Técnicas e instrumentos de recolección de datos, validez y confiabilidad

Aâmad al-Junayd was reluctant to leave Tarim for Mecca, despite his con-stant imprisonment by the Gharamah, because he was attached to the grave-yards of Tarim. The story is recounted today as one of his distinguishing preternatural acts (karámát) that even during his incarceration, he was spot-ted at night visiting the tombs.¹⁹His enthusiasm for them was part of a larger project that was his life’s work: to seek out and revivify the “traces of the ancestors/predecessors” (áthár al-asláf ). This commitment involved architectural projects of restoration—seeking out ruined mosques of the ancestors and rebuilding them in accordance with available knowledge of the original architectural styles. Beyond repairing cracks in walls and re-placing whole roofs, he underwrote the expenses of keeping a mosque in use and inducing men to prayer: the salaries of custodians, oil for the lamps, coªee, and incense. Among the major Tarim mosques he restored are the al-Saqqáf, al-Muâfár, and Bá ªAlawô. He made trips to surrounding set-tlements especially to locate and restore mosques that had fallen into dis-use. His devotion to his famous pious ancestors drove him to acquire the houses they had lived in. He had the house of the First Jurist rebuilt and constructed around it a dwelling for himself. He ended up owning fifteen such houses. In the cemeteries, he identified graves that had fallen into oblivion and rebuilt their tombstones. Gravestones of outstanding indi-viduals he had raised and coated with polished white quicklime, “that their light may radiate outwards.” Polished quicklime is an expensive material used in the houses of the wealthy. Its production is labor intensive,

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19. Attributed to saints, karámát are ontologically inferior to the miracles of prophets, muªjizát.

volving quarrying, breaking, and firing limestone; long hours of pound-ing with clubs; and hand polishpound-ing the resultpound-ing dry paste on a surface with stone to achieve the desired smooth, reflective surface. The local term for quicklime in this form is nñra, the feminine form of the Arabic word for light, the material being named for its function. With the quicklime’s ex-posure to the elements, the treatment has to be renewed every few years.

Thus revivifying the traces of the ancestors is constant, unending work.

A continual expenditure of energy is required just to keep at bay the cor-rosive action of the elements and of forgetfulness. Ahmad’s biography reports that he volunteered the reason for his eªorts in this way: “to pro-cure for the imagination²⁰its share of the historical traces” (al-Junayd 1994: 119). The traces were sensuous media that connected men directly to their pious ancestors, and this conjunction itself he supposed had cre-ative consequences in consciousness. How direct is the connection? It is strongest at the grave. The Sublime Benefits explains the significance of the graves of the pious thus:

The grand shaykh ªAbd Alláh b. Abô Bakr al-ªAydarñs was asked:

what is the meaning of “to be blessed by the remains of the pious ones (al-tabarruk bi-áthár al-íáliâôn)?” He said: “Blessing is by their remains and devo-tions and their clothes, because their places (graves) are in contact with their clothes; their clothes cover their bodies; their bodies dress their souls; their souls adorn the presence of their God.” Then he sang, “the fragrance of souls we find in their clothes, when coming close to knowledge of the abode.” (A. H. al-Haddád n.d.: 71)

This statement gives formulation to the practice, which is general in the Islamic world at the graves of saints, of passing both hands over the tomb-stone or its cloth cover, then drawing one’s hands to one’s face and in-haling. In Hadramawt, bits of clothing of saints are collected in small, triangular bundles (qubuª) and paraded on certain ritual occasions. At the conclusion of the parade, they are made available to devotees (muâibbôn, literally “lovers”), who perform the same action as at the graves. The ol-factory interpretation of the connection also plays a role in the practice of what has been erroneously called “kissing hands,” which in Hadramawt is performed on a great scholar, pious person, sayyid, or family elder. One takes the right hand, stoops while raising it to one’s face, and makes a sni‹ng

