Zaydi Adaptations of the Sunni Tradition in Yemen: The Case of Qur'an Commentaries

Good afternoon, my name is Aomar Boum. I'm associate

Professor of Anthropology in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA.

In my capacity as the Director of the Mellon Program on Minorities in the

Middle East and North Africa, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the second event

of our lecture series of Spring 2021.

Today's talk, "Zaydi Adaptations of the Sunni Tradition in Yemen:

The Case of Qur'an Commentaries," will be delivered by Dr. Scott Lucas from the school of Middle

Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The Mellon program examines the question

of how the concept of minority, religious or ethnic, has emerged as a key factor

in the cultural, economic, political, linguistic, religious, and educational lives

of modern MENA nation states.

It is our second– this is our second year of workshops, lectures, and

faculty graduate students research group meetings.

We plan to organize an international conference to explore

the historical dynamics of inter-community conflict and contacts later this year.

One of our key objectives is to further curricular development at UCLA and beyond.

An offshoot of Shia Islam that emerged following the communal

dispute over succession, Zaydis complicate the Shia denomination religious landscape,

especially given their intellectual closeness to Sunni Islam. As we try to understand

and think about ways to approach the ethnic and especially the religious complexity

of the Middle East and North African region, we have to be aware and cognizant of the legal

and religious specificities of each of these groups as schools of religious thought.

We are fortunate today to have Dr. Lucas, one of the few experts on Zaydi's in the United States

who worked on some of their religious scholars when he took Arabic in Sanaa, Yemen

in the middle of the 1990s. Dr. Lucas is Associate Professor of Islamic

Studies in the School of Middle Eastern and North African studies at the University of Arizona.

He received his PhD in Near-Eastern languages and civilizations

in 2002 from the University of Chicago.

Before he joined the University of Arizona, he taught at the American University of Beirut.

Fluent in Arabic, Dr Lucas' research explores

the creative process by which Sunni and Zaydi scholars

composed works in the genre of law, Hadith, and Quranic commentary during the

classical period of Islamic civilization. His first book

is titled "Constructive Critics, Ḥadīth Literature, and the Articulation of Sunnī Islam:

The Legacy of the Generation of Ibn Sa῾d, Ibn Ma῾īn, and Ibn Ḥanbal published in 2004.

He recently published a two-volume unabridged translation

of 30 passages from al-Tabari's quranis quran commentary titled,

"Selections from The Comprehensive Exposition of the Interpretation of the Verses of the

Qur'an. Dr. Lucas has also" published numerous articles on Sunni

Hadith and Islamic law. Since 2016, Professor Lucas has been

conducting research on the Zaydi intellectual tradition

in Yemen based primarily on Arabic manuscripts.

His research has been supported by an ACLS

fellowship and a membership in the school of historical studies

at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lucas.

Thank you very much Aomar, that was a lovely intro. I'm glad it was

recorded, I'm going to listen to that again

and again. So thank you very much uh,

I'm going to share my screen now if that's okay with everybody.

And uh okay, and I'm going to be talking a little bit about uh Zaydis today.

And I do really look forward to any questions or suggestions that you have

uh regarding anything you hear today. So to be honest, I didn't really

think about Zaydis as a minority until Dr. Boum

invited me to participate in a series called Minorities in the Middle East.

Of course, I probably should have thought about them as a minority because they

are a very small group and most Zaydis are only found

only in roughly where this hexagon is,

in northern Yemen. Uh, now that is where a lot of Yemenis live.

So even though they're not on the [...] they're very few people in the [...]

or in other parts of Yemen. But of course Zaydis are a minority and in fact even

in Yemen, they are not the majority of the population. I think the reason

I didn't think about them as a minority is because where they live,

in this hexagon, um they probably are not a minority. It feels as though they are a majority although once again

it's not always obvious who is a Zaydian, who is a Sunni.

Um, that's something anthropologists uh

can help sort out um but just you know, some tribes tend to be more Sunni, some tend to be more Zaydi,

and that's the case of where things are. But we're talking about a group

that has thrived for overall millennium in roughly this area, south of this town of Dhamar.

