In July, I will be attending the annual conference of the European Academy of Religion in Vienna. Claire Gallien (Cambridge) invited me to participate in the panel she organized on the intriguing topic, „A Culture of Certainty: Islam, Knowledge, and the Search for Truth in Unstable and Uncertain Times.“ The panel is scheduled to take place on July 11, 2025, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. My contribution will be on the topic „Verification (taḥqīq) as Religious and Epistemic Practice: Establishing Certain Knowledge about Prophetic Descent in the Islamic West.“
Abstract of my contribution
Verification (taḥqīq) as Religious and Epistemic Practice: Establishing Certain Knowledge about Prophetic Descent in the Islamic West
Natalie Kraneiß
In Muslim societies, those who were believed to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632) enjoyed a special status. They were often granted privileges and financial benefits, and were revered by some as intermediaries between believers and God. However, as the number of purported prophetic descendants grew, it became necessary to control access to their privileges and to verify claims of belonging to this group. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during periods of political unrest and uncertainty, this verification gained urgency in the Western Maghrib, present-day Morocco. This raises the question of the methods and criteria by which certain knowledge about prophetic descent was established and legitimized in historical contexts.
Focusing on Sulaymān b. Muḥammad al-Ḥawwāt (d. 1816), a Moroccan literary scholar, genealogist, and descendant of the Prophet, this paper examines his engagement with the verification of such claims in the eighteenth century. What epistemic practices did al-Ḥawwāt employ to produce certain knowledge in an age of increased uncertainty? One of his major projects was to investigate the lineage of the descendants of the Iraqi scholar and saint ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 1166) in Fez, to whom prophetic descent was attributed. This endeavor, which al-Ḥawwāt called verification (taḥqīq), involved the critical examination of information from earlier works, letters, and documents, as well as the systematic and thoughtful evaluation of various forms of evidence. Of particular importance was the concept of continuous transmission (tawātur), which served as the basis for arriving at a definitive judgment.
This paper shows how knowledge was understood in the Islamic tradition as a dynamic and processual concept capable of stabilizing both social and religious order. While aiming to establish certain knowledge, al-Ḥawwāt’s practices also reflected an awareness of the limitations of human knowledge, illustrating the balance between certainty and ambiguity in Islamic thought. What drove al-Ḥawwāt’s pursuit of verification was religious obligation: for him, defending the rights of the Prophet and his descendants was inseparable from the pursuit of truth and the correction of errors. At the same time, he emphasized that reliable and accurate knowledge is a central foundation for stability and order in society, especially in times of political and social uncertainty.
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