Author: Rainer Brunner
An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God
Brunner, Rainer: “AHL AL-BAYT.” Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God. Ed. Adam Walker, Coeli Fitzpatrick. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014.
ABC-CLIO eBook Collection. Web. 23 Aug 2014.
Literally meaning “People of the House,” Ahl al-Bayt is usually considered, both in Sunnite and in Shi‘ite literature, to refer to the family of the Prophet Muhammad; other designations are Āl Muhammad, ‘itrat al-nabī, or the like. Disagreement prevails, however, as to which persons exactly rank among this inner circle as well as with regard to the question of whether any claims to political leadership within the Muslim community can be derived from membership of the Ahl al-Bayt.
[āl = Familie. wie ahl. (nicht der Artikel al-!)]
Until modern times, the Ahl al-Bayt were also the object of veneration among Sunnites, especially in mystical circles and Sufi orders. It is in Shi‘ism, however, that the Ahl al-Bayt form the focal point of religious identity and distinct self-consciousness. In these sectarian contexts, the concept of the Āl Muhammad becomes even more charged, as this particular term is occasionally even included in the tasliya, that is, the ritual invocation uttered after the mention of the name of the Prophet that God may send His blessings onto Muhammad “and his āl.”
A great number of verses in the Qur’an stress the importance of kinship and exhort the believer to show kindness toward one’s relatives. Thus, to give only a few examples, Qur’an 16:90 demands “justice, doing of good, and providing for the close kin,” and Qur’an 4:36 reminds the faithful to “treat with kindness parents, kin, orphans, and the poor,” because, as Qur’an 33:6 explains, “blood relations have closer ties to each other in the Book of God than believers and emigrants (to Medina).” Finally, Qur’an 42:23 goes so far as to make God decree that “I do not ask you for any recompense except the love for near kinship.” In addition, not only the pre-Islamic prophets themselves but also their respective families and offspring are held in high esteem, as the chain of prophecy was supposed to extend from Adam through all subsequent messengers to Muhammad (Q 3:33, 6:84–89, 19:58). Explicit mention is made of the families of Noah (Q 21:76, 23:27, 37:76) and Lot (Q 27:56–57, 54:34, 66:10) who were saved from the deluge and disaster, except for those members who proved to be disloyal or remained pagans. In other cases, it is emphasized that the prophets were aided and succeeded by close relatives and descendants, prophecy thereby being depicted as a hereditary investiture. This holds particularly true for Abraham, to whom Isaac and Jacob were given (Q 6:84, 19:49–50, 21:72, 29:27, 57:26); Moses, who had his brother Aaron as a companion (Q 2:248, 20:29, 25:35); and David, who was assisted by Solomon (Q 21:78, 27:16, 38:30). Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist and whose wife was barren, implored God to grant him “a descendant who will inherit from me and inherit from the family of Jacob” (Q 19:5). What is more, the expression ahl al-bayt is used in two verses in direct relation to Abraham (Q 11:73) and Moses (Q 28:12, without the article al), respectively.
The Qur’anic proof text proper with regard to Muhammad’s own household members and their significance for the Muslim community is verse 33:33: “God desires only to remove defilement from you, o people of the house, and to purify you completely.” As the passage is grammatically inconsistent with the preceding verses where the Prophet’s wives are explicitly addressed, it has given rise to speculations not only with regard to the circle of persons who were referred to as Ahl al-Bayt but also as far as its placement in the Qur’an is concerned. The German scholar Rudi Paret (1935) has gone even so far as to isolate the verse from its immediate context and to suggest that the term here did not pertain to Muhammad’s family in the narrower sense. Rather, it designated — by analogy with the expression “People of the Book,” or Ahl al-Kitab, for the adherents of non-Islamic monotheistic religions — the Muslim community in general, in the meaning “people of God’s house,” that is, the followers of the cult of the Ka‘ba as established by Abraham and restored by Muhammad. Paret’s theory, which amounts to the view that the whole tribe of the Quraysh belonged to the Ahl al-Bayt, has found only a limited number of supporters (most notably Sharon 1986, 2004). It has energetically been contested by Wilferd Madelung (1989) who, following Henri Lammens, maintains that the expression was rather related to the blood relations of Muhammad, that is, the clan of the Banu Hashim in general and the Prophet’s wives in particular.