It's unlikely and topographically, you can see too, these are the higher

mountains of Yemen which are very difficult for

any outside force to try and conquer. So what are some of the salient qualities as Zaydi Islam um just

to get this clear from the start. They derive their name from the great,

great grandson of the prophet Muhammad, the grandson of Husayn Zayn al-Abidin

who like his grandfather uh raised a revolt

this time in Kufa uh but likewise was unsuccessful,

did not attract supporters and was executed, and actually even crucified

by the [...] regime. Uh one of the interesting

things about Zadism that I won't be

talking about much is that there are

many opinions, legal opinions, ascribed to Zaydi, the son of Ali

uh Zayd ibn Ali that are different from earlier the opinions that the Zaydi

school in its more classical period adopted. And so that generates perhaps a

little bit of tension although I don't really detect it

in the writings that I've been looking at. Um, Zaydis are almost always

classified as Shi'ites, largely because they believe Ali the

son-in-law and cousin of the prophet Muhammad

was the rightful successor, that the prophet had actually designated him

and Ali's two sons Hassan and Husayn.

But they're very different from Imami and Ismaili Shiites because they reject

the principle of [...].

They reject the idea that an Imam can designate the next Imam; only the prophet could designate Imams.

And so after the um, after Husayn died, the field, you might say, was a

little bit more open. There was no longer a process of designation.

Uh rather early on, Zaydis developed and adopted in many ways rationalist Mu'tazili theology.

We often think about Mu'tazilism perhaps as being kind of like Shiism and not really Sunnism,

but actually the most prominent articulators of Mu'tazilism thought, [...]

at least, uh were overwhelmingly Sunni um in orientation. And so there is, you

get a little reaction if you refer to Zaydis as Mu'tazili. They'll say, no

we're actually Zaydis. We're not really Mu'tazili

even though a lot of the tradition has been adopted.

Um the legal school, I find very interesting, claims to be the school of

the family of the prophet [...].

This is generally how Zaydis, when they're not calling themselves Zaydi or

if they're being called [...], which is another term that's used sometimes,

is that they like to refer themselves as [...] the School of Law,

the School of Islam that reflects the teachings of the families of the prophet.

And they're in very close conversation with Sunni legal tradition which

I will be pointing out. And that may be partly due to the proximity.

Uh, Zaydis have lived in the proximity of Sunnis for a long time

um and the lack of access perhaps they've had from most of their history

to Imam [...]. So there's very little

interaction with the Imam and Shia tradition.

Then the Imam, which I don't want to spend too much time on,

but theoretically the Imam must be a master religious scholar, must lead

a military revolt against injustice or

an unjust ruler, and it's usually not hard to find an unjust ruler anywhere in the world.

And then genealogically, unlike Sunnis who say the

Imam has to come from Quraish, right, which they call caliph, usually.

For Zaydis, the Imam must be a descendant of the grandsons of either al-Hasan

or al-Husayn. So on some lists of Zaydi Imams, the Idrises of Morocco are listed

because the Idrises fulfilled, you know, many of the– all the

requirements essentially of an Imam.

And here in the upper right, there's a picture of I believe [...].

The last Zaydi Imam of any time period was overthrown or who the dynasty

actually ended in the, in 1962.

So just, there's a little bit of diversity amongst Zaydis and I made a

couple of maps to help clarify maybe what's going on here.

Uh, Zaydis uh were small communities that spread out

and so you had a community that was in Kufa, along with the whole, you know

everything was present in Kufa.

Any type of orientation of Islam, you can imagine. Uh in the Caspian region, you had

several [...] or descendants of Ali who raised

revolts, the most famous maybe [...] but there are other ones. And in fact, in

the 11th century, uh the leading Zaydi scholars were in Iran,

basically or the sort of Caspian region in Iran.

That's where the leading ones were. You did though have a community in Medina

and from Medina, Ibn al-Hadi ila l'Haqq uh a descendant, also Hassan, most of

these Imams actually were descendants of Hassan but it didn't

really matter if it was Hassan or Hussayn. And he in 897 Imam

al-Hadi ila l'Haqq traveled with some supporters

and set up the first Zaydi principality in northern Yemen,

in that region of Saada, which I forgot to mention but it was on the map, the

northern part of the hexagon on the map in the earlier

slide uh is where Imam Al-Hadi is buried, where his sons are buried,

and has traditionally been the stronghold of Zaydi thought

and limited rules. Zaydis, for most of their history,

weren't really ruling over large territories. Instead, they were writing

books, which is maybe why I find them attractive in some ways.

So how did the Yemeni Zaydis end up prevailing? Well, there's a very

interesting story. I don't want to spend too much time on it

but it's pretty impressive especially in the days before airplane

travel and international mail.

Um, but there was a strong Zaydi Imam in

the 12th century named Ahmad ibn Sulayman who had authority over much of

the region we call Yemen. And one of the great things he did was to send

a convert, someone who was born Ismaili

uh but then became a Zaydi, uh Qadi Ja'far because the Ismailis

were actually very strong. That was one

of the chief rivals for some of this time in the earlier period of Yemeni history.

