Heretics and Party-Crashers: Al-Khāṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Kitāb al-Taṭfīl

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 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.”