Sapient Materiality in Medieval Hagiographies of Female Sufi Ascetics

Abstract

With its focus on self-mortification and withdrawal from the world, medieval asceticism seems entrenched in a rhetoric of immateriality. The materialities of the world—the human body, physical objects, natural phenomena—all seem to decay when subject to the withering glare of the ascetic. But upon deeper inspection, it becomes clear that asceticism and materiality have a much more intimate and dialogic relationship in medieval texts. This intimacy and dialogue are abundantly clear in medieval Arabic Islamic hagiographies about Sufi women, as in Abū ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān as-Sulamī’s (d. 1021) Dhikr an-Niswa al-Mutaʿabbidāt aṣ-Ṣūfiyyāt (Remembrance of Women Sufi Devotees) and Abū al Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī’s (d. 1201) Ṣifat as-Ṣafwa (The Features of the Elect). Asceticism (zuhd) denies materiality whilst at the same time situating itself within inescapable material objects and frameworks: the enclosed space, the prayer rug, the hairshirt, to name only a few examples. I argue that we can harness a ‘material hermeneutic’ to decode the ascetic materialities (a key example of ‘sapient materiality’, to use Daniel Miller’s term) at the heart of these Islamic hagiographies.

1. Introduction

With its focus on self-mortification and withdrawal from the world, medieval asceticism seems entrenched in a rhetoric of immateriality. The materialities of the world—the human body, physical objects, natural phenomena—all seem to decay when subject to the withering glare of the ascetic. But upon deeper inspection, it becomes clear that asceticism and materiality have a much more intimate and dialogic relationship in medieval texts. This intimacy and dialogue are abundantly clear in medieval Arabic Islamic hagiographies about Sufi women, as in Abū ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān as-Sulamī’s (d. 1021) Dhikr an-Niswa al-Mutaʿabbidāt aṣ-Ṣūfiyyāt (Remembrance of Women Sufi Devotees) and Abū al Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī’s (d. 1201) Ṣifat as-Ṣafwa (The Features of the Elect). Asceticism (zuhd) denies materiality whilst at the same time situating itself within inescapable material objects and frameworks: the enclosed space, the prayer rug, the hairshirt, to name only a few examples. Throughout both as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s texts, ascetic denials of materiality are underpinned by the very materiality that informs and enriches asceticism. Within the capaciousness of the term ‘materiality’, I focus especially on the objects and structures related to ascetic practice.1 The famous example of Rābiʿa alʿAdawiyya (713–801 CE) offers a particularly arresting case study; beyond Rābiʿa, there remains continual recourse to fabrics, architectural structures, and other objects. I argue that we can harness a ‘material hermeneutic’ to decode the ascetic materialities at the heart of these Islamic hagiographies.

2. The Texts and Their Ascetic Materialities

As-Sulamī’s Remembrance of Women Sufi Devotees has been unearthed only recently: Muḥammad aṭ -Ṭanahi found a manuscript version of this work in 1991 (Muḥammad ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, MS 2118) (Cornell 1999, p. 44). This text is an early eleventh-century collection of hagiographic accounts of Sufi women in various regions—including modern-day Iraq (especially Basra and Baghdad), Iran (especially Nishapur and more broadly Khurasan), Syria, and Egypt—in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries.2 The text belongs to the tabaqāt (levels) genre, itself generated from study of the ḥadīth (traditions related to the Prophet Muḥammad) (Cornell 1999, p. 49). In this vein, to use Rkia Elaroui Cornell’s apt phrase, the text is formed of ‘literary collages’, and each narrative is ‘made up of a few to a dozen or so individual accounts or vignettes’ (Cornell 1999, p. 47). Two hundred years after the writing of Remembrance of Women Sufi Devotees, Ibn al-Jawzī composed The Features of the Elect, which includes as-Sulamī’s accounts of various Sufi women but is also informed by substantial additional sources. It is not clear which version of as-Sulamī’s text he used (Cornell 1999, p. 46; Geissinger 2020, p. 170, n. 11).