He sent Qadi Ja'far, ibn Ahmad all the way to [...[

to collect and with good documentation [...] and chains of transmission

the key books in this in the Zaydi

tradition that have been compiled

by various Imams in Northern Iran.

And so Qadi Ja'far not only made it

there, he made it back with all these books–

presumably he had an entourage that carried them.

And so we see immediately after this time and

a growth, a really exciting growth of religious scholarship

being produced in Yemen um as a result

of these books and many of these books get copied

uh as well. These are both Mu'tazili books and Zaydi books

that are brought back. The process continued oops excuse me or maybe even

accelerated during the time of the Imam Abd Allah ibn

Hamza who was also a pretty strong Imam

among the, in the Zaydi tradition and who

wrote quite a few books just like Ahmad ibn Sulayman and actually wrote

numerous books that are still read in Yemen today. Um and during his time,

the Zaydis were blessed in Yemen to have a great scholar from Nishapur

for that region [...] and the region of Nishapur travel all the way to

Yemen. I don't think, this is probably not

the route he took, but it was the easiest way to draw an arrow

um to Yemen, with his books and among his collection were literary works. We have

many Quran commentaries. I think this is how a lot of the Sunni foreign

commentaries may have made it to the highlands of northern

Yemen which were relatively remote by any standards. And so in the

generations after, in the 13th century, we see

a lot of uh creative religious writing.

And you might say the high water mark, it's always risky to point to someone

and say oh this is this was the greatest of them all, uh but the Imam Abd Allah ibn Hamza in the

14th century, he clearly spent far more time writing books

and governing, um really wrote an astounding

range of books. I should add virtually none of these

people, I don't think any of them mentioned here wrote Quran commentaries

which is interesting. That's not a tradition

that uh many, certainly many Zaydi Imams engaged in.

And the reason for that is related to this Islam. There were two

sunni Tafsir books, two Sunni Quran commentaries

that more or less fulfilled most of the needs any Zaydi would

have for interpreting the Quran. And one of these was only published a few years ago.

This is a magnificent Quran commentary al-Tadhib fi l-tafsir by al-Hakim al Jishumi,

an extraordinary scholar whose large works remain almost

entirely in manuscript. Um many of those

manuscripts were in Yemen or they moved from Yemen to European libraries which

we can talk about in the Q and A if you're interested

in European libraries and their

collections of Yemeni manuscripts.

Um, but this al-Tadhib fi l-tafsir, I think it's about 7500

pages. It's extraordinary. It's arranged according to eight categories

of commentary and so for each cluster of verses, al-Hakim al Jishumi

gives you the readings, I mean the

variant Quranic readings, language,

linguistic issues, syntax, occasions for revelation meaning, occasionally structure, legal

rulings, and then very rarely narratives or stories um

but at least five of the eight are

present for almost every section

of the Quran. So it's a very, it's a very detailed Quran commentary.

He doesn't tell us who his sources are and so that's going to be a project uh

for whoever writes the next book on al-Hakim al Jishumi.

My sense and I've done a little investigation is that he's using [...]

pretty thoroughly, which makes sense. [...]

thought to be the great Nishapurian scholar. So I think he's

taking a lot of information from him and also from

Mu'tazili commentaries that are now lost. Um, he's including

uh works by [...] and maybe some other ones as well.

Um, so this book is really quite striking. In an article that inchallah is

coming out in October or so,

I refer to this as a Sunni Tafsir even though there are many reports and

Zaydis tend to believe

that late in life al-Hakim al Jishumi, he

became a Zaydi. He left uh left for [...] and came to mecca.

And he had a little bit of a colorful

life. He wrote a book that was pretty offensive

to many Sunnis that was basically

calling them friends of Iblis because of

their theological and predestinarian

beliefs. And he was killed allegedly

because of this book.

So it's always good to be careful, I guess, what we write.

Anyway, whether he became a Zaydi or not,

when he wrote this Quran commentary, he's

still writing as a Sunni Mu'tazili of the Hanafi school.

Um so that's pretty evident from the

Quran commentary. There are a few

references here and there,

two Zaydi legal positions which maybe

were added in as the manuscript tradition

developed or maybe he included them. But

it's overwhelmingly a Sunni Mu'tazili work

and it's just an absolutely brilliant

encyclopedic Quran commentary

uh that Zaydis have transmitted and now

finally, it's been published

courtesy of a scholar from Oman and a

team of experts he assembled. It took

a long time to get a book of this size out.

