Ibn Fadl Allah Al-Umari's Method of Handling Sects in His Work Titled Masalik Al-Absar and the Value of Knowledge and Sourcing in the Tradition of Maqalat

Abstract

The activity of classifying the sects in the tradition of Islamic literary composition. It is known that it started two centuries after the death of the Prophet Mohamed. Comprehensive works of encyclopedic nature, which were written in the Mamluk literary tradition in the following process, provide information about manuscript writing in a period when manuscript writing entered the stage of stagnation and repetition. Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari is one of the most important names and is an influential historian who wrote an article on Mamluk cultural historiography in his work. In addition to this identity, Umari, in his career, cared about the religious, political, socio-cultural, and historical reality of belief forms and sects through the interest and curiosity brought about by being a historian. This situation reveals that the maqalat writing-oriented information in the author's works, in fact, as an extension of the comprehensive historiography that reached its highest expression in the Mamluk period, is the subject of a new curiosity. One of the most critical issues that we encounter in the author's work is the information presented about the history of sects. These chapters, which we can consider as article writing, do not consist of randomly prepared pieces of information. On the contrary, they present a system structure according to the author's point of view. In addition, Umari established the writing of the maqalat according to the observance of seventy-three sects known as "the hadith of division." It evaluated the sects on the axis of "perversion-salvation". The author's attitude also caused him to explain the sects through refusals. Because some article writers, such as Baghdadi and Isfarayani, conveyed only the views of the sects in their works and did not try to prove their falsehood by stating that their claims were false. However, in the relevant article section, Umari presented a refutation-maqalat style approach by discrediting the views and giving a brief narrative about the sects. This situation seems directly related to the basic template the author bases the classification. The effort to put the hadith of affiliation into the center, increase the number of sects to seventy-three, and position the Ahl al-Sunnah as the sect's salvation caused Umari to move away from an objective attitude. The five-step analysis method that Umari used while examining the sects is also critical in the maqalat tradition. The fact that he gives information about the naming problem of the sects, the story of their emergence, the words of the predecessor about the relevant sect and his sub-sects, and finally, presenting an effort on the invalidity of the claims of the sects put Umari in a different position from other editorial authors. In addition to this, it is our greatest wish to increase the examples of authors like Umari and to bring to light the examples of articles that have taken their place in the works of cultural history, theology, or Islamic mysticism.