It is a clear sign of the many fallacies of academia that in the early twenty-first century a group of renowned scholars from Japan, Italy, Spain, Israel, Turkey, England, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and the USA have still to argue for the necessity of finally establishing the study of the kinsfolk of the Prophet Muhammad – which the editor of the volume neatly calls sayyido-sharifology – not even as a key field of research within Islamic studies but simply as “an ‘additional line’ or a ‘tangential line’ of inquiry worthy of serious consideration”, to use the words of the editor in his preamble to the volume, the essay “Toward the formation of Sayyido-Sharifology: questioning accepted fact” (The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies, No. 22, 2004, 87–103). The terminology used for identifying the object of enquiry already, however, poses some problems. The editor proposes the designation “sayyid/sharīfs”, to suggest that the volume examines the entire phenomenon of the Prophet's kinsfolk, in search of a common framework for enquiry that goes beyond the local varieties represented by the various honorific titles used for it (such as habībs, salips, and mīrs).
The volume originates from an international conference on “The role and position of Sayyid/Sharīfs in Muslim societies” convened at the University of Tokyo on 22–23 September 2009 by Kazuo Morimoto. The conference and the volume are a continuation of the first international colloquium on this topic, convened under the theme “I Discendenti del Profeta (Sadat/Ashraf) e il loro ruolo nella storia e nella cultura dell'Islam” at the Sapienza, University of Rome, on 2–4 March 1998 by Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti. The latter's proceedings were published as a special issue of Oriente Moderno, ed. Scarcia Amoretti and Laura Bottini, The Role of the Sādāt/Ašrāf in Muslim History and Civilization (Rome, 1999).
The volume features thirteen diverse essays in three parts. The period covered spans from the ninth century to the present day, the geography “from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indonesian Archipelago”. The essays can be divided into two parts: discourses on sayyid/sharīfs (both pro and contra), Part I of the volume; and actual sayyid/sharīfs in different times and places in the Middle East and beyond, corresponding to Parts II and III.
The chapters cover the following issues: (1) Kazuo Morimoto, dream-related stories on the merits of the Prophet's kinsfolk; (2) Roy Mottahedeh, Quran commentaries on khums (one fifth); (3) Yamaguchi Motoki, Islamic reformism and the Hadrami diaspora in early twentieth-century South-East Asia; (4) Teresa Bernheimer, ʿAlids’ marriage strategies (eighth–twelfth centuries); (5) Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti, joint research project on a “Historical Atlas of the ʿAlids”; (6) Rüya Kiliç and (7) Michael Winter, sayyid/sharīfs under the Ottoman Empire, in Istanbul and Anatolia (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries) and in Egypt and Syria, respectively; (8) Mercedes García-Arenal, sayyid/sharīfs in the Iberian Peninsula between the later Nasrids and early Christian rule (Moriscos); (9) Valerie J. Hoffman, sayyid/sharīfs on the modern and contemporary Swahili coast (the Hadrami diaspora); (10) Ashirbek Muminov, claims to religious descent not related to the Prophet's kinsfolk in Transoxiana in the pre- and post-Mongol period; (11) Devin DeWeese, double and multiple descent in Khwarezm (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries); (12) Arthur F. Buehler, sayyid/sharīfs in India; and (13) Arai Kazuhiro, sayyid/sharīfs and the Islamic magazines market in today's Indonesia (the Hadrami diaspora).
The main achievement of the volume lies in its offering extremely valuable but loosely integrated surveys of different geographical areas and historical periods of Islamic civilization, thus moving a step forward from the choice of privileging precise exemplifications to which the organizers of the Rome colloquium were constrained by the state of the art ten years earlier. Moreover, it advances our knowledge of Muslim discourses about the Prophet's kinsfolk and effectively demonstrates, and hence hopefully corrects, the persistent yet misguided preconception that attitudes favourable to sayyid/sharīfs are linked only to Shiism and are uncharted in Sunnism. It underlines the issue that, in Central Asia we encounter cases of double and multiple descent, or of claims to religious descent not related to the Prophet's kinsfolk and, therefore, the need to pursue sayyido-sharifology within the wider framework of the study of descent groups in Muslim societies. It both consistently proves the strong relation between intercessional Islam and favourable attitudes towards sayyid/sharīfs in Muslim societies and corroborates the hypothesized affinity between sayyid/sharīfs and Sufi tarīqas, leaving unaddressed, however, the defining issue of the sacredness versus sanctity rationale for the claimed exceptionality of Muhammad's descent, or, in other words, the issue of the Prophet's kinsfolk as “simple” role models for or actual (and indeed touchable) divine presence in Muslim societies (“relic-ness”).
My principal criticisms concern the gap between proclaimed and implemented interdisciplinarity, the general lack of integrated attention to the relevance of the role of women, at least among the ʿAlids, and the absolute absence in both the conference and the volume of contributions from those who currently play a role in the Muslim world insofar as they are descendants of the Prophet. Indeed, the contribution of “witnesses” was one of the two criteria set by the organizers of the Rome conference, who even underlined that this was an “absolute need” that could “be taken for granted”. This absence appears out of touch with the urgency to understand the fundamental issue of continuity of tradition versus adaptability to deeply changed contexts, particularly as witnessed in the Muslim world in the last century. Sayyido-sharifology is as much about early Islamic history as it is about current events in the Dār al-Islām and the authors should therefore tackle this issue, not simply mention it.
The volume represents an important development in the formulation of the coherent understanding necessary to address the largely unanswered question of the mechanisms through which a transnational claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad becomes economically, socially, religiously or politically determinant at specific places and times in history.