Not least due to the ambiguity of the wording, the term ahl al-bayt was apparently early on used for political and partisan purposes by all parties involved in the sectarian strife after the death of the Prophet.
In the course of the first three centuries of Islamic history, however, it underwent significant changes and a considerable narrowing down of those who were counted among the Ahl al-Bayt. Finally, it became the hallmark of Shi‘ite theology and assumed cosmological traits that went far beyond the initially purely political considerations. The egalitarian Qur’anic emphasis on individual piety and personal religious merit notwithstanding, dynastic deliberations and kinship played already a decisive role in the formation of the Islamic empires after Muhammad’s death. It was therefore only natural to establish—or rather to reconstruct in later sources—ties as close as possible to the Prophet. In the case of Abu Bakr and ‘Umar it was stressed that relationship based on marriage (both caliphs were fathers-in-law of Muhammad) was on a par with blood relationship, and they were consequently ranked among the Prophet’s family by their supporters. It seems that there were even sporadic traditions in circulation to the effect that the Umayyads who came to power in 661 claimed to belong to the Ahl al-Bayt. Both statements to a certain extent come across as posterior reactions to the ‘Abbasid bid for legitimacy; when the ‘Abbasid staged their revolution and seized power in 750, they did so in the name of their Hashimite pedigree and thereby explicitly claiming affiliation to the Ahl al-Bayt. But since the Hashimite movement was a variegated one, they had to share this privilege with other currents, above all with all those proto-Shi‘ite groups who had initially supported them but who understood the notion of the Prophet’s family in a much narrower sense. They restricted it to the direct offspring of Muhammad through the marriage of his daughter Fatima and his cousin ‘Ali. When the ‘Abbasids consolidated their reign and excluded their former Shi‘ite supporters, this had serious consequences. Not only did the Hashimite movement split into the proto-Sunnite ‘Abbasids and the more clear-cut ‘Alid Shi‘ites (from whose ranks Imamism and finally Twelver Shi‘ism were later to evolve), but also the concept of Ahl al-Bayt was henceforward broadly understood according to the Shi‘ite interpretation and in sharp contradistinction to those factions that by the ninth century eventually came to constitute Sunnite Islam.
But the Shi‘ites did not make do with narrowing down the Ahl al-Bayt to one single and specific family and their offspring. Rather, they made every effort to link them to salvation history by endowing them with supernatural qualities. Moreover, they particularly claimed that the Prophet (and thereby ultimately God himself) had, like in the case of the pre-Islamic prophets in the Qur’an, unequivocally chosen them as his legitimate successors and so-called imams of the Muslim community. The appointment of ‘Ali as imam was supposed to have taken place on the return from the Prophet’s last pilgrimage to Mecca, at a place called ghadir Khumm, when he presented his son-in-law to the community, stating that “he whose master I am, ‘Ali is his master too; o God, be a supporter of whoever supports ‘Ali and be an enemy of whoever is an enemy of ‘Ali.” This tradition had two important corollaries. On the one hand, the idea of a divine designation (nass) became the cornerstone of the nascent theory of the imamate, as it was stipulated that the world could not exist without an imam and that the imamate was handed down in direct genealogical succession to the offspring of ‘Ali and Fatima. On the other hand, it contributed to portraying the Shi‘ites in general as a chosen people and the Ahl al-Bayt in particular as a holy family to whom every believer owed absolute allegiance (walaya) and whose enemies he had to renounce (bara’a) in an equally unconditional manner. Love for the Ahl al-Bayt was thereby elevated from a political statement to the rank of a religious duty, and opposition as well as enmity toward them were henceforward regarded as grave sins.
