The first half of The Irrigating Fount sets out in a definitive manner the pedigree of the Hadrami sayyids and their spiritual investment in Hadra-mawt, especially Tarim. The history of their settlement in the region,
manuscripts, so pagination diªers between copies. One would have to index each copy in-dividually, which would be no mean task. Alphabetical ordering of the entries probably be-gins with an index but supersedes it, creating a separate work unto itself. The problem also arises in arrangement by generation, as Rosenthal has noted: “The greatest and obvious drawback of ìabaqát (generational biographical) works was that it was extremely di‹cult for the historically minded to find in them that which they were looking for. In the famous T
¥abaqát al-fuqahẠof Abñ Isâáq ash-Shirázô,one needs about as much information in order to be able to locate a particular biography as one might expect to find in that biography once one has succeeded in locating it” (Rosenthal 1952: 84).
23. Al-Shillô allows for one exception to alphabetical order: he places the biographical entries beginning with the name Muâammad first. In this case, figural considerations take precedence over purely alphabetical ones.
24. Though al-Muâibbô lived in Damascus, his book’s center of gravity is Mecca-Medina.
which was summarized in The Travelling Light before the biography of the Adeni, appears in full detail, drawing from very early sources such as al-Kharid’s Blaze (1985) and al-Shaykh ªAlô al-Sakrán’s Lightning Bolt (al-Sakrán 1928).25The account is couched in a rhetorical, argumentative style that anticipates objections. Thus, al-Shillô tells us that when the Migrant first arrived in Hadramawt from Iraq, the natives challenged the veracity of his Prophetic descent. The response to this challenge is given in detail.
The process of authentication takes the form of itineraries, in which Ha-drami pilgrims to Mecca meet pilgrims coming from Basra, who confirm the Migrant’s provenance.
Al-Shillô then traces the ascendants of the eponymous ancestor of the Hadrami sayyids, the grandson of the Migrant, step by step to the Proph-et, and beyond. Having established the ascent/descent line, he presents sections on the mosques, graves, and hills of Tarim. These accounts draw heavily from stories such as those in the Transparent Essence, which we have encountered in chapter 2. But they are now fitted completely within the master narrative of the Prophetic genealogy of the Tarim sayyids; this is new. Whereas al-Khaìôb’s Transparent Essence and al-ªAydarñs’s The Trav-elling Lightfeatured both sayyids and non-sayyids, al-Shillô’s The Irrigat-ing Fountretained only the former, featuring canonical ancestors such as ªAbd al-Raâmán al-Saqqáf and ªUmar al-Muâfár.
The narrowing focus of the developing canon is evident in subtexts embedded within these texts. One genre of these subtexts is manuals for visiting graves. These manuals are short, early predecessors of more com-plex manuals, such as Aâmad al-Junayd’s Salve for the Sickly in Organiz-ing Visits to Tarim’s Cemetery,which I analyze in chapter 7. Such manu-als appear in the earlier texts of ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs and al-Shillô.
ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs includes as e‹cacious not only visits to the graves of Tarim but to those of Zabôd as well (al-ªAydarñs 1985: 76), and he names the graves to visit there. He does not restrict his list to the graves of Hadrami sayyids. Al-Shillô, however, focuses only on those of Tarim and presents a how-to guide to visiting them, in a liturgical account that contains the basic structure of al-Junayd’s later manual (al-Junayd n.d.;
al-Shillô 1982: 283).26This account starts with the First Jurist and works its way through a number of names, stations, and prayers. It also begins
H Y B R I D T E X T S 145
25. Muâammad b. ªAlô al-Kharid’s (d. 1451; see table 1) book is the first major Hadrami sayyid genealogy. Al-Shaykh ªAlô b. Abô Bakr al-Sakrán (d. 1490; see table 2) is the first au-thor of Hadrami sayyid biographies.
26. Al-Shillô’s section on “how to visit” the graves of Tarim is called kayfiyyat ziyáratihim.
with Zanbal, the graveyard of the sayyids, and moves on to al-Furayì, that of the shaykhs. Unlike ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs’s rendition, the liturgical movement in al-Shillô’s version becomes driven by the larger, systematized narrative of Prophetic descent in which it has been placed.
One can trace this systematization in the evolution of genealogical texts abroad, as we see here, and note that it provided paradigms for subse-quent texts composed in the homeland, such as al-Junayd’s. That al-Shillô wrote his text in and for the diaspora is not in question, as he ends abruptly his liturgical guide to the graves of Tarim, saying that “there is no use in lengthening the account here because he who is far from the place will not benefit from its description, and he who is there can easily find and ask reliable persons in the town” (al-Shillô 1982: 284). Aâmad al-Junayd’s manual for visiting the graveyards of Tarim, a repatriate de-scendant of al-Shillô’s subtext written in and for the homeland, is best learned in the company of just such “reliable persons in the town,” as we shall see.
In The Irrigating Fount of al-Shillô, non-sayyids and non-Hadramis disappear from the scene, and the scene is no longer a diasporic space emergent in the desultory accounts of events there. Rather, the text pres-ents a didactic and developmentally systematic account of one patriline and one tradition, anchoring it in the homeland. The far-flung places that are intimates in ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs’s The Travelling Light appear marginally, as points in the biographies of mobile persons featured in the Irrigating Fount. In The Travelling Light, space and time are discrete, named entities that are of interest in themselves. The century gives its name to the book. Each year is individuated and numbered; some years stand out because of memorable events. Places too, such as Zabôd, have their own lives, narrated through alternation of floods, fires, droughts, and inflation.
In al-Shillô’s Irrigating Fount, in contrast, space and time are not in-dependent realities; they are harnessed to a narrative project—the un-folding of the genealogy of the prophet Muâammad. This unun-folding is almost Cartesian in its elaboration from first principles. The book opens with a discussion of this genealogy and marks the progress of time by the chainlike parade of predecessors and successors. Dates are often dispensed with; it is sequence that matters, the silsila, the onomatopoeia of “chain”
that repeats itself. Places come into view not in their own right but be-cause of the spirituality invested in them by specific persons of this ge-nealogy. Whereas The Travelling Light incorporated a whole world of persons beyond the Hadrami sayyids—the ecumenical society of
trans-regional Sunni scholars and Sufis in the Red Sea/Indian Ocean—The Ir-rigating Fountdispensed with all others in its focus on the sayyids. Oth-ers are retained only as teachOth-ers or students of individual Hadrami sayyids. The sense of the Indian Ocean as a universal concourse tra‹ck-ing in scholars of all origins disappears.
The Irrigating Fountthus transforms The Travelling Light by rework-ing its materials into a new, tightly integrated form focused on the Prophet’s patriline from Hadramawt. Al-Shillô’s book converts the whole diasporic space of The Travelling Light, with its rhizomic quality and its diverse cast of actors, into a stage that displays the missionary telos of the Hadrami sayyids.