["Pomp and Circumstance"]
Hello, welcome to the online lecture series
Recent and Ongoing Research Projects in Islamic Studies
at the Asia-Africa Institute Hamburg University.
Today we present to you myself, Thomas Eich,
who will present his ERC Consolidated Ground Project
Contemporary Bioethics and the History of the Unborn in Islam.
Again, welcome very much, everybody.
I hope now you can see my screen, the presentation,
which is about contemporary bioethics
and the history of the unborn in Islam,
which was an ERC Consolidated Ground between 2015 and 2021,
including a six-month extension due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And the acronym of the project is COPHUNI,
but I took the liberty to refer to it as COPHUNI
early on since I feel that this sounds cooler.
So within the pretty large field of bioethics,
COPHUNI focused on questions relating
to the unborn, relating to the beginning of human life.
In earlier work, I had been analyzing debates since the 1980s
about, for example, abortion and vitro fertilization,
premarital genetic counseling, and others.
And these debates took place at conferences organized,
for example, by the Islamic Organization of Medical Sciences,
the IOMS, from Kuwait, or the Islamic Academy
of the Islamic Organization of Cooperation Based at Jeddah.
What emerges as a broad consensus in research about these
bioethical deliberations is the following picture.
In mostly Sunni-dominated contemporary Islamic bioethics,
a consensus emerged since the 1980s
that prenatal life of embryos develops
in three consecutive stages, each of them lasting 40 days.
At the end of this process, the embryo is in salt,
and this 120th day is a decisive cut-off point
in any bioethical statement from Muslim religious scholars.
After the 120th day, all agree that abortion would amount
to the same level as the killing of a born human.
Before that debate, different opinions exist, some hold that
until the 40th day, any action taken against the unborn
is without any legal significance, while others view this differently,
and the same can be said about the 80th day, though to a lesser extent.
How did this picture emerge?
Well, the contemporary religious scholars always pointed to a small group
of Hadith material and two Qur'an verses.
From the Hadith material, especially two, were highlighted.
I used the name of the first person after Muhammad,
who was later remembered to have transmitted the respective saying as labels.
One is Ibn Masrud, the other is Qudayfah bin Asid.
There is also other material, but it did not have such a great influence
over Islamic history as these two.
Both Hadiths describe a scene, how an angel visits the unborn during pregnancy
and determines a list of things, which can vary between the different variants.
This is why this material is later often found in the Hadith collections
in chapters about predestination.
Beside their obvious similarities, the two Hadiths also have differences.
In the Ibn Masrud Hadith, the angel seems to visit on the 120th day
while the Hudayfah Hadith has the 40th day.
The Ibn Masrud Hadith seems to refer to a Quranic passage,
which is in Surat al-Hajj and Surat al-Minin in Qur'an 22.5 and 23.14, respectively.
Whereas the link, it is not so clear in the Hudayfah Hadith.
And the Ibn Masrud Hadith seems to mention installment.
While the Hudayfah Hadith does not.
Especially the importance of the latter point cannot be overstated.
The only and exclusive text basis for the concept of individual
and soul and of the unborn during pregnancy in contemporary
bio-ethical deliberations of Muslim religious scholars is the Ibn Masrud Hadith.
Following historical precedents, the contemporary scholars link the Ibn Masrud Hadith
especially to 23.14 in the Qur'an.
This verse makes reference mostly to prenatal development.
And as you can see from the table, Qur'an 22.5 and 23.14
first refer to the story of the creation of Adam, of dust,
glad or clean.
Then followed by references to consecutive stages of prenatal development,
which is mukvah, salmon, alakkah, a blood clot, a mudra, a lumbar flesh.
And Qur'an 23.14 then continues with three additional things on the list,
which is Adam bones, lahum, the clotting of the bones with flesh,
and then ansha'na'u khalakhan aha, then we made it into another creation.
Different opinions can be found in exegesis what this refers to
and one opinion is that this refers to installment.
Now, as you surely noticed, I put two items in brackets in the Ibn Masrud line of the presentation.
Why? Because the text of the Hadith in its early transmission layers did not necessarily contain these two items.
As to the term mukvah, it was added in a rather late process
and most Hadith compilations, including Muslim and Bukhari,
have a version which only explicitly refers to alakkah and mudra.