Sufism has a rich tradition of zuhd, among both women and men, and this asceticism forms a fundamental part of both as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s hagiographies (Solovieva 2014; Malti-Douglas 1998, p. 395; Saniotis 2012; Dallh 2023; Sviri 2012).3 The Qur’an is the basis for such practice, for it affirms repeatedly the transience and corruptibility of this world when set against the Afterlife. For example:

Bear in mind that the present life is just a game, a diversion, an attraction, a cause of boasting among you, of rivalry in wealth and children. It is like plants that spring up after the rain: their growth at first delights the sowers, but then you see them wither away, turn yellow, and become stubble. There is terrible punishment in the next life as well as forgiveness and approval from God: the life of this world is only an illusory pleasure.

(57, Al-Ḥadīd, ‘Iron’: 20)4

Zuhd for early Sufis involved, among other practices, vigils, extensive prayer, fasting beyond Ramadan, weeping, and the wearing of hairshirts.5 Scriptural support for vigils and supererogatory prayer, in particular, may be found in Qur’an 25:63–65 and 73:1–4:

The servants of the Lord of Mercy are those who walk humbly on the earth, and who, when aggressive people address them, reply, with words of peace; those who spend the night bowed down or standing, worshipping their Lord[.]

(25, Al-Furqān, ‘The Differentiator’: 63–65)

You [Prophet], enfolded in your cloak! Stay up throughout the night, all but a small part of it, half, or a little less, or a little more; recite the Qur’an slowly and distinctly[.]

(73, Al-Muzzammil, ‘Enfolded’: 1–4)

Alongside the concentration on the Sufi women’s asceticism, as-Sulamī and Ibn al-Jawzī reveal the women as vessels of wisdom; the hagiographers quote these women’s insightful sayings or demonstrate the guidance they offer their interlocutors. We also see these women engage in Qur’anic exegesis (see further Geissinger 2020, pp. 151–78). Furthermore, the hagiographies show the women to be great lovers of the Divine, relaying their passionate prayers and demonstrating their intoxication in the Divine Beloved. Asceticism is at the core of these women’s cultivation of Divine Love: ascetic and love-based practices are not easily separable, and both are underpinned by skilful exegesis (see further Dakake 2007, pp. 72–97; Solovieva 2014). Within these women’s nurturance of Divine Love, materiality continues to assert itself as central to their asceticism.

With the exception of the wearing of the veil (ḥijāb), material objects and structures associated with asceticism are not confined to female spiritual practices; Sufi men also used and responded to ascetic materialities.6 Nonetheless, a focus on materiality in the lives of Sufi women stages a much-needed intervention as we partake in the ‘hermeneutic of remembrance’. This is a hermeneutic highlighted by Cornell, borrowing the term from Lynda L. Coon, who was in turn examining women’s authority in early Christianity (Cornell 1999, p. 48; Coon 1997, pp. xix–xx). Coon was writing in 1997, and Cornell in 2005. Since then, there has been substantial scholarship on Sufi women, as will be revealed. But Sufi women have been side-lined over many centuries, and continual efforts are needed to regain their lost histories, including the materiality that shapes the women’s asceticism.

This is not to forget the inevitable limitations when confronted with male-authored texts on women. However, I follow Gail Ashton in hearing two voices in hagiographical texts: the masculine and the feminine, with the latter ‘as much a part of the vitae as that other’ (Ashton 2000, p. 15). Ashton writes on Christian vitae, and I believe that this double-voice is also deeply resonant to the ‘collage’-like (Cornell 1999) Islamic hagiography, where male and female authorities combine to piece together the account of the female ascetic. Our access to as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s women is through a textured lens, one that marshals a range of voices in order to convey each woman’s extraordinary devotion. Such a hermeneutic process is itself an almost material endeavour, an active weaving together of threads of authorities to form a textured collage of each devotee. I propose such a ‘material hermeneutic’ to accompany Coon’s and Cornell’s ‘hermeneutic of remembrance’.

It remains true that devotion and materiality are not obvious bedfellows, given the historical inclination to polarize the ‘material’ and the ‘religious’ in Western scholarship. As observed by Tracy Pintchman:

There has been a tendency in many forms of religious discourse to associate religion primarily with the nonmaterial realm of extramundane considerations and experiences, especially beliefs about God or ‘the Ultimate’ variously understood, timeless truths about eternal realities, and experiences that lie beyond the realm of ordinary human awareness. This tendency has remained remarkably tenacious despite numerous attempts by religious studies scholars to unseat it.