20. See the discussion below on the relation between imagination and sense perception in Ibn al-ªArabô’s thought.

gesture, which consists of short, sharp, shallow inhalations, rather than kisses.²¹The gesture is a hovering of the nose above the back of the hand, rather than physical contact. In The Transparent Essence, the earliest and least inhibited collection of Hadrami Sufi hagiographies, the flamboyant saint ªAbd Alláh Bá ªAlawô is reputed to have been liberal in his use of per-fumes, and his presence could be discerned from a distance.²²The sacred has a scent. In Hadramawt, it is usually encountered as the aroma of smol-dering sandalwood, the incense that Aâmad al-Junayd paid for to attract men to prayer. The incense is a dark-colored variety with a sweet, buoy-ant musk; it is extracted from the jungles of Southeast Asian islands such as Timor and sourced from creole Hadrami middlemen in Penang, Sin-gapore, Surabaya, and other regional centers. It cost three hundred dol-lars per kilogram in the mid-1990s, more than the monthly salary of a schoolteacher. At mosque gatherings, during pilgrimages, and at wed-dings, it is carried aloft through the crowd and taken round in a censer to each person in the gathering. In a gesture similar to the action at the grave, one cups one’s hands above the smoke and draws it to the face, breathing in. In addition, one may wave the incense toward one’s clothes, tucking it, as it were, into the recesses of the folds.

The remains of the ancestors exist only as traces, in small quantities and almost beyond recognition; often they are physically buried and no longer protrude into the visible realm. Their recuperation by those who know of them involves making their signs sensible and accessible. Mak-ing them available for direct perception by the less privileged requires mo-bilizing all the human senses and their material stimuli. This was how Aâ-mad al-Junayd proposed, in his various projects, “to procure for the imagination its share of the historical traces.” Elevating sepulchral mon-uments and illuminating them with gleaming white quicklime made them available to sight. Incense, working through the same olfactory pathways as those that induce appetite for food, even in the absence of sight, arouses a sensation of presence in anticipation of the contact of taste. As for taste itself, the stimulant coªee viscerally promotes wakefulness and exerts an energizing eªect on the imagination. Its use has been traced to Sufis of the Shádhilô order in the Red Sea areas around Aden and Zabôd in the fifteenth century, including the Adeni of chapter 1, who ingested it dur-ing their nighttime vigils of invocation, or dhikr (Hattox 1985). Coªee

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21. Serjeant understands the action as that of kissing, denoted by the Arabic word taqbôl, but correctly notes that colloquially it is shamma, which is to smell or sniª (Serjeant 1957: 14).

22. ªAbd al-Raâmán al-Saqqáf had similar tastes; he is discussed below (al-Shillô 1982: 328).

finds use in Hadramawt today on religious occasions, such as during rit-ual mosque activities, in the breaking of the fast, at pilgrimages to graves, and for special social occasions such as weddings and the annual ibex hunt.

While it is normally prepared with sugar, it is preferred unsweetened by

“old men” and for religious occasions. The term for such coªee, intrigu-ingly, is Shádhiliyya (“of Shádhilô”), which appears to be a direct refer-ence to its historical provenance.²³

23. While the social origins of coªee have not been conclusively established, much ev-idence points to its usage by Sufis on the Red Sea coast in the fifteenth century, before

figure 13. Coªee implements at the grave of the Migrant. Photo by the author.

The mobilization of the senses is directed toward a prototypical goal:

the “presencing” (âafra) of the prophet Muâammad. The ability to per-ceive the Prophet’s presence while awake is a high station of Sufistic achieve-ment. Its method and ontological basis have been the subjects of extensive refined elaboration by the thirteenth-century mystic and theoretician Ibn al-ªArabô, whose ideas, often glossed as “monist,” continue to inform much Sufi thought and practice in the Islamic world (Chittick 1994; Chod-kiewicz 1993; Corbin 1997 [1969]; Hoªman 1999; Knysh 1999b; O’Fahey and Radtke 1993). Chapter 5 discusses some of Ibn al-ªArabô’s influence on Hadrami religious writings, tracing the development of a canon of texts.

For now, I would like to note that one can speak of a vernacularization of his doctrines in the daily practice of religion in Hadramawt.

A number of religious rituals, held on a regular basis, formally focus

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the European rush for it at the Red Sea port of Mocha in the seventeenth century. Botanists believe that Ethiopia was the source of coªee beans. In the fourteenth century, Muslim So-mali pastoralists waged a war of conquest against Christian Ethiopia under Aâmad Granye.

