The Lives of Badawi are therefore very complicated texts, which refer to thousands of things that are transparent to the readers or audience for which they were designed but which the specialist of today must decipher. Sha‘rani (d. 1565) is an inexhaustible source for the historian.6 He gives us the keys, the flavor, the odors of life in the zawiyas of his time, talks widely about his contemporaries, and draws on oral history. He is a witness as much as he is a hagiographer since he gathers and transmits the whole heritage of Sufism at the end of the Mamluk era.
The task is not just one of reading the hagiographies, but also of knowing with which sources they should be cross-referenced. This is a basic question. The Mamluk and Ottoman hagiographies of Badawi are not sufficient: one must also study contemporary pamphlets and vernacular tales (qisas), which perpetuate the oral tradition in the nineteenth century and gather current oral tradition. A new facet of the saint appears at every turn. There is no question of discarding the marvelous or miraculous, of filtering between the more or less reliable sources or those that are more or less ‘contaminated’ by propaganda of the Sufi brotherhoods. This propaganda is in itself fascinating because it gives us precisely the point of view of the Sufis.
While the hagiographies are exceedingly rich in solid information, one should not at all costs attempt to reveal the realia by rejecting any ahistorical accounts. For the friends of the saints the supernatural or tales of visions are no less real than concrete stories. In this lowly world ruled by the hidden government of the saints, how can one accept mere appearances? As for the rest, it is impossible to decide between the legend and history, supernatural and real, without major amputation. Later narratives, even if repetitive, are no less interesting than older accounts. They all belong to the same culture and its evolution, that of the saints. This homogeneous hagiographic culture should be studied exactly for what it is: an ensemble of texts written to convince by the convinced; a literature of struggle.
When diving into Sufi hagiographies, it is necessary to employ literary methods of textual study. The very composition of the book and the plan followed by the hagiographer provide the first clues. What place do miracles occupy in the hagiography, and has the writer separated them into miracles in vita and post mortem? At what date did such and such a miracle or event occur? An examination of the hagiographer’s sources and the way in which he manipulates them is particularly interesting. Sha‘rani works primarily with oral tradition passed on by his sheikhs; ‘Abd al-Samad is the most familiar with the poetic tradition and the life of the tomb; while Halabi, who does not always cite his sources, compares several and employs a critical analysis. As for the later hagiographies and texts, they are most probably pure compilations; however, the way in which the repetitions, variants, and omissions appear make these sources fertile ground.
In every case, oral history is essential for a written hagiography. After all, the devotees and disciples of the saint began by speaking his history before writing it down. The accounts of miracles recorded in the hagiographies were first passed from sheikh to disciple, from father to son, between neighbors and villagers during Sufi séances or on the pilgrim’s route to the tombs of the saints. Oral tradition is an underground current that suddenly bursts to the surface, and it would be very difficult for a historian to construct any archaeology based upon it. For example, the hagiography written in the sixteenth century contains the marvelous story of Fatima bint Birri, a sinful saint who confronts Badawi, and there is no way of telling if this is a recent invention, a late addition, or simply the transcription of a very ancient folk tale. The story of Khadra al-Sharifa, the beautiful prisoner held by the Franks and freed by Badawi, has always remained limited to the oral sphere and is only known to us from the nineteenth-century edition of a colloquial text. Nevertheless, a close study of the tale shows that it is old (it dates at least to the Mamluk period) and it contains Biblical motifs.7 Thus, the latest hagiographies of Badawi do not necessarily reveal the most recent traditions, but rather the different faces of the saint of Tanta.
Oral tradition, of course, does not run on unchanged alongside the written. It remains constantly vital and the circulation of manuscripts and published hagiographies feeds into the narratives of the sheikhs. Hagiographers are inspired by a vita to compose yet another. The writing of hagiographies would appear to have influenced the tales that circulated among the illiterate peasantry. From the end of the nineteenth century, the storytellers themselves drew the substance of their poems and songs from printed collections. Printing, which became extremely widespread after 1860, effectively changed the game by imposing the standard popular versions and unifying the oral tradition.
Should the life of a saint be told in the vernacular or in literary Arabic? There are quite clearly certain miracles that exist in oral tradition but not in the written: tales of drowned cows and resurrected chickens, verbal fights and assaults where Badawi generally shows himself to be more rough and hearty than in the written hagiography. The difference between oral and written culture is often more a question of style and manner, of tone, than of content. The vocabulary and certain themes may change, with a clear and conscious division of roles. The oral tradition features more animals than the written, and the oral Badawi is a rather truculent, flatulent, and irascible saint. However, the hagiographic texts feed off these legends too, and certain writings do not shy away from recording how Badawi urinated from his roof onto his opponents below. Despite infinite variations, the two traditions are in reality not separable. It is clear that ‘late’ additions are not in our eyes any less authentic than the few biographical details of ancient provenance. All, or almost all, of them come from the oral tradition that is capable of evolving over the centuries, building up a formidable corpus in a society where all transmission of knowledge was, in the first place, oral.
The hagiographer’s style, words, and phrasing are the essence of the work. He is never naive. He knows exactly why he is writing and his codes are immediately understandable by those who share his culture. Lions, for example, do not wander through a tale at random, since the anecdotes and tales that the hagiographer employs are all given a symbolic significance. Taming a wild beast and successfully petitioning a brutal emir are in the end the same miracle. The tales are not short of metaphors, and depending on the audience some will take them literally, others figuratively, but for all, the sense of the esoteric is never absent.
Reading the hagiographies, entertaining though they may be, requires the historian to have somewhat deft interpretative and imaginative skills. An intimate understanding of the text is needed to read the lives of the saints. Some hagiographers are easier to understand than others, as is the case with all writers, and one must spend time in their company to grasp their ellipses and their silences, to listen to their music, and, in the end, to hear the hidden melody.
And so we shall recount the life of a Muslim saint as his disciples gradually molded it between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It was then, in the Ottoman period, that a dominant popular version was arrived at that subsequently endured up to the end of the nineteenth century. In truth, no devotee or adversary of the saint of Tanta knows all the episodes in this protean life, but we shall attempt a narrative of the most famous of them as they are found in the three principal hagiographies of the Ottoman era, those of Sha‘rani, ‘Abd al-Samad, and Halabi. These texts solidified a shifting legend composed at the end of the Mamluk period. The fact that historical reality has little to do with this tale is scarcely important. At the risk of repetition, the tale tells the reality of the saint as his devotees see it.
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