(Pintchman 2015, p. 11)

Yet, as Pintchman shows, the study of religious materialities has flourished in recent decades, embodied in the journal called Material Religion (founded in 2005). A wealth of other publications demonstrates this material turn (see especially Arweck and Keenan 2006; Vásquez 2011; Houtman and Meyer 2012; and on the Islamic context, Khosronejad 2012; Bigelow 2021). Daniel Miller’s term of ‘sapient materiality’ crucially underscores the deep link between consciousness and cognition and the material (Miller 2005, p. 34). ‘Sapient materiality’ reveals the embeddedness of cognitive and conscious activity within material frameworks. On the earlier neglect of materiality, Pintchman notes the problems caused by the tendency to ‘elevate texts and the ideas contained therein as the most favoured objects of serious scholarly inquiry’, leading to a ‘devaluation of the material realm’ (Pintchman 2015, p. 12). In my own focus on textual sources, however, I seek to demonstrate how textual study can itself contribute to the material turn in religious studies, by attending to the array of objects and structures central to devotional lives. As will be seen, the asceticism avowed in texts like as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s is shaped by a rich materiality.

3. Rābiʿa Alʿadawiyya: An Opening Case Study

Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya’s asceticism is affirmed in abundance. In both as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s versions of her life, she refers again and again to abandoning the earth and focusing all attention on the Divine and the Afterlife.7 In one of her statements recorded by as-Sulamī, she says: ‘Everything has a fruit (thamara), and the fruit of the knowledge of God (maʿrifa) is in continual orientation towards God (iqbāl)’ (Cornell 1999, p. 77).8 When various visitors criticize the world in her presence in Ibn al-Jawzī’s version of her life, Rābiʿa complains that in fact the outer world is entirely dominating these visitors’ inner realm, since they chose the subject closest to their hearts to speak of first (p. 279). Rābiʿa engages in extreme weeping practices, and she also prays through the whole night (see further Silvers 2014, pp. 32–35; Lazikani 2023). On taking a short rest, Rābiʿa awakens in horror and chastises her own lower soul or nafs: ‘Your sleep is almost as deep as the sleep from which you will only awaken when the trumpet calls forth the Day of Resurrection!’ (p. 281). But even as her ascetic practices would seem to call for an abandonment of all materiality, the material remains fundamental to her hagiography.

In Ibn al-Jawzī’s version of her life, as a visitor enters her humble domain, he observes that she sits ‘on a mat made from the skin of a striped mullet’, referring to a type of fish (p. 277). This immediately calls attention to the materiality of the mat: not only its status as an object used by the ascetic, but the matter it is made from—which, in turn, brings to mind a range of qualities, from its texture to its smell to the sound it makes when one sits upon it. And indeed, sound is evoked when the visitor remarks that he could hear her tears falling on the mat, likening the sound to rain. Even as it acts as a sign of her austere existence, the mat demonstrates the centrality of materialities to her ascetic life: Rābiʿa embodies a richly ‘sapient materiality’. The most self-abnegating of lives still demands the presence of a mat made of fish.

Then, within the ‘collage’ of the text, a visitor called Muḥammad ibn ʿAmr visits the elderly Rābiʿa. Her home is said to include a mat and clothes rack, a door-skin made of mullet, a jar, a mug, a scrap of felt for her bed, and her prayer rug, not to mention her burial shroud hanging on the clothes rack (p. 277). This detailed description serves to affirm her asceticism and her powerful denial of material comforts, but as it does so the hagiographer is drawn into a deep concentration on materiality. The mat’s texture and shape are described (it is old and rectangular), and the clothes rack is identified as made from Persian reeds; the door is covered by a skin made of possibly mullet again. Later in the text we are told she wears a hairshirt during her night vigils. The impression given is of a deeply ascetic life, but in order to create such an impression the hagiographer is caught in a rich web of materiality: the identification of the Persian reeds and mullet, in particular, allows materiality to shimmer clearly for the reader as the hagiographer expounds on the elderly Rābiʿa’s existence.