The Muslims were supported with gunpowder and finance from the Hejaz and the Turks and used the Yemeni towns of Zabôd and Aden as logistical bases. They were finally de-feated by the Ethiopian emperor Galawdewos with artillery assistance from the Portuguese, who had long been in search of the legendary Prester John, a Christian king lost in infidel lands. A relatively large number of émigré Hadrami sayyids participated in these events, and many are recorded in Hadrami genealogies as martyrs in that context. The Muslim base in the Ethiopian highlands was Harar, which even today is known as a coªee-producing region. Antonine Besse, who founded St. Antony’s College at Oxford and built his for-tunes in Aden on his uncanny ability to grade coªee, discovered that he could mix the cheaper Harar beans with Yemeni ones without customers being any the wiser. This practice is one indication of the possible closeness of the Yemeni and Ethiopian varieties. The introduc-tion of coªee to the Red Sea coast of Yemen itself may have been a consequence of this war. The chronology would support this interpretation, and the itinerary retraces the path of war booty such as slaves and ivory back to the Arabian Peninsula. The Hadrami sayyids who participated in the Ethiopian war were also Sufis with Shádhilô a‹liations, and they had a presence in the town of Zabôd, which was a regional center of Sufism in the Indian Ocean under the patronage of the Rasulid court. The al-Ahdals, the preeminent scholarly family of Zabôd, reputedly entered Yemen as companions of the ancestor of the Hadrami sayyids, from ªIraq. The Yáfiªôs from near Aden, who have a relationship with the Shaykh Bñ Bakr sayyids of ªAynát in Hadramawt as spiritual clients and political allies, have sent annual votive oªerings to Hadramawt in the form of coªee since the seventeenth century. Mood drugs seldom are able to cast oª associations with the risqué. In this regard, the choice of coªee over other alternatives has received an interesting interpretation by the very eminent and very Protestant historian of Islam, Marshall Hodgson. While wine was associated with singing slave girls and drunken madness, hashish eªected a “dreamy play of the imagina-tion,” causing a loss of responsibility but “called for no women.” Coªee was the most in-nocuous of these substances, “more adaptable to peaceable all-male gatherings than wine, bringing a certain mental excitement or relief without loss of responsibility” (Hodgson 1974: 568).

on the Prophet. One of them is the presencing, or âafra; the other is the celebration of his birth, or mawlid. Coªee and incense are used on these occasions. But they are the enabling paraphernalia of other special social occasions as well, such as weddings, receptions for important personages and long-absent migrants, and the annual ibex hunts. Such gatherings usu-ally have masters of ceremonies who choreograph the performance of eti-quette. Throughout the event, they call out regularly at certain moments, such as the entrance of important participants: “Prayer for the Prophet!”

(“S¥alá ªalá al-Nabô!”)and those present respond as a chorus: “God’s prayers and peace be upon Muâammad!” (“Alláhuma íallô ªalá Muâammad wa-sallim!”). The call to pray for the Prophet figures in Ibn al-ªArabô’s writ-ings as the act of taíliyya (an onomatopoeic neologism), whose repeti-tion eªects presencing of the Prophet (Hoªman 1999; O’Fahey and Radtke 1993). What I am suggesting is that such special social occasions are conducted as if they were Sufi presencings geared to the beatific visio Muâammadi.Their specialness is marked by their reiteration of cues such as the taíliyya. Within the religious tradition that has developed in Hadramawt, the traces of the ancestors, and especially of the prototypi-cal ancestor—the prophet Muâammad—loom large as signs in and for the imagination, whose care and feeding became Aâmad al-Junayd’s life’s work. Their sensuous apprehension indeed received much theoretical elaboration in Ibn al-ªArabô’s thought as the concepts of sight (ruºya), taste (dhawq), and hearing (samáª).²⁴As signs, the consumption of coªee and the inhalation of sandalwood align two distinct hierarchies of value (Sahlins 1976: 179 ª.). While coªee finds use in special religious and so-cial occasions, its cheaper substitute, tea, facilitates soso-cial pleasantries on more mundane occasions, such as the daily family gathering after lunch.