As to nafuqh ar-rukh, installment, it is clearly part of only certain transmission lines
after the major transmitter al-Ahmas from Kufa, who died in the 760s.
This was already noticed by other scholars, such as Tahawi, Ibn Hajj al-Asqalani,
or Yousuf Fanez, the latter focusing on the installment part.
And partly, I will come back to all of this later.
Now, the Kapani project was essentially asking one simple question.
What impact did history have on the ways how people in different times and at different places looked at these texts?
While contemporary bioethical deliberations often create the impression that the interpretations of these texts were almost always stable,
the project took the opposite starting point, that nothing is stable over more than a millennium of human history.
Nowadays, speaking about prenatal development is often equated with speaking about abortion.
One of the major aims of Kapani is to show that the strong focus on a specific legal question considerably narrows down a rich history of diverse possibilities and settings.
Three more or less recent trends from the study of Islamic history were integrated into the project design.
The first is decentralization.
The history of Islam is still often perceived as being centered in the Middle East, that is, a further question, plus the Arabian Peninsula.
Recent research has pointed out that this is wrong.
Regions such as Al-Andalus, the Islamic West, perceived themselves as a center, and in many ways, this was simply justified.
So we had a work package in Kapani analyzing writings from the Islamic West.
And this way, we can analyze how the exchange of ideas about the unborn between Muslim writers from East and the West as a multifaceted process developed of renegotiating identity, rather than just a big mishmash of an overarching Muslimness or Islamness.
The person responsible for this work package was Khaled Khab.
The second major trend is late antiquity studies, grossly speaking. Often the first centuries of Islamic history, at least, are only studied in Islamic studies, but not only there on the basis of Arabic texts authored by Muslims.
In this approach, it is often just taken for granted what constituted Muslim identity say in Iraq of the 8th century.
It is forgotten that all the areas that were conquered by invaders under Muslim command in the 7th and 8th century had a strong history of other religious groups, and this history did not simply end with the conquests.
Now, only two people were responsible for this work package. One is Doh Doh of Teh, who received his PhD in Jewish studies from Chivingen University, but also has a strong background in Syriac.
And second person is Florian Jekyll, who just defended his PhD thesis on Barhe Breyer's major Syriac author in Iraq of the 13th century.
The third trend in Islamic studies is to emphasize the fact that often it is not exclusively the religious scholars who are defining or negotiating Muslim identity.
This is especially true in the study of imaginations of the unborn, and it is the most evident when we get to the 20th century.
This is a time when the hierarchy between different fields of knowledge production was considerably reshuffled through the rise of natural sciences.
The relationship between authority of religious scholars and medical scholars changed considerably. However, it did not stop at the line between natural sciences and religious scholarship.
Rather, the 20th century saw the emergence of a new type of medical scholar, that is, doctors who self-confidence claimed the authority to form their own interpretations of religious texts as authoritative reference texts.
In Kobhani, this aspect is studied by Melanie Dinan.
There is a fourth trend, current trend, in Islamic studies. It might look on first sight as if Kobhani would also be part of this, but it is not.
This is the cat word of digital humanities. Why do I say that Kobhani is not part of the current age trend? Because the current age trend, grossly speaking, aims at applying already existing technical solutions to text data.
And then the research result is an interpretation of this text data. That means it is a typical research result in the humanities.
In Kobhani, the aim was rather to offer a computational linguist an environment for developing technical solutions in interaction with other researchers from humanities.
So the result is not an interpretation, it is computer code.
This code is ready and available on GitHub and can be downloaded and used if you have a comparable project.
The person who created that code in Kobhani is Alistia Gonzalez, who is now working in the Intersama project of Abafidele, which I'll introduce to you last week.
And now I want to proceed in two steps. First, I want to give you a brief sketch of the three PhD projects of Kaula, Florian and Melanie.
And in the second step, I will present some of the contents of the book that Doro and I are currently finishing.
And yes, this is intended as a sort of advertisement, especially in the cases of the three PhD projects.
It is important to note that none of them is just about the embryo. Rather, in all three cases, it's important to note that Kaula, Florian and Melanie are rather making a contribution to a broader field.
So their work, in my view, is of broader academic interest, even if you do not care academically about the embryo.
