In this second essay, I will examine one Persian fatwā paper from the National Library of Israel (NLI) Afghan Genizah collection. It measures 19.3 x 13.8 cm, that is, slightly smaller than an A5 sheet (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1, Recto (left) and verso (right) of a twelfth-thirteenth century Persian fatwā paper from Khurāsān, 19.3 x 13.8 cm, Ms. Heb.8333.153=4, NLI, Jerusalem.
The paper has suffered some damage on the left-hand margin recently repaired using modern archival lining tissue. It is still possible, however, to make out symmetrical cut-out spear head shapes on the left hand-margin. It is not clear when this careful cutting of shapes into the document occurred. The cut-out shapes of paper now lost could have served some specific material purpose in the medieval period.[1] Alternatively, it could be the work of a modern antiquities dealer who wanted to even out damaged edges.[2]
The text of the fatwā begins on the recto of the sheet and continues in the middle of the verso. The top and bottom half of the verso was also reused at some stage to record accounts. This type of reuse where a document becomes a new writing support for texts is well-known for medieval Islamic documents.[3] In the case of the Cairo Geniza, Marina Rustow, for example, describes a process of deaccessioning whereby provincial officials jettisoned administrative decrees that had probably already been archived elsewhere and their paper was recycled and put to other uses.[4] Arezou Azad and Pejman Firoozbakhsh have demonstrated how something similar might have occurred when the verso of a Khurāsān administrative decree was recycled to record a receipt for handover of grain and other items dated 564/1169.[5]
In this example, however, reuse appears to have occurred in a private non-official context. The verso of the fatwā paper was reused to record a list of debt payments ranging from one to six dīnārs owed by a certain Ḥasan to thirteen individuals. These include two jurists (fuqahāʾ), named Abū Bakr Badīʿ (two and a half dīnārs) and Muḥammad (four dīnārs) (verso lines 13–18). It is possible that the fatwā paper belonged to Ḥasan and that he had requested several fatwās from these two jurists who later needed to be paid for their work. Ḥasan himself, or someone else, on his behalf, thus included these jurists as a reminder in the list of debt payments appearing on the verso of the fatwā paper.
The fatwā paper was clearly rolled at some point from the verso side and then pressed into a rectangular strip which was itself folded in two.[6] This has left a vertical fold line and eight tightly spaced horizontal fold lines on the sheet. These types of horizontal fold lines are often a sign that the folded strip was archived with other folded documents in a bundle.[7] A possible site of archival storage of the bundle from which the fatwā paper originated might be the private archive of the person who requested the fatwā, presumably the same Ḥasan whose outstanding debt payments are inventoried in the list on the verso.
After these preliminary remarks on the “social codicology”[8] of the document, I conclude this second essay with the text and translation of the document. In the third and final essay I will provide a commentary on the document.
Text[9]
Recto
Verso
Translation
Recto
- Praise is due to its Owner (God).
- What does the judge, the most glorious leader, the scholar [of the religion ]
- of islam, and the most learned among the leading intellectuals, may He (God) perpetuate his erudition, say concerning a man who repudiates his wife
- thrice in a single utterance. Does triple repudiation occur
- or not? Explain and you will be rewarded if God the Exalted wills [ ].
- Triple repudiation
- occurs.
- And what is his opinion
- regarding a man who in one utterance repudiates his wife thrice
- and in the same instant refers to this wife as [his] mother [and] sister, is it proper
- that he marries that wife again or not? [Explain and you will be rewarded].
- Triple repudiation
- occurs and God knows best.
Verso
- 8 dīnārs
- [[Amount:]]
- [[206 dīnārs]]
- Amount:
- 612 dīnārs
- And what his opinion
- concerning an amīr who has authority over his wife and [in one utterance?] repudiates his wife
- thrice, has he divorced (her) or not?
- The answer has been
- given and God knows best.
- List
- of remaining [money?] which is [owed by?] Ḥasan [as debts?]:
- -15. […], […]; faqīh Abū Bakr Badīʿ, 2½ dīnārs; Muḥammad Abū l-Ḥasan, 4 dīnārs; ʿUmar Manṣūr, 6 dīnārs.
16-18. Muḥammad ʿArab [ ]; faqīh Muḥammad, 4 dīnārs; [Sūd?] ʿAlī [Suhrāb?], 10 dīnārs; Mubārak Jūla, 2 dīnārs.
19-21. [ ] 1 dīnār […]; Maḥmūd Sālār, 4 dīnārs; Maḥmūd […] 1 dīnār; Aḥmad […] 2 dīnārs.
22-23. ʿUthmān Ibrāhīm, 1 dīnār.
Notes:
[1] See for example the reuse of documents for Mamluk arrow flights, textiles, and head-gear citied in Konrad Hirschler, “Document Reuse in Medieval Arabic Manuscripts,” COMSt Bulletin 3, no.1 (2017): 38. See surviving Mamluk era documentary cut-out shapes in the Vienna papyri collection in Daisy Livingston, “The Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ: Documentary Life Cycles, Archival Spaces, and the Importance of Documents Lying Around,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 362–63.
[2] This latter hypothesis proposed by Werner Diem is cited in Livingston, “The Paperwork,” 362.
[3] See for example Petra M. Sijpesteijn, “A Ḥadīth Fragment on Papyrus,” Der Islam 92, no. 2 (2015): 321–31.
[4] Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), 55–77.
[5] Arezou Azad and Pejman Firoozbakhsh, “No One Can Give You Protection: The Reversal of Protection in a Persian Decree dated 562/1167,” Annales Islamologiques 54 (2020): 125–38.
[6] The spear head shape was probably cut out on the left-hand margin of the rectangular strip before it was folded in two.
[7] See for example the four bundles of folded papers, each wrapped in a strip of linen, containing business letters, legal documents, and receipts of the Banū Bifām found inside a painted jar in the ruins of a house to the northwest of Naqlūn, a Coptic monastery in the Fayyūm oasis in Christian Gaubert and Jean-Michel Mouton, Hommes et villages du Fayyoum dans la documentation papyrologique arabe (Xe-XIe siècles) (Geneva: Droz, 2014), 305–06 and doc. # 29, 342.
[8] On social codicology, see Olly Akkerman, ed., Social Codicology: The Multiple Lives of Texts in Muslim Societies, Leiden Studies in Islam and Society, Volume 21 (Leiden: Brill, 2025).
[9] Key: [ ] lacunae/insertions by the editor; [?] uncertain reading; […] illegible; [[ ]] erasures by the scribe.
[10] The indefinite noun is indicated in the text with a hamza over the silent hāʾ.
(Suggested Bluebook citation: Zahir Bhalloo, Learning from the document: Part 1, Islamic Law Blog (Oct. 17, 2024), https://islamiclaw.blog/2024/10/17/learning-from-the-document-part-1/)
(Suggested Chicago citation: Zahir Bhalloo, “Learning from the document: Part 1,” Islamic Law Blog, October 17, 2024, https://islamiclaw.blog/2024/10/17/learning-from-the-document-part-1/)