Similarly, frankincense, a cheaper incense, serves as a deodorant in the home. The choice of substances in these cases aligns hierarchies of social occasion and location with hierarchies of monetary rarity qua price, serv-ing as a common structure of signs for separate domains of value. The choice between costly polished quicklime and basic matte whitewash,

24. For Ibn al-ªArabô, the imagination lies between spirit and body and is a composite of meaning (maªná) and sense perception (âiss): “Revelation is a meaning. When God wants meaning to descend to sense perception, it has to pass through the Presence of Imagina-tion before it reaches sense percepImagina-tion. The reality of imaginaImagina-tion demands that it give sen-sory form to everything that becomes actualized within it. There is no escape from this. If the divine revelation arrives in the state of sleep, it is called a ‘dream-vision,’ but if it arrives at the time of wakefulness, it is called an ‘imaginalization,’ takhayyul, . . . That is why rev-elation begins with imagination” (Chittick 1994: 74–75; Ibn al-ªArabô 1972: II 375.32).

which Aâmad al-Junayd constantly confronted in his restoration projects, reflects coordinate considerations.

As signs, the sensuous media we have discussed thus far are arbitrary in the long view. As we saw in chapter 2, some of these media are of for-eign origin and have been localized and assimilated into the indigenous scheme of things. Tea became a substitute for coªee at home, and for-eign sandalwood at some point probably displaced frankincense in rit-ual function. Foreign cement and industrial paint are now beginning to make inroads as alternatives to local quicklime, whitewash, mortar, and adobe. The blessed cloth of Tarim, ranked by Aâmad al-Junayd above the foreign textiles, has now been completely supplanted by the foreign goods and no longer exists. Those fabrics, sourced today from Indone-sia and bearing Hadrami names as trademarks, themselves constitute hi-erarchies of religious and social use values, whose sartorial deployment functions in precise ways to mark status, position, and occasion. At re-ligious or social gatherings, for example, the rere-ligious notables, sayyids and shaykhs, are easily recognized at the head of the group, striking in their long white cotton gowns and their white turbans tightly wrapped in a spiral with ends tucked in. On these occasions, notables also don white sarongs of fine cotton with light, thin lines outlining large, sub-tle grids. Others sport white skullcaps or colored turbans loosely tied with ends sticking out, and some wear darker sarongs of industrial Tetron in browns or blues with shaded checkered prints, a coarser design for every-day use that is less susceptible to soiling. At dance processions during pilgrimages, townsmen who are neither sayyids nor tribesmen cover their heads with red-and-black headdresses of ikat textile, a distinctive east-ern Indonesian design that is woven with the dye wet on the weft, result-ing in diªuse, bleedresult-ing patterns as in a Rorschach test. Local weaves from al-Shiâr, made on narrow looms and barely covering the kneecaps when worn²⁵—with their bright polychrome patterns, open ends, and loose fringes—mark the wearers as bedouin from out of town. Interestingly, while the Indonesian textiles are adapted to local categories in their usage, they impose a major distinction of their own: that of gender. Checkered sarongs in bitonal shades are for men, while polychrome batiks with botan-ical motifs are for women, in accordance with Indonesian usage. That prin-ciple is scrupulously respected and retained in Hadrami consumption of the imported cloth.

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25. Because covering the kneecaps is enjoined in Islamic law, this attire carries a hint of the risqué in the eyes of the religiously aware.

Coªee, sandalwood, the taíliyya, musical instruments, sarongs, and liturgical texts are detachable media. They are the mobile parapherna-lia of ritual events such as âafra and mawlid that can be reconstituted in modular fashion and performed elsewhere (J. Z. Smith 1992). In the dias-pora, in East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, communities of Hadramis, or of Muslims under Hadrami tutelage, regularly held such sessions, which had a distinctive Hadrami cast. They continue to do so today. Yet such sessions relate to the ones in Tarim as satellite to source, and in that sense, something gets lost in the transmission. There are things emplaced in Tarim that cannot be replaced or modularly reproduced elsewhere.

figure 14. Texts in a niche by a grave within a dome.

Photo by the author.

These are the traces of the ancestors, which kept Aâmad al-Junayd at home and kept him busy in lifelong projects of restoration. In the most immediate sense, the traces of the ancestors are their bodies interred in the graves of Tarim. Their location enables unique and inimitable pres-encings. In these performances, participants are moved not only by the action of their sensory organs from a distance. Rather, it is their whole bodies that gravitate to the graves and tilt toward the ancestors lying within.

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