On Rābiʿa’s death, she is wrapped as she requested in her burial shroud. It turns out that this is the very shroud made of hair which she would wear during her night vigils (p. 281). Such a connection serves to underline her severe asceticism, but yet again it does so by drawing attention to the material trappings that accompany and reinforce Rābiʿa’s ascetic life. After a year passes, ʿAbda bint Abī Shawwāl sees Rābiʿa in a dream, and here we see Rābiʿa transformed through a material lens. ʿAbda perceives Rābiʿa in a green dress and wearing a veil of green silk (p. 281). Rābiʿa becomes deeply associated with fabric: first the hairshirt which becomes her burial shroud, and then in transformative green. The clothing seeks to underscore her asceticism even as it would seem to undercut it. The roughness of the hairshirt is transfigured into the softness of her postmortem clothing, both garments nurturing the wisdom of her ascetic life. The colour green is also of significance: it has specific associations in the Qur’an and ḥadīth with holiness, Paradise, and the Prophet Muḥammad (see Quran 18:31 and 55:76 and also Pastoureau 2014, pp. 46–49).9 Fabric comes to the foreground in the life of Rābiʿa, and not in opposition to her asceticism as might be assumed. Rather, the substance and colour of fabric become intimately linked to ascetic practices and its rewards.

4. Fabrics

Fabrics, indeed, swathe these hagiographies: the wearing of particular kinds of garments and veils enriches the ascetic lives recounted and celebrated in these texts.10 This is deeply conversant with the material hermeneutic mentioned above, where the reading of the hagiographies is itself a kind of weaving. Above all is that basic item of all ascetics in numerous religious traditions: the hairshirt. We witnessed Rābiʿa wearing a hairshirt, which would ultimately become her shroud, only to be altered into beautiful green garments encompassing the dead Sufi. In the wearing of a hairshirt, Rābiʿa is joined by Muʾnisa the Sufi (fl. before 906–7) (p. 175). The hairshirt is given significant attention in the account of Muʾnisa life. When asked why she wears a hairshirt, and whether it is out of fear (khawf) or love (maḥabba) for God, Muʾnisa sternly replies that it is ultimately how she learns to experience suffering, in a direct expression of ‘sapient materiality’. Muʾnisa suggests that khawf and maḥabba are obvious markers of the Sufi life, and both are underpinned by suffering. Hairshirts are the ultimate mark of the ascetic as they strive to overcome the material world, but the very materiality of the hairshirt continually intrudes upon the hagiography.11

Alongside the wearing of hairshirts, the other marker of the ascetic Sufi is the wearing of woollen clothing. One theory for the root of the word taṣawwuf (Sufism, or the following of the Sufi path) is the woollen (ṣūf) garment worn by devotees, possibly a practice inspired by Christian hermits (see Schimmel 1977, p. 35). The importance of woollen clothing is emphasized repeatedly in as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s hagiographies, bringing the materiality of the women’s ascetic lives to the surface: wool becomes a hallmark of asceticism. Hawra, ‘the Foolhardy’ (dates uncertain) in as-Sulamī’s hagiography praises a woman who visits her wearing a blouse made of wool, affirming that, just as the one who wears wool is distinguished in clothing, so should they be distinguished in spiritual features (p. 223). The details of ʿAjrada al-ʿAmiyya’s (d. second half of eighth century) clothing are recounted by Ibn al-Jawzī: she wears a woollen garment, a woollen head veil, and a woollen mantle (p. 285). The material of wool is at the centre of the Sufi women’s asceticism.

Earlier in the account of ʿAjrada’s life, Ibn al-Jawzī observes through his ‘collage’ of sources that ʿAjrada would prepare for prayer by putting on her necessary garments and veiling her face (p. 285). And prayerful intimacy with the Divine can itself be encoded through fabric. Before her nightly prayer, in which she speaks of devoting herself to her Beloved, Ḥabiba al-Adawiyya (early ninth century) is said to fold herself up tightly in fabric and put her blouse under her veil (p. 203). The materiality inherent in Ḥabiba’s actions are dwelt on by as-Sulamī, even as the focus is on Ḥabiba’s heartfelt prayer. After she enfolds herself in fabric, Ḥabiba declares: ‘My God: the stars have set, everyone’s eyes have slept, the rulers have locked the gates, and every lover is alone with their beloved; this is the time I devote myself to you’ (p. 203). This is a poignant example of a prayer within the category of the munāja (plural munājāt): a prayer that acts as a deep, loving conversation with the Divine, beyond ritualistic prayer (see further Nicholson 1923, p. 36; Smith 2001, pp. 45, 49, 51, n. 16; Dallh 2017, p. 90; Erkinov 2007). To facilitate this loving conversation, Ḥabiba first envelopes herself in fabric.