Also the more familiar book,

the Kashshaaf of Al-Zamakhshari was extremely popular

in Yemen as it was throughout the Sunni

world. I think it was probably easier for Zaydis to appreciate

the Kashshaaf because Al-Zamakhshari Mutazilism

had to be explained away in commentaries

uh throughout the Sunni world. In fact,

still when this book was published,

it tends to have a variety of uh

commentaries or glosses in the footnotes

that say oh this is where Al-Zamakhshari

is being Mutazili or he has the wrong

position. For Zaydis, these positions almost

always were the right position, so

Al-Zamakhshari is, I think, probably even more

enjoyable for Zaydis to read

and there are many, many manuscripts of

it. I just point this one here. I had

the pleasure of looking at some

manuscripts at Princeton University, which

has one of the best, if not the largest

collection of Arabic manuscripts. And if

you notice the date, this manuscript was copied actually

in Baghdad three years before the

Mongols came in the [...]

madrasa and it's just sitting in

Princeton. So I mean, we have to do

something with it but that's perhaps a different story.

Let's just take a case study. Say

you're a Zaydi scholar, we can pretend we're

Zaydi scholars and we have this great passage in [...]. Right, [...].

Right, so what is this ruh? Well the

Quran tells us we don't know much about it.

There's very little knowledge about it

and so you know an exegete just

has to tell you, oh I have to explore this.

If you know, and explain it. So if we go

to Jishumi, we're not disappointed.

We get seven different interpretations

of what this "ruh" might be.

Very interesting, ranging from the spirit or soul which is

honestly what I thought it meant and

Jishumi says most of our teachers

hold on to this, that's the meaning. It generally means

the soul. Uh but it could just mean a

living person. It could be life, the sort of mysterious attribute of

life. Uh it could be some entity in a person, it could be

sort of what's governing the body. It

could be Gabriel. The angel Gabriel is sometimes referred to

as a ruh. And then it could be the Quran, which

was one I hadn't seen that interpretation before uh

because it is the life of the religion which is kind of a lovely way of

thinking about the Quran.

Well, Jishumi is a little unclear at first, what is this

really going to be all about. Uh and so he gives three options

including the Mutazili [...], pushing for the spirit of life. But he

says the correct opinion is the Quran, which is very interesting. Uh that this

isn't actually a verse talking about the soul and the mysteries of the soul or the spirit.

It's actually talking about the

mysteries of Quran. That's quite an interesting thing. Jishumi

takes what I thought was the correct interpretation

uh that and he says you know the majority say it's life, spirit, or soul.

He gives three other opinions. One of

them, which Jishumi doesn't have, is that

it's a massive spiritual being bigger

than angels. That's kind of exciting.

Uh, yet then the other two he mentions

are the possibility that it could be

the angel Gabriel or it could be Quran

as well although he says the majority favor

the life spirit. Um so this kind of gives

you a sense of the diversity of opinions you can get

uh within this Tafsir. One project

I've been working on and that is uh

I don't think it's overdue yet but it will be soon is trying to classify

Yemeni-Zaydi Tafsir.

And as you notice, any of these scholars, I don't have the titles of

their books, there wasn't room, but there are

Tafsir works that have the red asterisks, are unpublished.

So one of the challenges of trying to come up with the classification

is a lot of these works are in manuscript.

Fortunately, many of these manuscripts have been put

online. There are microfilm copies of many of these at Notre Dame

University, for example, which I've spent several summers, uh a

few days for several summers looking at

and making copies and so forth. Um so

there are ways to get to this material but

we're not dealing with a large published corpus in the way that in the Sunni tradition,

and even the Imami tradition, there are

many, many works that have been published.

So I've broken it down into about three

categories. The first are Imam-based commentaries.

These are usually short works in which

you have a Zaydi Imam just kind of

telling you what different words mean

in the Quran, not the most exciting but it does

uh at least help with the difficult

words. It's kind of almost like a gloss

but sometimes a little bit more. But virtually no

references cited, no earlier authorities cited.

Um, the exception here is Ahmad al-Sharafi,

who did what we might expect is Zaydi Tafsir to look like. He

tried to limit his Tafsir to um

Zaydi Imams and their opinions. But he had a hard time because there just

really wasn't much material for him to put in his commentary.

The group I've been focusing more on is

what I'm calling Zaydi adaptations of

Sunni commentaries.

And these are ones that are clearly drawing very heavily

on Sunni Tafsir works. Sometimes they tell you in the title that they're

drawing on a kashshaf for example. There's a [...] work.

Sometimes they don't tell you but with a

little bit of work you can kind of figure it out.