So Kaula goes first.
Kaula changed after the end of Kobhani to a research position in the project African Voices in the Islamic Manuscripts from Mali here at Hamburg at the Center of Manuscripts.
And in her PhD, Kaula analyzes the work of Paddy Iyal and especially Paddy Ibn al-Arabi, two iconic figures from the Islamic West.
Although the names are widely known, they are under-researched due to the mentioned masjidic centeredness in Islamic studies.
So bringing together a vast array of readings in Arabic, Spanish, French, and English, Kaula's work gives a detailed idea of the biography, especially of Paddy Ibn al-Arabi, including information about where he might have traveled during his ekla to the east, who he meant, what that implied, and what manuscripts
he definitely and also possibly might have brought with himself when he returned to Al-Andalus.
He links this to a detailed analysis of Paddy Ibn al-Arabi's works in order to establish a reliable chronology of those works.
The lack of such a chronology often impedes on the analysis of any scholar's work.
Against his background, Kaula is able to follow up on the ways how Paddy Ibn al-Arabi's thinking about the unborn developed.
She is able to identify the persons he was engaging with at certain times, and he was referring to in passages which one can see sometimes quoted out of context in later works up until today.
This way, the rather particular position that Paddy Ibn al-Arabi took within the Malik P. Masab concerning prenatal life is fleshed out and explained.
In contemporary debates, it is often stated that the Malik might have what consider any violation against the unborn illicit from the beginning of pregnancy.
However, historically speaking, several important Malik authors, such as Paddy Ibn al-Arabi, rather viewed the 40th day of pregnancy as that deliberate cover.
The reasons for this are now well studied and understood in the work of Kaula Krap.
She can also show that the Ibn Mas'uld hadith and therefore the question of insolent started to impact on Paddy Ibn al-Arabi's thinking rather late.
She cautiously and solidly argues that this is best explained as a result of the contact between the two of Paddy's.
Paddy Iyad studied with Paddy Ibn al-Arabi and for Paddy Iyad's thought, the Ibn Mas'uld hadith and thus the insolent issue had already been formative at that period.
So what we likely can see is a process of the student challenging his teacher and the latter is developing his thoughts further.
Thus, in summary, the work of Kaula Krap not only gives profound insights into the history of the unborn, rather it constitutes a, in my eyes, significant contribution to the study of Muslim scholarly exchanges and networks and production in the Mediterranean in the 11th and 12th century.
If you are interested in that, I highly recommend her work.
The next in line is Florian Jekyll, who is now a position at the History Department of Humboldt University, Berlin with Professor Dorothea Wittk.
With Florian's work, we move roughly a century ahead and translocate into the Muslim.
He analyzed the Uber of Bahir Breus, who was born in Malatya in 1226 and passed away in Maghara in 1286.
In other words, we are now in the time of the collapse of the Abbasids and of the Mongol Comcast.
And with Bahir Breus, we encounter one of the most important thinkers of Syriac Christianity. Additionally, he is also an interesting figure because he was a medical doctor.
As such, he had received training at the Bimaristan Nuli in the Mascots, where he worked together with and received training from Muslim medical doctors who were well known in Islamic studies.
Though the very fact that one of the major intellectuals of Syriac Christianity of that time was also there is less well known in our field.
Like Khala, Florian also devotes considerable attention to the establishment of the chronology of Bahir Breus' writings on the onboard, which are mostly in Syriac but also in Arabic.
Through his close analysis, he is able to show several things.
To start with, the legal field. Previous research has argued that Bahir Breus surely had considerable knowledge of Islamic fig writings, which he amalgamated into his own scholarly production.
Bahamut al-Razali was, until now, considered the point where the information had come from, but Florian could show that this is not entirely convincing and identified with more certainty another field manual put together by Quduri.
This alerts us of the necessity to look beyond the usual suspects, big names in Islamic history if we want to identify processes of cultural cross-pollination, as some put it.
Then, Florian establishes that in the course of his life, Bahir Breus changed his broad framing and conceptualization of the embryos and song.
In his earlier writings, Bahir Breus follows a 9th-century author of Syriac Orthodox tradition, Mushi Barakkefa, in that installment takes place with or shortly after conception.
