Pavel Pavlovitch and Abdelrahman Aboelmajd discuss kalāla

   We have a fresh opportunity to reflect upon the word kalāla in the Qurʾān. Professor
Pavel Pavlovitch is going to talk about his study of the word kalāla, which is mentioned in Sūrat al-Nisāʾ 12 and 176. In the former verse, the meaning of kalāla is difficult to understand; in the latter verse, it is defined as a man who dies leaving no child. In his book “The Formation of the Islamic Understanding of Kalāla in the Second Century AH (718-816 CE). Between Scripture and Canon,” recently published by Brill Academic Publishers, Pavel Pavlovitch undertook an extensive analysis of 29 clusters of kalāla traditions, which led him to important conclusions about the early history of the Qurʾān, Islamic law and exegesis .

Pavel Pavlovitch

   Prof. Pavel Pavlovich, PhD, DSc

Head of the Department of Arabic and Semitic Studies at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski "

   Areas of academic interest: Arabic and Islamic history between 5th and 10th centuries CE, early Islamic law and jurisprudence, authenticity of traditions about early Islam, and methodology of dating and reconstructing legal and historical traditions .

Q : First of all, we thank you for agreeing this interview for Alukah, what prompted you to take up Qurʾānic studies? Why did you become interested in kalāla ?

PP: To me, the Qurʾān has a double significance as a foundational document and an epistemological tool .

Before all, the Qurʾān is of prime importance for the self-identification of the Islamic community. As a divinely revealed constitution, it transformed the geographically dispersed and socially incoherent tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia into an integral community of believers (muʾminūn) and brought it to the forefront of the historical events that reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the late-antique world. In the second century Hijra/ca. eight century CE, the Qurʾān gave impetus to the development of Islamic sciences, before all exegesis and jurisprudence. This brings us to the epistemological aspect of scripture. It is a guide to the early history of fiqh and tafsīr, and its study may afford insights in the historical path followed by the community of muʾminūn and its interactions with other late-antique communities in the highly controversial first/seventh century. Hence, when one deals with almost every aspect of early-Islamic history, one inevitably comes to the Qurʾān and extra-Qurʾānic narratives, such as Muslim traditions (ḥadīth) and exegetical interpretations. Dealing with these sources poses an immense methodological challenge: how are we to approach the large stock of literary evidence that began to be systematically recorded more than one century after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad in 11/632? My study of kalāla in the Qurʾān and ḥadīth pursues, therefore, multiple goals. It aims at defining a coherent methodology of dating ḥadīth and reconstructing its earliest formulations; it explores fiqh and tafsīr; and it seeks to throw light on the Islamic perception of scripture as it evolved in the first/seventh and the early second/eight centuries .

Q : I wonder if the meaning of kalāla was known in the jāhiliyya and early Islam .

PP: This is an interesting question. One expects that the recipients of the Qurʾānic message would have known the meaning of an important lexical unit that is present in two Qurʾānic verses treating the law of inheritance (Sūrat al-Nisāʾ, 12 and 176). This does not seem to have been the case, however. In their earlier studies of kalāla, David Powers and Agostino Cilardo were able to find only six mentions of kalāla in purportedly early poetic and prosaic witnesses. My study of these witnesses suggests that none of them qualifies as a proof that kalāla was known in the lay idiom of the first/seventh century. They are mostly late exegetical glosses on the kalāla verses in the Qurʾān. One of them does not deal with kalāla at all. That is to say, apart from the Qurʾān, the internal sources do not include any positive indications that the Arabs of the jāhiliyya and early Islam used the word kalāla to refer to a set of inheritance rules, to a specific kinship relationship or to anything else, for that matter .

Q : What about the definition of kalāla and how the meaning of kalāla is hidden ?

PP: Any Arabist who takes a look at verse 12 of Sūrat al-Nisāʾ will immediately recognize the immense challenge that this verse poses to the understanding of kalāla. The meaning of the word depends on the interplay of several grammatical factors, which are difficult to set out for a non-specialist readership. In any case, the only way to make clear sense of kalāla as it stands in al-Nisāʾ 12, without recourse to external narratives, is to read the verb y-r-th in the expression y-r-th kalāla in the active voice, that is, yūrithu kalālatan. In this case, which, by the way, was the reading of the early jurist an exegete al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728), kalāla would mean “someone who is appointed as heir,” that is, a testamentary heir. Al-Ḥasan’s reading, however, was not adopted by later jurists and exegetes .