And then the one I'm really supposed to be working on uh with my book

is on legal commentaries. And Muhammad

ibn al-Hadi's book is the one I'm focusing on the most. Um but the other

works. Zaydi seem to have been interested

in what we might call a sort of more thematic type of tafsir

verse on commentaries devoted just to legal verses

or passages that jurists needs to be aware of.

Um and these works we'll look at, I mean, al-Hadi's a little bit more

closely, really draw heavily on Sunni

normative pluralism and Islamic law as well as the internal

pluralism within Zaydism because of its

complex early history where you had

Imams in the Caspian region. You had Imam's in Northern Iran

and Imams in Yemen. And so now these

Zaydis in the 14th and 15th century are

sorting out all these different opinions

to try to establish uh what is most authoritative.

Here's an example of one of the early uh

Zaydi adaptations of a Sunni Quran commentary.

Um there are very few copies of this

commentary and in fact it's not in any European libraries, so

fortunately there are Yemenis who have

been taking images and sharing them in various formats [...].

I was pleased to discover that almost the entire text seems to–

most of the text– seems to come from the

Al-Wahidi's Quran commentary on al-Wasit

and that's an interesting choice

because unlike [...], Al-Wahidi is very [...].

He's very mainline, you might say Sunni.

He knows his Hadith very well and it's

certainly a useful resource book and

that's clearly how these scholars are

using it. They're still reading some [...] and

others. But Atiyya's tafsir is one of the earliest

one books that we have written by a Zaydi scholar

after the massive importation of books

from Iran that took place in [...] that I mentioned earlier.

Here's a Tafsir that the article I

mentioned that's coming out. I edited the commentary on Sura of the star.

There's a lot of really interesting stuff in that sort of a lot of material.

It's unique words, some theological issues and so forth,

just to give you a sense of what I'm

working with. This is what manuscript

images and manuscripts look like

uh when they're not blurry. Usually

they're not blurry, every now and then

the photographer had a bad day, and his

hands kind of moving around. But most of them are clear

and it's really wonderful to be

able to use or have access

to these texts that currently are in the

Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Italy.

As much as I'd love to go to Italy to do

research, it's easier to go to Indiana

if you live in Tucson, Arizona and so

it's been, it's been wonderful to have

access to these Yemeni manuscripts and

to now try and work with them a bit. So this is one of

the Tafsirs I want to talk about a little bit.

I think it's exemplary in its

adaptation of Sunni commentaries.

Um, Ibn Abi I-Qasim has a reputation

for being a staunch

Zaydi. One of his students and he got

some pretty ugly debates [...]

There's a whole book that came out recently on [...]

over the issue of [...] and hadith and

some of these things.

So when I got into this Tafsir, I was

expecting, oh this is a serious

sectarian Zaydi and then I was kind of

surprised because everything he was drawing on,

uh sometimes he identified it more often

than not he didn't, these were all Sunni Quran commentaries.

And including al-Wahidi, whom we saw earlier. Very clearly [...]

Sunni scholar. Ibn al-Jawazi, who's a [...]

preacher from Baghdad whose Tafsir is actually very nice. If

you haven't, if you're into Quran

commentaries this holy month

uh by all means, check out

al-Jawazi commentaries. It's actually

very insightful and useful, um and then Al-Tahdhib,

who as Professor [...] has emphasized and I think he's right.

Uh, his commentary really was the foundation for what we kind of called

classical Quran commentaries and then Zamakshari and

Al-Jishumi, we mentioned in an earlier slide.

So let's take a case study. There's this this unique word samidun

uh at the end of the Sura of the Star and so the question is well what does this

word mean. Um and so you can see here and

I don't need to read all of this but

those of you who are familiar at all with

with um commentaries, all these names you

see, these are Farra, Zajjaj.

These are famous grammarians. [...] of course, a famous companion of the

prophet. Al-Wahidi is mentioned by name here.

Al-Dabhak is a famous successor. These are all

names you would find in any Sunni Quran commentary,

which was a clue that Ibn Abi I-Qasim was drawing heavily on the

Sunni tradition. Um interestingly though,

these four opinions are found in Ibn al-Jawzi and they're found in other

sources as well.

Even though al-Jawzi adds a fifth meaning,

which is that it needs to sing in the Yemeni dialect.

And I can't help but think that our Yemeni scholar here saw that

and was like, No it doesn't actually mean that.

You know that's just what someone you know in Baghdad, they say that

Samidun means to sing or something.

But that's that's not what it means in our dialect. So he didn't include that

one. That was the one interpretation he chose not to include.

Zaydis are famous for using or trying to use Sunni sources to undermine

Sunni theological positions and in the Sura of the Star,

Ibn [...] does not disappoint.