Several other traditions (all traced back to Muhammad and the imams themselves) were adduced to corroborate this view of history. One is the so-called hadith al-thaqalayn (“tradition of the two precious things”), according to which the Prophet was supposed to have said “I have left among you two precious things; if you hold fast to them, you will not be led into an error after me. One of them is greater than the other: the book of God which is a rope stretched from heaven to earth, and my progeny, the people of my house.” Various versions of this tradition exist, some of them characteristically substituting “the practice (sunna) of His prophet” for “the people of the house,” but even in many authoritative Sunnite sources the reading “Ahl al-Bayt” was accepted, albeit without the far-reaching conclusions that the Shi‘ites derived from it. Another famous tradition is the hadith al-kisa’ (“tradition of the cloak”), which was directly connected to the above-cited Qur’anic verse 33:33 in which the purification of the Ahl al-Bayt is announced. According to this hadith, the verse was precisely revealed when Muhammad gathered under a black cloak his daughter Fatima, her husband ‘Ali, and their two sons al-Hasan and al-Husayn, and the Prophet confirmed its message by saying “O God, these are my family whom I have chosen; take the pollution from them and purify them thoroughly,” to which in some versions the distinctly political statements “I am the enemy of their enemies” or “O God, be the enemy of their enemies” were added. A further validation of the outstanding position of the Ahl al-Bayt is provided by Shi‘ite Qur’anic exegesis, which links them to the famous episode of the ordeal (mubahala, Q 3:61) as well. In a controversy with the Christian community of Najran on the nature of Jesus, Muhammad is addressed: “If anyone dispute with you in this matter . . ., say: Come let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves, then let us swear an oath and place the curse of God on those who lie.”
For Shi‘ite commentators, it goes without saying that those referred to in this passage were the very Ahl al-Bayt as described in the tradition of the cloak. Their purity and sinlessness turns them into the Holy Five, and a certain parallelism to Christian concepts of the Holy Family—in particular between Fatima and Mary—cannot be denied.
Shi‘ite theology went still further and extended the role of the Prophet’s family into pre-Islamic and even antediluvian times. Thus, the Ahl al-Bayt who are depicted as having been created before the actual creation are associated with Adam onto whom their light was transferred. Of special importance is their connection with Noah who, as is embroidered by many traditions, could not have constructed the ark and survived the flood but with their help. All of this not only lent virtually cosmological traits to their veneration but also contributed enormously to the quasi-divine character of the imams in classical Shi‘ite theology. Eventually it forms the background of the accusation that the Sunnite compilators of the text of the Qur’an omitted all references to the Ahl al-Bayt in a great number of verses, thus deliberately falsifying the holy scripture. This charge was widespread in early Shi‘ism but also continued to play an important role in the sectarian strife during later centuries; it is only in the 20th century that Shi‘ite theology more or less unanimously abandoned this accusation.
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See also: Abu Bakr al-Siddiq; ‘A’isha; ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib; Companions; Rashidun; Shi‘ism; Shi‘ism, Subsects of; Twelver Shi‘ism; Twelver Shi‘ism, Doctrines and Practices
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Further Reading:
Afsaruddin, Asma. Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourses on Legitimate Leadership. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Bernheimer, Teresa. The ‘Alids. The First Family of Islam, 750–1200. Edinburgh: University Press, 2013.
Goldziher, Ignaz. “Ueber die Eulogien der Muhammedaner.” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 50 (1896): 97–128.
Hoffman-Ladd, Valerie J. “Devotion to the Prophet and His Family in Egyptian Sufism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 615–637.
Kohlberg, Etan. “Bara’a in Shi‘i Doctrine.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 7 (1986): 139–175.
Kohlberg, Etan. “Some Shi‘i Views of the Antediluvian World.” Studia Islamica 52 (1980): 43–66.
Lammens, Henri. Fatima et les filles de Mahomet: Notes critiques pour l’étude de la sira. Rome: Sumptibus Ponificii Instituti Biblici, 1912.
Madelung, Wilferd. “The Hashimiyyāt of al-Kumayt and Hashimi Shi‘ism.” Studia Islamica 70 (1989): 5–26.
Madelung, Wilferd. The Succession to Muhammad: A Study in the Early Caliphate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Paret, Rudi. “Der Plan einer neuen, leicht kommentierten wissenschaftlichen Koranübersetzung.” In Orientalistische Studien: Enno Littmann zu seinem 65; Geburtstag am 16; September 1935
überreicht von Schülern aus seiner Bonner und Tübinger Zeit, edited by Rudi Paret, 121–130. Leiden: Brill, 1935.
Sharon, Moshe. “Ahl al-Bayt—People of the House.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986): 169–184.
Sharon, Moshe. “The Development of the Debate around the Legitimacy of Authority in Early Islam.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 5 (1984): 121–141.
Sharon, Moshe. “People of the House.” In Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, Vol. 4, edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe, 48–43. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Sharon, Moshe. “The Umayyads as Ahl al-Bayt.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 14 (1991): 116–152.