Later, Bahir Breus changes his opinion, likely under the impression of Abyssinian philosophy, setting installment to the point when the embryo attains human shape.
This result is brought about by two major efforts carried out by Florian. First, he simply provides the first scholarly edition of an extensive section of Bahir Breus' work relating to the unborn based on two rare manuscripts.
So this aspect of the era of Bahir Breus now becomes accessible to the public. Second, Florian shows meticulously the great extent in which Bahir Breus interacted with the intellectual legacy of Abyssina, thus offering a broader perspective of the reception history of Abyssina.
By his thorough study of even minute details, Florian is able to argue solidly that Bahir Breus introduced term Mughfa for salmon from the Arabic into Syriac, which had been using a different term until that time.
But he took great care to sort of rephrase the wording of Alabta and Mughba in order to avoid that terminology.
The most likely explanation being that by the time of Bahir Breus, those two terms had become too corenically loaded, as it were.
So the overall picture that Florian is presenting is a Syriac Christian scholar at work during the 13th century who is clearly and self-consciously amalgamating materials and ideas from a wide array of social contexts and intellectual backgrounds into his own work,
crafting his specific and distinct theological vision. So if you are interested in the intellectual history of the Masaric in the 13th century, in the broadest terms, I highly recommend Florian's work.
With Melanie, who is now working in a follow-up position at Hamburg University, we jump into the 20th century and we go beyond Masaric and Magrat binaries because now we are global.
Melanie is particularly analyzing the work of the public intellectuals, of two public intellectuals of the second half 20th century, that's Abdelmajid al-Zindani and Muhammad al-Bahir.
The former is by and large a self-trained hadith expert from Yemen, the latter a medical doctor from Saudi Arabia, who became one of the most influential authors in contemporary Muslim bioethics since the 1980s, publishing in Arabic and English.
There is little work on both of them, although their overall importance is widely acknowledged. This is specifically the case for Zindani, who is often mentioned in the context of Yemen-related security questions and maybe Salafism since the 1990s.
Surprisingly, no one has taken up the challenge so far to try to piece together the available info on Zindani's life. Melanie is now doing that job, which our colleagues from security and political studies have refrained from doing up to now.
By doing this, Melanie was able to show that Zindani during the 1980s became a central figure in the organization of global DAWA activities from Saudi Arabia.
In that context, speaking about the embryo is an intrinsic standard topic because it is stated that modern medical embryology would have found out, would already be in the Quran, especially in Quran 2314, with several stages of embryological development would be described.
Pivotal to the worldwide spread of this idea that the Quran would contain such knowledge was the work of Zindani. It was published in many different formats and also entered for a considerable period the standard textbooks for embryology training in Western universities.
What Melanie can also show is that Zindani and Al-Barr have very different embryological ideas, while Al-Barr goes along with the focus on the 120th day of pregnancy, which you can also find all over the place in academic publications about contemporary Muslim medical ethics
and scholars such as Muhammad Ali and also myself. Zindani has an entirely different perspective. For him, the 14th day is much more important and he derives that this idea by a specific procedure to read together.
This is a discourse which you can find all over the place once you move beyond the very organized forms of contemporary Muslim bioethical literations, in boards, or comedies such as
the Islamic Organization of Medical Sciences or the Islamic Figure Academy. Until now, the academic study and analysis of these bioethical deliberations has very much focused on these boards.
And Melanie shows that this approach overlooked very influential voices, situating the speaking about embryos in a different setting, which is the field of Naba.
So, if you are interested in the study of one of the globally most influential phenomenon relating to Islamic history, the field of Naba, the work of Melanie is highly recommended.
So, after this first step of rushing in two to fours manner through three PhDs plus several articles that Melanie, Hauda and Florian have published, I will now get to the second step. That's the work of Doh Doh of Tei and myself.
Until now, you have heard about three cases, different settings, we're speaking about the unborn so different functions or had different consequences, all of them are situated in the time since the 11th century.
Doro and I focus on the time before.
We look at that time as a process. Speaking in historical terms, this might sound banal, but when it comes to Hadith and passages in the Quran, this is often not the way how these texts or text snippets are approached.