There's a big debate over this verse, "The mind in our question

what it saw." Well what did it see and the two opinions are that the

prophet either saw God or saw the angel Gabriel.

And so that's a big question for Zaydis.

There's an obviously correct answer.

If they're giving the test, the correct answer is the angel Gabriel.

And the way they prove it is by using a Sunni hadith.

Now Ibn [...] wasn't the first exegete to use this Hadith. He

draws on it at a little bit more length

perhaps than some others.

But who are you using, you're using, A'isha right.

Now think about this. If Zaydis are Shi'ites,

Shi'ites generally don't have a great,

many great things to say about A'isha,

the beloved wife of the prophet Muhammad.

Ali and A'isha had some issues, to put it mildly.

Um and so here you have a Shi'ite using

A'isha to correct Sunnis. Right. this is,

this is a really clever strategy.

And so if you can read through this,

but essentially she says, there's no way

the prophet saw Gabriel. And how do I

know this, I asked him

right. She goes, I was the first person to

ask the messenger of God,

what did you see related to this verse.

And he said it was Gabriel, case closed. There's no way this can

possibly mean God. You have a prophetic hadith

narrated by the prophet's beloved wife A'isha

um being quoted of course in a

Zaydi Quran commentary. And Zaydis are

usually classified as being Shia.

So I don't want to take too long to

spend a little time now talking about legal verses

um and I don't want to spend too much

time on the slide. This is

courtesy of the Princeton University Digital Library. This

book I'm working on, this Quran

commentary, um until very recently, this

was the only complete copy of the book I

had access to. And in fact,

going through various manuscript

catalogs, there are very few copies of this book.

But it's very important because it's the

first book of its type written by a

Zaydi. And then it inspired Yusuf the

jurist, which is a pretty cool nickname, Yusuf the Jurist,

uh to write his longer work that's been

published actually by the Ministry of Justice of Yemen.

The [...], The Ripe Fruits, which

is a great name for a book. Maybe that'll be

a later book. And then that book was too

long, so it was abridged, which is usually

what happens to long books.

And then a totally different book on

Quranic laws was written

in the 17th century as well. So there's

really interesting tradition

of writing Quran commentaries that

really focus on uh on legal verses. So I don't want to

spend too much time talking about this

author, although i think he had a pretty

interesting life.

He lived you can see, the late

second half of the 13th, early 14th century.

He's a 13th generation descendant of

the Imam al-Hadi Ila al-Haaq who was the Hassanid

Imam who brought Zaydism, some

might say the first Zaydi state and who

also wrote quite a bit as well.

His epistles and all are very

fascinating treatises, his [...]

and so forth. So he's a 13th century

descendant which means there are a lot

of other descendants floating around

Yemen, but he's got that nice pedigree

which means he's also a potential Imam.

His grandfather didn't write much because he was a

governor. I guess that's a pretty busy

job up in the northern

city of Sa'da for many years. His great

uncle was one of the greatest of the

Zaydi scholars who wrote

important works in theology and law

and hadith. His father seems to have been one of these

types of scholars who transmitted books

but didn't write books. So probably a

really good teacher,

careful reader of manuscripts, but not

someone who wrote his own

books. And he seems to have died in

somewhere north of Sa'da.

His uncle Ibrahim was briefly a Zaydi

Imam but he was captured by the far

stronger Rasulid dynasty. That's a

Sunni dynasty that ruled much of

Yemen in this period and reportedly died in prison

In Ta'izz. the relations may have been good or may have been a little strained

between ibn al-Hadi and the Imam during his, much of his

lifetime. This Imam al-Mutawakkil al Mutahhar ibn Yahya

although he did teach that Imam's

son. So they couldn't have been too tense.

Um, the other major book by Muhammad ibn

al-Hadi is his work on legal theory al-Mudi al-musri ila tamam al-Muquni,

which is actually the second half of a

book and it survives only in this

manuscript. This is the only manuscript

in the world surviving

that's known to survive of it. It's in the

British Library. Unfortunately, their

their rates at least before the pandemic

for making images were affordable.

Maybe the most affordable thing in Great Britain uh and so

I was able to get a copy of this and I

look forward to finding some time to read it.

Um he also wrote a list of the major books that he was using, that ibn al-Hadi

was using in his commentary, which is very helpful.

Uh, we know there was some tragedy in his

family. His son died during his lifetime

and he talks about that a bit in his Ijaza.

And then he himself died in the southern

area where Yemenis were prevalent, which leads me to believe he may have

had some issues with the rulers in the north

um because he was about as far away from them as he could be.