Q. What was their preferred reading of the verse ?

PP. They preferred to read the verb y-r-th in the expression y-r-th kalāla in the passive voice, that is, yūrathu kalālatan. In this case, however, the context of al-Nisāʾ 12 alone is insufficient to understand the meaning of kalāla .

Q : I wonder where does the term kalāla derive from ?

PP: Early jurists and exegetes derived the meaning of kalāla from the context of al-Nisāʾ 176. It includes the expression, yastaftūna-ka qul: “Allāhu yuftī-kum fī l-kalālati ‘In imruʾun halaka laysa la-hu waladun’” (When they ask you for advice, say, “Allah advises you with regard to kalāla, ‘If a man dies without a child etc.’”). Unlike al-Nisāʾ 12, here we have what seems to be a positive definition of kalāla: a man who dies leaving no child. For that reason, towards the end of the first century AH Muslim exegetes established a hermeneutic link between al-Nisāʾ 12 and al-Nisāʾ 176 and defined the meaning of kalāla in the former verse by analogy with its meaning in the latter verse. This link, however, entailed semantic and legal complications .

First, which is the specific referent of the analogy in al-Nisāʾ 12? This verse includes the expression in kāna rajulun yūrathu kalālatan (if a man is inherited from while being kalāla). By analogy with al-Nisāʾ 176 (in imruʾun halaka laysa la-hu waladun: if a man dies without a child), the “man” in al-Nisāʾ 12 would appear to be kalāla, that is, someone who dies without a child. But, in this case, al-Nisāʾ 12 would acquire the following form: “If kalāla is inherited from while being kalāla,” which suggests that we actually have two different kalālas .

Second, the inheritance norms in al-Nisāʾ 12 and 176 differ. Thus, for instance, in al-Nisāʾ 12 brothers and sisters inherit an equal share of the estate, which, however, may not exceed one-third. By contrast, in al-Nisāʾ 176 brothers inherit twice as much as sisters, and, in the absence of a sister, a brother inherits the full estate .

We must also note that al-Nisāʾ 176 has a problem of its own. It speaks about kalāla as a man who dies leaving no child, but, oddly, it does not say anything about the father who shares with the child the same lineal relationship to the deceased. Should the father be included in the legal understanding of kalāla by analogy with the child? Or does one have to adhere to the Qurʾānic expression literally ?

All these issues set off a series of exegetical and legal disputes during the second century AH, which involved prominent scholars as Isrāʾīl b. Yūnus, Sufyān b. ʿUyayna, and ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī, to mention a few. By the end of that century, Muslim jurists and exegetes had agreed that kalāla means either (1) a deceased who has no child and no parent and is inherited by his or her collateral relatives (Medina) or (2) the collateral relatives who inherit from a deceased who dies without a child and a parent (Kufa). A legal and exegetical consensus had been hammered out that, while speaking of brothers, al-Nisāʾ 12 and 176 refer to two different categories of siblings. Al-Nisāʾ 12 treats the inheritance of consanguine siblings, whereas al-Nisāʾ 176 treats the inheritance of uterine/germane siblings. My study contributes to the reconstruction of the earliest definitions of kalāla, their history and regional distribution, and the attendant scholarly disputes .

Q : You speak about the second century AH. But what about the first century? How to explain that kalāla did not attract exegetical attention already in early Islam ?

PP: My study shows that the famous Kufan jurist Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī (d. ca. 96/715) was among the first to tackle the issue of kalāla. Al-Nakhaʿī expressed his disappointment that he did not understand the meaning of the word. That is to say, kalāla became an object of exegetical attention only in the last two decades of the first/seventh century. The reason for this belated interest in the word is difficult to explain. I venture that it had something to do with the way the early Muslim community perceived the Qurʾān. In my opinion, in the first century AH the Qurʾān was used before all for ritual reading, and it transformed into a fully-fledged source of legal norms only towards the century’s end. This transformation triggered an increased interest in the Qurʾānic legal terminology, including the by then obsolete word kalāla .