However, looking at the text material closely and scrutinizing them against the background where we assume it worthwhile to look at Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek and Arabic texts alike, plus the research which has been published about these texts, processes
and sometimes far ranging implications of apparently minor text differences become available.
In this work, we build on several observations made by others before sometimes already 100 years ago. For example, one of the most extensively discussed and sometimes hotly contested topics in biblical literature was the biblical story of the creation of humankind.
Against common public perceptions, there is not only one account of the story in the Bible, there are two.
In the first, God creates humankind, male and female. That's Genesis 1.27. In the second, God creates Hadam, which literally means the human.
The human then feels lonely and God creates a partner for Hadam by taking a bone out of Hadam's body and then creating a partner. That's Genesis 2.7 following.
So in the first story, male and female are created directly, not one out of the other. In the second, the first human is created and then a second out of that first.
This became popular and widely known as a story of a man with the name Adam being created first and a woman with the name of Eve being created second.
The big debate about the implications of that text situation. How shall the two be read together? What is the second story supposed to mean?
This debate occupied Jewish and Christian scholars at least since the second century common era. And one can read in the research that this became the most productive output in terms of quantity in biblical exegesis during the following centuries.
Partly, this exegesis was well aware that Hadam means the human and is not identical with the male name Adam. However, other exegesis skipped that point and read the story as a man called Adam being created and then a woman called Eve.
Thinking, speaking, writing about Adam and Eve soon turned into a sort of literature genre, the Adam and Eve literature, which became very productive and very influential since the second century.
For example, Christopher Meisscher has already pointed out that Islamic studies could gain a lot by taking note of the very existence and the richness of this literature.
One of the most interesting examples of this literature is the so-called cave of treasures.
The work of the late Alexander Tupel and others have convincingly argued that this text has to be dated to the sixth or maybe early seventh centuries, as has also been recently argued by Sergei Minov, who additionally situates the production of the text North and Mesopotamia.
The cave of treasures is a text developing further and enriching a popular Christian idea, establishing a link between Adam and Jesus, considering Jesus as the new Adam.
This not only serves to illustrate the idea of an entirely new era inaugurated by Jesus, literally interpreted as a historical scratch.
It is also linked to the idea that Adam's corpse is waiting for redemption in his grave.
The localization of that grave had many implications for the different communities and around 600 Christian authors put forward the idea that the grave was at the foot of Mount Golgotha.
And when Jesus was crucified, his blood was rushing down the hill, flooded the cave with Adam's corpse, and thus brought in redemption.
And as you might notice, sometimes theologians do not shy away from making sure that an audience literally is getting the picture.
Now, recently, research on the beginnings of Islam has made a strong argument that we should be more aware of the considerable shockwaves that the Sasanian Comcast of Jerusalem in 614 created throughout Christianity, especially because the relic of the Holy Cross was abducted and carried to Mesopotamia.
What, according to my knowledge, has been overlooked is the fact that the Sasanians did not only take that relic, they also destroyed the only recently erected chapel over Adam's grave at the foot of Mount Golgotha.
Given the centrality of the Adam-Jesus link in early 7th century Christianity, the fundamental implications of the act of destroying this specific chapel become obvious, and one cannot avoid the impression that the Sasanians knew pretty exactly what they were doing.
Now, several things are common knowledge in Quranic students. First, the Qur'an knows the idea of the Adam-Jesus link. Second, the Qur'an has several passages describing how God orders the angels to bow before the human, which he has just created.
Obviously, one angel, he believes, does not follow this order. Many scholars, for example, Hulghazalintin, but also others, have shown that the specific elements contained in the Quranic account establish the cave of treasures as an intertext for these passages.
Third, when speaking about the creation story, the Qur'an often uses Al-Insan, literally the human. In the Qur'an, Al-Insan more than once serves exactly the same function as Ha-Adam in the Hebrew Bible.
And as in Judaism and Christianity alike, reference to Ha-Adam is often intended as a template for all human beings.
So, against his overall background, we asked whether there might be even more instances in the Qur'an where the text refers to Adamic ideas common in the larger region around 600.
In this, particular attention is paid to the exact terminology to describe the material out of which Al-Insan is created. And here, I focus on three aspects.
First, it is often assumed that when the Qur'anic text speaks about creation out of clay and out of dust, out of clean and out of dry, the two terms would be interchangeable.