Or maybe he was working on their behalf

and they didn't really want to go down there.

Um, I want to show you this picture too.

What also makes ibn al-Hadi's book so special is

this manuscript that's held in the Ambrosiana

In Milan, that's in ibn al-Hadi's own handwriting.

We don't often get manuscripts in the

author's handwriting and unfortunately

we only have it, 100 folios of it and he wrote rather large

and a little bit messy. And as many

Yemenis do, without dots. So if Arabic

is too easy for you,

uh enjoy Yemeni manuscripts without dots.

It really improves one's Arabic rather quickly.

Um and eventually you start to recognize

things, but this is a, this is a real treasure to have

uh the manuscript in his own handwriting for at least the last

uh portion of the text. And if you look here, he identifies [...].

This isn't a sort of hajj i want to pick out. This verse because many verses,

it's obvious they're legal. They're about

marriage, they're about divorce, they're about

you know criminal penalty of some sort, but many of them are subtle. Many of them,

it's really hard to tell what does this have to do with law. So if

you look at this verse here for example,

what's the legal issue at stake. Two opponents contend

it doesn't, it sounds like the losing party is going to do very badly

in the hereafter, but it doesn't really say what the legal topic is.

And I just want to point out that Ibn al-Hadi's commentary is drawing

heavily on Jishumi. So we see Jishumi's influence here as well

because he has the category of language,

the categorication revelation,

the category of meaning, and then it's really in the category of

the rulings that we see ibn al-Hadi's original

contributions and the insertion of a whole host of material. I'm not going

to read all this text, It's getting late

in my talk and I will be wrapping up shortly, but I was informed that

we might have some lovers of Arabic on with us this

afternoon. So I include a little Arabic

text. If you're curious, you can kind of skim it. It turns out

this legal verse is about the issue of

whether non-Muslims should be considered by Muslim jurors as a single religion or

as multiple religions.

And you might say, well why does that

matter. Well it matters in the issue of

inheritance uh because as if you scroll down here a

little bit you'll see a Hadith that gets cited a few times.

Um down here, I guess, that people of two different religions cannot

inherit from each other. There are several Hadith,

I'm not going to get into whether they're authentic or not, but they're out

there and they get cited a lot. And most Sunni

scholars agree that you know that cannot happen

and that's actually a topic we'll see on

the next page. Topic I believe number

uh number three. So but what the jurors

initially are interested in is okay are they

should they be treated as a single religion of this belief

and if so, and the Hanafi is going to be

the only school that say yes, and if that is the case, then does that

mean Jews can inherit from Christians and Christians can inherit from Jews.

Now once again it's interesting seeing Muslims kind of debating this.

And now we're talking about even like a very small group of Muslims, Zaydis, although

all Muslim jurors have probably debated this issue somewhere in their large books.

But the question that this verse that doesn't really seem to have anything to

do about Jews or Christians or Muslims, um it's,

this is where this legal conversation

happens. It's a very subtle

uh situation and so after ibn al-Hadi

lays out the arguments

that you know we think they're all a single,

uh that they are different religions, and

so they can't inherit between each other,

the more interesting issue perhaps is

whether Muslims can inherit from

non-Muslims. Certainly for converts to

Islam which are quite a few in this country. This

is an issue of interest but just in

general, it's kind of an interesting premise.

And so first he tells us, whenever he says [...], right that's that's our opinion.

And he ibn al-Hadi says no. And this is

the opinion of [...].

Most scholars say this. However, one Zaydi

Imam, that Imam [...] up in the Caspian region,

and the Imamis whom he rarely mentions

but in this topic they were famous.

The Imamis actually say Muslims can inherit from non-Muslims

but non-Muslims cannot inherit from Muslims.

They can only go one direction. That's

the Shi'ite position, the Imami Shi'ite position

and one of these Zaydi Imams. Um and what I

like about Ibn al-Hadi is that he likes

to provide evidence. Now he's quoting an

earlier book. So I used at first, I

thought he was finding all this evidence himself and then

you know, I've taught for 15 years,

so I'm good at detecting plagiarism at this point.

Uh you know, then you're like, wait a

minute, this sounds like another book

I've read– or skimmed in my case. Uh and sure enough,

he's getting a lot of this information from

a single earlier book. But that's okay, he

provides evidence, so he provides evidence for why the

most Zaydis like himself think there

should be no inheritance between

Muslims and non-Muslims. But then he also

down here gives the Hadith. He says [...]

the companion of the prophet uh,

who quoted the prophet, is saying

Something to the effect of [...].

Right, that Islam can increase, it just

isn't supposed to decrease.

