a contribution to Islamic intellectual history, the history of the occult sciences, and the study of medieval manuscript cultures.