If you have ever tried pottery, this is surprising. Dust and clay are surely not the same sort of thing, and the shaping of an object differs considerably if you shape dust or clay.
This situation changes, of course, once you add water to the dust. And this is, second, the picture that you can find in some instances in Syriac literature, namely that God created the human by mixing dust with water.
It is already in the foundational Syriac writings of Ephraim the Syrian from the fourth century and also used by Babai the Great, who died in 628.
There are several instances in the Qur'an speaking about the creation of humans out of dust, out of purer, and water.
This situation is commonly understood to have meant, dust refers to Adam. Mopfah means salmon, dust refers to procreation through sex.
I am not convinced. In several cases, I think that passage likely used a picture of God mixing dust and water for the creation of Adam.
Also, and this is the third point, the situation is not always clear when the Qur'an uses the word Alap, which happens four times, when the term shows up in a list of steps of the creation of humans.
Alaka is often understood to refer to a clot of blood and sometimes is even translated simply as embryo.
The problem with this is the fifth instance in the Qur'an where the term shows up, this time as Allah, without Tamarabuta. And of course, this is Surat al-Allah, Surat 96.
There, Al-Insan is created from Allah. And many understand this as a reference to embryology.
But it is also noted that the passage differs considerably from other instances, and also that Allah simply means something sticking, sticking together, something clinging.
Now, as Dua Dua of Teh shows, the Adamic literature already knew this picture quite a while. Adam was created from love.
Already 80 years ago, Abu Ghurat al-Bitsa has pointed to this aspect, and Dua Dua of Teh now shows how far spread the picture was and how deep its implications.
Reading Surat al-Allah as referring to the creation story, the Adamic literature is thus helpful to see additional layers to the text and to situate it in the early seventh century in the Middle East.
Of course, there are many other observations that one can make on the references to human creation in the Qur'an. I'm happy to take questions in the Q&A in a second.
The overall picture that we arrive at is this. During the fourth and eighth centuries, at least reference to Adam in religious debates took significant developments.
Analogies could be made comparing the creation of Adam to the process of baking bread, as well as making comparison to how the unborn grows in the womb.
The Adamic material in the Qur'an can clearly be situated in that context.
The Qur'anic text shows traces of such a process in the making, as it were. In other words, there are passages where the reorienting of the Adamic material to the embryo is just on its way.
In other passages, the process has already been completed, and of course there are also passages which simply refer to the creation story.
This situation that thinking about the creation story and thinking about the unborn developed very close to each other did not stop with the seventh century.
Rather, the textual development of Hadith material referring to one of the two topics obviously developed in relation to each other.
This helps us to put the Ibn Masood Hadith into perspective. As I said, this Hadith is central to debates about prenatal human life, and it is the only text referring explicitly to individual installment of the unborn.
And it is said that this happens after 120 days. Now, as we show in our book, this Hadith went through several redactional processes, just as adding the installment passage, probably around 800 in a distinct circle of Kufin students of Allamat.
And the number of 120 is also a result of redactional development.
Interestingly, exactly the same can be witnessed in Hadith material about the creation of Adam, which in one prominent version was portrayed as having taken place in three stages, each lasting 40 or 40,000 years, and when the number 120 was reached, Adam was ensoiled.
I think this overall picture is of large interest in at least two respects. Again, just in case you're not interested in the embryo at all.
The first aspect relates to the Quranic studies. There is a common model to state that the surahs, which are often considered earlier, that means the shortest surah, such as Allah, do not refer to biblical stories, rather they are more mundane in approach.
Only in surahs, which are often considered later, this would change and interaction with biblical literature would increase.
In our analysis of the material, also the shortest surahs interact with biblical material.
The second aspect is about the relation between the Quranic text and exegetical material. I think our work shows that the exegetical material continues a process which is also reflected in the Qur'an.
In our case, a continuous reconfiguration of Adamic material.
So to sum up, Kabhani shows that speaking about the unborn underwent significant changes, it was never stable and fixed in the scholarly interactions, be it in the Quranic context, in biblical and parabiblical material, hadith, or the life in times of individual thinkers as diverse as Al-Padi, Ibn al-Arabi, Bahibrios or Zindani.
Thank you very much.
Applause
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