And so by Muslims receiving

inheritance, right that in essence increases you might say

the wealth or the prosperity of Islam.

And so it's okay.

If Muslims give away their wealth to non-Muslims, well that kind of affects the

balance sheet I guess on the Islam side and so that's not allowed.

What I like is that he presents both sides of the argument.

The last one's about apostasy, we're low on time, and so we don't need to talk

about that. I would just hasten to add that the

only time he mentioned [...]. the eponym of the school,

is right here at the end. He quotes from Zaydi ibn al-Hadi's collection of Hadith

and he quotes a Hadith related to apostasy uh and so forth.

So I want to kind of wrap things up because I'd love to hear some of your questions.

So one of the big questions is what did

Zaydi exegetes borrow from Sunni exegetes.

A lot. They borrowed companion and successor generation

comments and exegesis that we would find in Sunni

commentaries. They brought over a lot of

grammarians, now grammarians often aren't

really Sunni or Shi'ite, that's not a big deal. They're grammarians.

They've got enough enough problems to

deal with uh but nonetheless they seem to have gotten a lot of this

material from Sunni commentaries.

Their legal commentaries are arranged

according to the Suras of the Quran which is how Sunnis do legal Quran

commentaries whereas Shi'ites tend to

arrange them according to topics.

So you have your verses related to ablutions, then prayer,

then fasting and so forth. Uh the Sunni

legal discourse is found throughout these texts

especially Shafi'is and Hanafi's Sunni Hadiths including

the notoriously fake Hadith where every Sura

has some amazing benefit ascribed to the prophet teaching.

They're in commentaries across the board

in the sunni tradition. The Zaydis pick up and

include these as well. Occasions for revelation

and Sunni Mu'tazili positions. So

in conclusion, I want to just sort of– a

question I've been getting a lot because

there's been some interest in Zaydis,

maybe because of the political situation in Yemen

which I've avoided in this talk, uh it's

not terribly relevant to

this immediate topic though we could talk

about it in the Q&A. But what makes this Zaydi

commentariy Zaydi, right? If you're adapting

the mainstream Sunni, why is this Zaydi?

So here I think it's good to go to my

three categories. For the Imam-based

commentaries, it's pretty obvious.

It's a Zaydi Imam who's writing it, or

teaching. It's his opinions.

Okay so that's Zaydi. For the adaptations,

it's really the compilers who are Zaydis.

There aren't so many Zaydi authorities

actually in the commentary but the

compiler is being selective.

He's being selective and including parts

and bits and pieces from different

commentaries. And then for the legal

commentaries, as hopefully we saw,

there is internal debate among Zaydis. So

while you do have the Sunni

normative pluralism, excuse me, and some hadith

you also have the Zaydi normative

pluralism. So a bunch of names that no

Sunni would ever recognize

if those names were dropped into

listening. So I thank you for attending

today. I hope you enjoyed this talk. I'd like to thank

my sponsors and various organizations

that have made this work possible.

And Dr. Boum for inviting me, thank you.

Thank you so much Scott, this is really,

this is a, I really appreciate

your talk. I always learn so much from you

and I think one of the things that

I really appreciate about your talk is how

important for us as scholars, we're

interested in the question of minorities,

to really think seriously about Islamic studies. And

not only think about the Sunni interpretation, but also

think about these diversities of

opinions of interpretations of the

Hadith and the Quran and because I think they're really

central in as far as how we can make sure that,

outside of the political discourse of

the modern day and outside of the sociological

makeup of these communities, it's really important to also

try to figure out a way, how are these

relevant when we think about

the religious part. And I think you do,

your work is, your work and the

work of Asma and Luke,

and Dr. [...] is really important for us

and others that I'm not mentioning here.

So I'm gonna thank you so much.

I'm gonna leave the, give the

floor to Ali to end it here, but thanks for

your great uh talk and for

uh answering our questions. And I learned so much, thank you.

Ali. Thank you indeed, um wonderful talk.

Extremely insightful and informative, very much enjoyed

um learning about the Zaydi's

community, which I knew very little about.

So thank you for coming to to UCLA, for

joining us for the Mellon Lecture Series.

I also want to thank

my colleague Aomar Boum for his

incredible leadership on

our Minorities in the Middle East

project which is Mellon funded. And I

would like to also express my gratitude

to the Mellon foundation for providing us

with the funds to do this kind of work

that we are doing here.

And I also finally wanted to thank all

our um audience for joining us today

and please check out our website. There

are more events coming up

and we really look forward to having you,

so thank you all.

Thanks professor Lucas and Aomar.