Scholars and Charlatans on the Baghdad-Khurasan Circuit from the Ninth to the Eleventh Centuries

By the ninth century a distinct, self-aware scholarly class had formed in the Islamic world.  Although they often earned their livelihoods as landowners, government administrators or merchants plying the Silk Road from Khurasan to Baghdad, these ulama (Islamic scholars) saw themselves as the guardians of true Sunni Islam and the religious elect charged with guiding the uneducated and vulnerable Muslim masses.  The body of written work left behind by these Muslim scholars of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries is permeated with awareness of this hierarchy and of the scholars’ paternalistic role in society.

Equally present are tense discussions of these scholars’ bête noire: those popular preachers who might lead the masses astray with heretical stories in street-side venues and sometimes even in the great mosques of the empire.  As the self-professed guardians of orthodoxy, Muslims scholars saw these figures as charlatans misleading the masses.  They also represented a challenge to the scholars’ own religious authority.  As an educated class whose scholarly writings were produced for appreciative cultural consumption as much as they were expositions of proper religion, however, Muslim scholars appreciated the entertainment value of popular preachers and miracle-workers.  Such charlatans thus enjoy a dual role in the scholarly works the ulama.

This paper examines the different roles that popular preachers, magicians and miracle works—charlatans all in the ulama’s eyes—played in the literary and religious culture of Muslim scholars from the ninth to the eleventh centuries in the cosmopolitan world of the Baghdad-Khurasan circuit.