The link between clothing and intimacy with God also comes to the surface in the case of Rayḥāna ‘the Enraptured (wāliha)’ (d. second half of eighth century), in as-Sulamī’s text. Rayḥāna has a message inscribed beneath her pocket or collar. With evident sapient materiality, the inscription revolves around intimacy with her Divine Lover. Love is embedded within the material text:

• You are my intimate friend, my aspiration, and my joy,
• And my heart cannot love anything except you.
• Oh, my precious one, my aspiration, and object of my longing,
• My yearning has no end. When will I finally encounter you?
• My petition is not for Heaven’s pleasures;
• I desire only to encounter you.
(p. 95)

Even as this inscription focuses on immaterial Divine intimacy, the message is relayed through fabric both in the hagiographic text and on Rayḥāna’s own body.

The munāja enables a heightened intimacy with God, and thus the act of such prayer is suffused with a consciousness of death. In offering a mode of communication with the Divine, the munāja can act as a reminder of mortality and the closeness with God that death provides. Again, we find fabric supporting and amplifying such consciousness, particularly in the case of Umm Hārūn of Damascus (first half of ninth century). A man shouts out ‘Take him!’, and, thinking that the Angel of Death has come to take her soul, Umm Hārūn falls on a rock and her veil becomes bloodied (p. 147). This story brings to the foreground her wearing of a veil; the veil is a central part of her ascetic life, in which she constantly fears death due to the anxiety that she has disobeyed God (p. 147). The veil which shields Umm Hārūn’s hair and possibly her face—as attested in the life of ʿAjrada—becomes a sign of her ascetic preoccupation with death. The material veil is made central to her ascetic quest; it is not an incidental or extraneous aspect of her spiritual life.

Where Umm Hārūn’s veil becomes bloodied in a demonstration of her anguish about encountering the God she has disobeyed, the garment of Qusayma the wife of Abū YaʿQūb of Tinnīs (fl. tenth century) conveys her ascetic self-denial through its very colouring and texture. In the account of her life by as-Sulamī, we are told that Qusayma takes off her brown garment and gives it away to a group of Sufis in the midst of an invocation session (p. 211). This is proof of her asceticism and her focus on otherworldly pursuits, but again, materiality permeates Qusayma’s act. We are given a clear sense of the hue of the garment; it is specifically ‘walnut brown’ (‘jawzi’), a specificity which places the materiality of the garment at the centre of Qusayma’s asceticism. Rābiʿa’s green clothing is replete with symbolic meaning; Qusayma’s ‘walnut brown’ clothing brings the reader’s or listener’s attention either to the garment’s attractiveness or to its simplicity. We are also told that it is a garment from Basra, highlighting the texture and tradition of the garment. Even as Qusayma sheds herself of the garment, its materiality takes centre stage in the narrative of her ascetic impulses.

5. Architectural Structures

Fabrics are only one aspect of ascetic materiality in the hagiographies of as-Sulamī and Ibn al-Jawzī. Accompanying them always are the architectural structures that frame and enclose the ascetic life. The multifaceted relationship between architecture and Sufism is too vast to be addressed here in full (see further Akkach 2005; Mumtaz 2009, pp. 41–61; Wolper 2003; Lifchez 1992). Our focus rests on the particular manifestations of architectural structures and their relationship to the early Sufi women in al-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s texts, read through a material hermeneutic. In these hagiographies, architectural structures form the physical frameworks through which asceticism can be achieved, in another clear manifestation of ‘sapient materiality’. The structures become the sites of extreme denial and intent focus on the Divine Beloved and the Afterlife, acting as nurturing places with deep spiritual significance.12 No clearer is this than in the emphasis on the underground cells (sarādīb) in Shabaka of Basra’s (fl. before 952–3) house, for the purposes of reclusion. The hagiographer makes clear that Shabaka is a specialist in the way of spiritual care (waraʿ), and it is in these sarādīb that female disciples learn self-sacrifice and spiritual devotion (p. 91). As Tor Andrae observes:

[…] during the earliest period of Islam certain ascetics arranged for a cell or subterranean chamber to be built in or under their own house, where, periodically, they practiced a life of quasi-eremitism.

