Heretics and Party-Crashers: Al-Khāṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Kitāb al-Taṭfīl
Selove, EJ; Turner, J
Date: 16 May 2019
Journal
Journal of Abbasid Studies
Publisher
Brill
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Taṭfīl (party-crashing) stories, in addition to being humorous and entertaining,
provided a space to explore a number of serious theological and ethical issues. Given
their inherent concern with inclusion and exclusion (i.e., who should be admitted to
the “party”), they are an especially appropriate vehicle for the exploration of ...
Taṭfīl (party-crashing) stories, in addition to being humorous and entertaining,
provided a space to explore a number of serious theological and ethical issues. Given
their inherent concern with inclusion and exclusion (i.e., who should be admitted to
the “party”), they are an especially appropriate vehicle for the exploration of ideas
concerning the categorization and exclusion of “heretics,” enacted as part of various
efforts to define and control orthodoxy. We will argue that some party-crashing
stories presented a plea for more inclusiveness in religion, by subtly invoking the
value systems of hospitality, and by emphasizing the impossibility of knowing who
will be saved and who will be damned. In the analogy that these stories present,
paradise is like a party and God is the host. As Julia Bray writes in her essay “The
Physical World and the Writer’s Eye,” “Though medieval Arabic has a vast literature
of ideas nakedly expressed as such, it is…highly characteristic of the culture that
some of its guiding ideas are not expressed abstractly, but are explored through
narrative, or through other forms of representation which are not overtly analytical. A
problem raised in one discipline, such as Ḥadīth or theology, may, as we have seen,
be debated outside the rules and conventions of that discipline.”
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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