Documents that record the legal opinion, called in Arabic fatwā (pl. fatāwā), of Muslim jurists or muftīs have a long history of over a thousand years in the Islamic world. The earliest extant fatwā documents that have come to light so far are two fatwā fragments recorded in Arabic on the recto and verso of a papyrus sheet from the ninth/tenth century Egypt that were edited by Adolf Grohmann and published posthumously by Raif Georges Khoury in 1993.[1] A more complete early example is extant on a narrow strip of paper measuring 22.5 x 7.3 cm. This document from the eleventh/twelfth century probably also produced in Egypt was edited by W. Diem in 2007.[2] While these early fatwās are recorded in Arabic, we know that in the eastern Islamic lands, among non-Arabic speaking peoples, fatwās also began to be recorded in Persian. Several early exemplars of such Persian fatwās probably dating to the twelfth/thirteenth century have recently come to light among the cache of paper documents discovered since the 1990s from present day Afghanistan, which historically formed part of medieval Islamic Khurāsān.[3] In this essay, I will introduce some of these early Persian fatwās from medieval Islamic Khurāsān.
In 2013 and 2016, the National Library of Israel (NLI) purchased in two separate batches 221 documents originating from Afghanistan which were given the name “Afghan Genizah” due to the fact that some of the documents were in Hebrew script, though it was by no means certain that those documents actually came from a Jewish genizah.[4] Recent research has revealed that the “Afghan Genizah” consists of a varied collection of texts in six languages or linguistic variants (Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, Early New Persian and Early Judeo-Persian) written mainly on single leaf paper documents which have either survived in whole or as fragments.[5]
Chronologically, there are two separate groups of documents. The first group, dating to the first half of the eleventh century, was part of the archive of a Jewish family living in Bamiyan (central Afghanistan).[6] This family archive contains, among other documents, ten deeds of acknowledgement of debt (iqrārs) dating from 395–430/1005–1039. These are the earliest known exemplars of Islamic legal documents written in “New Persian,” that is, the Persian language of the Islamic period.[7] The second group of documents, whose provenance, at least in part, is also from the Bamiyan district, dates from the second half of the sixth/twelfth century to the early seventh/thirteenth century. Like the first group, it contains different types of documents, including some Islamic legal documents in New Persian, mainly iqrār deeds, and two folios containing fatwās which have not yet been edited.[8]
Besides these two fatwā folios in the NLI Afghan Genizah collection, there are also nine fatwā documents in New Persian in a separate corpus of outstanding historical significance, which, until now, has not received scholarly attention.[9] This second cache of letters, lists, administrative and legal documents mainly in New Persian also from Afghanistan dates from the second half of the twelfth to early thirteenth century. The documents were discovered in 1370 sh./1991 inside a cave near the village of Shahr-i Kharu, in Ghalmīn, 30 kilometers north of Chaghcharān (Fīrūzkūh), the capital of Ghūr province in central Afghanistan.[10] These “Ghūr documents” or what has also been called the “Fīrūzkūh papers,” were, until recently, held in the private collection of an inhabitant of Ghūr, Mīrzā Khwāja Muḥammad, who donated the documents in 1399 sh./2020 to the National Archives of Afghanistan. In 1388 sh./2009, Mīrzā Khwāja Muḥammad and Nabī Sāqī published an edition with facsimiles of 84 of the Ghūr documents.[11]
The discovery of the eleven fatwā papers (nine in the Ghūr documents[12] and two in the NLI Afghan Genizah collection), means that we are in the remarkable position of being able to reconstruct the earliest traces of fatwā writing in New Persian in medieval Islamic Khurāsān under Ghūrid (540–612/1145–1215) and Khwarazmian rule (596–617/1200–1220). Although none of the eleven fatwā documents are dated, the internal evidence of language, script, and dates that appear in the other documents of each corpus suggest they were written in the second half of the sixth/twelfth to early seventh/thirteenth century. In the next essay, I will examine one of the Persian fatwā papers held in the NLI Afghan Genizah collection in more detail by comparing its structure and formulae with the earliest Arabic fatwā exemplars and the remaining ten Persian fatwā papers from Khurāsān.
Notes:
[1] The measurements of this papyrus sheet are not provided. See no.82/83 in Raif Georges Khoury, Chresthomathie de papyrologie arabe. Documents relatifs à la vie privée, sociale et administrative dans les premiers siècles islamiques (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 143–45.
[2] Werner Diem, Ein arabisches Rechtsgutachten zum Eherecht aus dem 11.–12. Jahrhundert aus der Heidelberger Papyrussammlung (Schriften der Max Freiherr von Oppenheim Stiftung 17) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007).
[3] The study of these documents has been awarded funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the European Research Council (ERC). A comprehensive online digital corpus of all the documents will be made available by the team led by A. Azad. See “Invisible East,” Invisible East, https://invisibleeast.web.ox.ac.uk, accessed July 23, 2023.
[4] Ofir Haim, “What is the “Afghan Genizah”? A short guide to the collection of Afghan Manuscripts in the National Library of Israel, with the edition of two documents,” Afghanistan 2, no. 1 (2019): 70–90, https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/citedby/10.3366/afg.2019.0026?role=tab.
[5] Ibid., 71.
[6] See Ofir Haim, “Legal Documents and Personal Letters in Early Judaeo-Persian and Early New Persian from Islamic Khurāsān” (unpublished M.A. thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014).
[7] For an edition and facsimile of the first eight iqrārs dated, see Ofir Haim, “Acknowledgment Deeds (iqrārs) in Early New Persian from the Area of Bāmiyān (395–430 AH/1005–1039 CE),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 29, no. 3 (2019): 415–46. Two more iqrārs from the same group dated 401/1011 and 409/1018 are edited and published with facsimiles in Haim, “What is the Afghan Genizah,” 77–87.
[8] For the two fatwās, see NLI, Ms. Heb.8333.153=4 and Ms. Heb.8333.193=4.
[9] A third much smaller corpus of New Persian documents from the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries is also held in the private Islamic art collection of Nasser D. Khalili. For a recently edited qāḍī court record concerning a lawsuit over water rights from this group, see Zahir Bhalloo, “A pre-Mongol New Persian legal document from Islamic Khurāsān dated AH 608/1212 CE,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 86, no. 3 (2023): 465–83.
[10] For an account of the discovery of these documents, see the remarkable film Striking Gold: The Discovery of Medieval documents from Afghanistan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyhBiY7_hG8, accessed September 17, 2024.
[11] Mīrzā Khwāja Muḥammad and Nabī Sāqī, eds., Barg-hā-yī az yak faṣl yā asnād-i tārikhī-yi ghūr (Kābul: Instishārāt-i Saʿīd, 1388 sh./2009).
[12] See docs. #20; #21; #22; # 23; #24; # 25; # 26-1; # 26-2; #27 in ibid., 55–67.
(Suggested Bluebook citation: Zahir Bhalloo, New Light on Persian Fatwā Writing from Medieval Islamic Khurāsān, Islamic Law Blog (Oct. 10, 2024), https://islamiclaw.blog/2024/10/10/new-light-on-persian-fatwa-writing-from-medieval-islamic-khurasan/)
(Suggested Chicago citation: Zahir Bhalloo, “New Light on Persian Fatwā Writing from Medieval Islamic Khurāsān,” Islamic Law Blog, October 10, 2024, https://islamiclaw.blog/2024/10/10/new-light-on-persian-fatwa-writing-from-medieval-islamic-khurasan/)