          But we must be alert to an important limitation of current Western studies of early Islam. Our methodologies are scarcely capable of throwing light on the first Islamic century. In my book, I apply a method known as isnād-cum-matn analysis. This method remains credible so long as we are able to establish the common link of a given tradition, that is, the earliest transmitter who is the point of convergence of several lines of transmission (isnāds). Below the common link, the method starts to lose credibility. In the study of early Islam, we are constrained by the fact that the oldest common links are found at the beginning of the second/eight century, and, usually, we can make only sporadic forays in the unexplored area below the common-link level. That is to say, the first/eight century mostly remains beyond our reach. In my book, I propound several criteria that may help us to overcome this hindrance at least partly. Nevertheless, Western academia has yet to develop a consistent and broadly accepted methodology of studying early Islam .

Q : Western researchers such as Agostino Cilardo and David S. Powers wrote on kalāla. I want to know what you added .

PP: David S. Powers pioneered the study of kalāla in Western scholarship. He published an article about the term in 1982. In 1986, he treated kalāla extensively in his major study devoted to Islamic law of inheritance. And in 2010, he revisited the issue in his book Muḥammad is Not the Father of Any of Your Men. Meanwhile, kalāla has come to the attention of Yasin Dutton, Claude Gilliot, and others. Powers hypothesized that kalāla in al-Nisāʾ 12 was initially kalla, meaning daughter-in-law, and that originally the verse was aimed against a disherision by way of testament of closest relatives in favor of a daughter-in-law or a wife. That is why al-Nisāʾ 12 reserves for the brothers and sisters of the deceased at least one-third of the estate. To support his hypothesis, Powers studied a large array of traditions found in early ḥadīth collections, works of exegesis and lexicography. Cilardo examined kalāla traditions in various contexts and undertook to assort them according to their chronology, regional origin, and doctrinal background .

          Powers and Cilardo have done a tremendous work in advancing our knowledge about kalāla. As every academic pursuit, their work has a few shortcomings. Thus, for instance, they did not use clearly defined methodological principles in dating kalāla traditions. They also did not attempt to reconstruct the earliest formulations of these traditions. Another shortcoming is that they did not study all kalāla traditions that may be found in currently published ḥadīth collections, works of exegesis, lexicography, biographical compendia and other literary sources. To address these issues, I open my work with an elaboration on the methodology of studying Muslim traditions. Using modern computer technologies, I extract hundreds of kalāla traditions from published sources and include them in 29 large ḥadīth clusters. Each cluster is visualized by an isnād diagram, some of them being of great complexity. Finally, I date these clusters and trace the historical development of the respective traditions by means of isnād-cum-matn analysis and literary- and text-critical approaches. This allows me to date and reconstruct kalāla traditions with greater accuracy than that achieved by Powers and Cilardo. In a number of cases, I have been able to show how freely floating narrative pieces coalesced into complex traditions dealing with various legal, exegetical, and historical topics. Sometimes, it is possible to date such narrative pieces, but on other occasions their origin remains obscure. Anyone interested in the workings of narrative condensation is referred to Chapter 3.3, “ʿUmar, Kalāla, and the Ominous Snake .”

Q : I hope you did not suggest that the Ominous Snake on the matn evidence suggests that the Kalāla-cum-snake narrative al-Ṭabarī that drew upon at least three earlier sources I think we should avoid such grand generalizations. Your work, then, is not only a study of kalāla traditions as such but also a methodological experiment ?

PP. I agree. Generalizing statements should be avoided, because they can be misleading. Nevertheless, recent research on Muslim historical traditions undertaken by Albrecht Noth, Stefan Leder, Fred Donner, Sebastian Günther, Jens Scheiner, and others has indicated that in many cases they are literary narratives, which absorbed different earlier motifs. My research of legal traditions points in the same direction. Dating and reconstructing historical and legal ḥadīth is critically important for the understanding of the history of early Islamic jurisprudence and exegesis, and it also affords a glimpse in the history of the Qurʾān and the community of muʾminūn in the first/seventh century. For this reason, Western students of early Islam must develop a strict methodology by which to proceed in their dealing with the diverse narrative material found in the Islamic literary sources .

Abdelrahman Aboelmajd: Thank you very much, professor Pavlovitch .

Pavel Pavlovitch: Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk before Alukah