(Andrae 1987, p. 10)

Situated as they are underground, the sarādīb allow an escape from earthly distractions; the sarādīb form a netherworld full of ascetic potential. But paradoxically, the physical structure in which self-denial is enacted has an inescapable presence for Shabaka’s hagiographer, as this becomes the richly material framework in which asceticism is made possible.

Architectural structures continue to play a crucial role in various accounts of early ascetic Sufi women in as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s hagiographies. Hafṣa Bint Sīrīn (eighth century) in Ibn al-Jawzī’s hagiography has ‘her mosque’, meaning a private place of prayer, where her continual prayer finds its expression:

[She would] pray the noon (ẓuhr), afternoon, (ʿasr), sunset (maghrib), evening (‘īshā), and morning (ṣubḥ) prayers. She would remain there until the sunlight came; then she would make a single prostration and depart. At this time, she would perform her ablution and sleep until the noon prayer. Then she would return to her mosque and do the same as before.

(p. 271)

Hafṣa’s ‘mosque’ becomes the site of her utter devotion to the Divine. Such a private place is also evident in as-Sulamī’s life of Umm Aḥmad Bint ʿAʾisha (fl. first half of tenth century). As-Sulamī remarks that she dwelt inside her home, never leaving it, for fifty years. It is here that she flourishes as an ascetic, known for her spiritual aspiration (himma) and her spiritual state (ḥāl) (p. 219). Again, the physical structure of the house enables her asceticism, colouring the hagiography despite the text’s attempts to escape the material. Beyond houses and private places of prayer, there are also cemeteries. ʿĀfiyya the Infatuated (fl. second half of ninth century) would flee from human relationality by escaping to cemeteries (p. 97). Even here, the allure of the material can be felt. Her ascetic existence is nurtured by the physical structures evident in the cemeteries—the tombs, the gravestones—all contributing to her attempt to break free from the material world. Just as Rābiʿa’s hairy burial shroud touched her asceticism with a powerful materiality, so too do the materiality of cemeteries haunt ʿĀfiyya’s hagiographer.13

Vitally, there is mention of a prayer-niche (miḥrab) in as-Sulamī’s life of Ṣafrāʾ of Rayy (ninth century) (p. 163) and Ibn al-Jawzī’s life of ʿAjrada al-ʿAmiyya (p. 285). A miḥrab is a niche in the wall of a mosque or other sacred architecture that indicates the qibla, the direction of prayer. The miḥrab also had a range of meanings in earlier sources. It may have originally indicated a covered prayer space, a row of columns, or the maqsurah, the screen in front of the qibla—all conveying a potent materiality (Searjant 1959, pp. 439, 453). But in its more specific sense as the niche in the prayer wall, the miḥrab has a crucial directive purpose in Islamic prayer, a marker that orients the prayerful soul: the Virgin Mary herself dwelt in the miḥrab in prayer (Mumtaz 2009, p. 50). The miḥrab also has an important symbolic function, ‘as the innermost sanctuary, the heart, where one is in the presence of God’, embodied in Qur’an 24:35 (Mumtaz 2009, p. 50).14 The architectural detail of the miḥrab is the lifeblood of an ascetic’s dwelling with God. The miḥrab features in precisely such a way in a poem attributed to Rabi’a known as ‘My Rest is in My Solitude’. Speaking on her Divine Lover, the Rābiʿa-speaker remarks: ‘Wherever I am, I witness his beauty. He is my prayer-niche [miḥrab] and my prayer-direction [qibla]’.15 The Divine is evoked through architectural precision: his enduring presence as her Lover means that He becomes her miḥrab, accompanying her and directing her soul. The mentions of the miḥrab in the lives of Ṣafrāʾ of Rayy and ʿAjrada al-ʿAmiyya are freighted with the sense of the miḥrab as a spiritual and loving centre, the niche both as the ultimate orientational device and as the soul’s dwelling with God. For the ascetic life shaped by sapient materiality, the miḥrab provides a fundamental architectural framework in which to nurture intimacy with God, the soul oriented to him in all ways. We may be reminded here of Rābiʿa’s assertion, mentioned earlier, of the fruit of knowledge residing in continual orientation towards God. Whilst Rābiʿa seems to indicate the soul’s orientation, this remains inseparable from the architectural miḥrab itself.

