Collating The Signs of Benevolent Deeds: Muḥammad Mahdī al-Fāsī’s Commentary on Muḥammad al-Jazūlī’s Dalā’il al-Khayrāt and Its Ottoman Readers

Abstract

AbstractThe article examines the efforts of Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī (d. 1605) and his readers in the Ottoman domains to reconstruct an authoritative version of Muḥammad b. Sulaymān b. Abī Bakr al-Jazūlī’s (d. 1465) Dalā’il al-khayrāt. In his commentary on the Dalā’il, al-Fāsī recorded his collation of multiple versions of al-Jazūlī’s work. The commentary and its contribution to a notion of an authoritative and authorial version of Dalā’il al-khayrāt accompanied al-Jazūlī’s text in its journey to the eastern parts of the Islamic world and helped readers there bridge a two-century gap in the transmission of the work. The article studies the manners in which Ottoman readers/reciters of Dalā’il used al-Fāsī’s commentary to create a channel to al-Jazūlī and the divine. In so doing, the article seeks to draw attention to additional functions of the genre of the commentary in the Islamic tradition. Moreover, by focusing on the textual practices of al-Fāsī and his Ottoman readers, the essay argues that the act of collation of the multiple versions of Dalā’il al-khayrāt was in and of itself an ethical act of devotion that manifested the readers’/reciters’ quest for proximity to al-Jazūlī.