Becoming a Sunni Scholar: Ibrahim al-Kurani (d. 1690), His Role in Seventeenth-Century Medina and the Transregional Contexts of His Writings

Abstract

This dissertation examines the production and transformation of knowledge in early modern Ottoman Arabia. It proposes a new historical narrative of seventeenth-century Medina by closely perusing the biography and works of Ibrahim al-Kurani (d. 1690), the most prominent Kurdish theologian, Sufi, and hadith scholar during the eleventh Islamic century, or the seventeenth century, situating this figure within broader cultural, intellectual, and political milieus in the global configuration of Islamic thought in the early modern period. This dissertation investi-gates particular routes of knowledge transmissions that took place in the post-Timurid and post-Mamluk intellectual spheres, which became the multifaceted settings of the Ottoman scholarly tradition. It argues that Kurani’s pursuit of multiple genealogies from both intellectual traditions enabled him to balance between the rational and traditional sciences, which strengthened his authority in Medina where the production, circulation, transmission, and transformation of his writings occurred through trans-imperial and transregional connections.

To examine this phenomenon, this dissertation uses a corpus of manuscripts produced and written in Arabian, Maghrebi, Indian, Ottoman, and Southeast Asian cultural contexts. It reveals the sites of connection and contestation in order to explore how Kurani’s scholarly and religious authority was formed, circulated, and contested through the views of his proponents and opponents in different geographical locations. This study demonstrates that Medinan intellectual culture in the seventeenth century was shaped by the confluence among various streams of knowledge that underpinned Ibrahim al-Kurani’s intellectual persona among Muslim elites and scholars throughout the Islamic empires. It also emphasizes the importance of textual produc-tion and transmission in comparative and transregional settings, explains the inevitability of engaging with unexplored and understudied sources from multiple cultural ecologies, and explicates an ideal case of extensive networks in the Islamicate Republic of Letters in the early modern time.