6. Other Objects

Beyond fabrics and architectural structures, there are other material objects that permeate as-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Jawzī’s texts. One is in the case of Hafṣa Bint Sīrīn who in as-Sulamī’s version lights a lamp at night when she prays. But even when the lamp goes out, it continues to exude light in the house until the coming of sunlight (p. 123). This is another material aspect of an ascetic life: a lamp guides the act of prayer, functioning in a sense as an accompaniment to the miḥrab in its visual and orientational function. And even in its extinguished forms, the lamp’s presence continues to be felt. There is also a wash basin featuring in the account of Rābiʿa Bint Ismāʿīl (eighth-ninth centuries). She asks for the wash basin to be taken away from her, for she sees written on it the death of Caliph Hārūn ar-Rāshīd. It turns out that Hārūn ar-Rāshīd had indeed died on that day in the year 809 (p. 139). This is a curious case of illuminating a Sufi’s clairvoyant abilities through a very material object. As profoundly ascetic as Hafṣa and Rābiʿa Bint Ismail may be, the accounts of their lives are touched by the material. The lamp and the wash-basin remind us that asceticism does not equate immateriality.

Dhakkāra (fl. first half of ninth century) forms a fitting close to this essay in her remarkable words about the making of real falūdaj (a Persian sweet made of flour, water, and honey), in a description replete with the material:

Take the sugar of divine gift, the flour of purity, the water of modesty, the butter of self-consciousness, and the saffron of requital, and drain them in the sieves of fear and hope. Then, put under the mixture a tripod of sorrow, hang up the sauce-pans of grief, seal it with the lid of contemplation, light under it the fire of sighs, and spread it over caution until it feels the gentle breeze of the night-vigil.

(p. 183)

This extraordinary passage links qualities of the ascetic life with materiality. The ascetic existence is given a sapient-material foundation. It could, certainly, be postulated that such a description has as its purpose the very denial of any materiality: falūdaj is stripped of all its materiality, losing its ingredients, textures, and flavours to instead become a mere signifier of immaterial ascetic states. But I would argue that the opposite is true: the asceticism symbolized by the pseudo-falūdaj is haunted by the material. Even as the hagiographer focuses on an array of ascetic qualities—divine gift, purity, modesty, self-consciousness, requital, fear, hope, sorrow, grief, contemplation, sighs, caution, night-vigil—he is brought back again and again to materiality. Asceticism is enriched by material frameworks, even as it attempts to escape the tethers of materiality.

The hagiographies of Abū ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān as-Sulamī and Abū al Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī are saturated with the material. The lives they recount are ones of pure and determined asceticism: and yet, there is a continual recourse to materiality. Through a material hermeneutic, in which one reads the hagiography as though weaving together different authorities, it becomes clear that asceticism and materiality share a supportive and dialogic relationship. Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya provides one famous case study of the materiality inherent in an ascetic’s life; this model may be enriched by considering further instances of fabrics, architectural structures, and other objects that are fundamental to Sufi women’s asceticism. As-Sulamī and Ibn al-Jawzī’s hagiographies demonstrate that we can speak of an ‘ascetic materiality’: asceticism nourished by material objects and structures. Such ascetic materiality provides an important instance of ‘sapient materiality’. A focus on textual sources does not militate against the material turn in religious studies, but in fact has quite the opposite ramifications. In their edited collection on the materiality of Middle English anchoritic devotion, Michelle M. Sauer and Jenny C. Bledsoe remark that ‘there is enormous potential to expand the study of reclusion and materiality to different places and periods, including […] other places and religions of the medieval world’ (Sauer and Bledsoe 2021, p. 14). I hope that I have made one small contribution to such efforts, and I echo these editors’ words that there is great scope and need to explore the close links between materiality and different kinds of religious vocation in greater depth. Asceticism and materiality, in particular, have a bond that is as startling as it is intimate and abiding.