care if they kill me by the sword. The only thing I’m afraid of is being flogged: I’m afraid I won’t be able to take it” (68.1). Even readers who have little sympathy for his beliefs will, I hope, be able to admire Ibn Ḥanbal—or at least, his literary counterpart—for practicing principled nonviolent resistance to coercive state authority.
In the introduction to his wonderfully informative life of Ibn Ḥanbal, Christopher Melchert explains why he wrote a new biography instead of translating an old one. A medieval biography, he writes, “inevitably presents a medieval point of view”:
A full time scholar has had the chance to develop a taste for such literature, but most readers would find it grotesque. For example, one chapter of Ibn al-Jawzi’s biography is simply a list of the more than four hundred persons from whom Ahmad collected Hadith. A proper analysis would easily exceed the limits of a normal biography.…I doubt it would interest any but specialists.
Moreover, says Melchert, the translation of a premodern work would be too long. For example, al-Dhahabī’s life of Ibn Ḥanbal “would require a good 60,000 [words] and Ibn al-Jawzi’s over 150,000.”2
The latter work is the one edited and translated here: the Virtues of the Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal by the Baghdadi Hadith scholar, jurist, historian, biographer, and preacher Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201).3 Melchert’s estimate of length is remarkably accurate: the present translation of Ibn al-Jawzī’s text comes to about 173,500 words. He is also quite right about the long lists of names. And he does not even mention the chains of transmitters. Like collections of Hadith reports, Arabic chronicles and biographies generally cite their sources by listing all the individuals who transmitted the original account of the event in question. As a Hadith scholar writing about another Hadith scholar, Ibn al-Jawzī seems to have been especially careful to cite all his sources. The result is a book approximately half of which is taken up with isnāds, as the lists of sources are called.
In the bilingual edition of this book, all of the original material, including the isnāds, was retained. This paperback edition, by contrast, drops almost all of Chapters 2, 11–14, 20, 90, and 100, keeping only a representative section, usually the first, intended to give the reader an idea of what has been left out. To maintain consistency with the hardcovers, however, the section numbers in the margins have been left unchanged in this paperback edition, even though that has led to some non-consecutive numbering in some places. This new edition also omits all the isnāds except for the first (1.1). As in the bilingual edition, the name given in brackets at the beginning of each report is the name of the narrator. When it appears in brackets, “Aḥmad” means “Ibn Ḥanbal” and the following report is in effect autobiographical. Other commonly cited narrators are Ibn Ḥanbal’s sons Ṣāliḥ and ʿAbd Allāh, and his disciple al-Marrūdhī. More information on these figures may be found in the Glossary.
In his insightful review of the bilingual edition, Tasi Perkins asked why I did not have more to say about the author of this book.4 There are several reasons why. First, the external facts of Ibn al-Jawzī’s life are readily found in several sources both in print and on line. More importantly, Ibn al-Jawzī was less an author in the modern sense than a compiler. As the literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito has argued, pre-modern Arabic literature has distinct genres (praise poetry, love poetry, biography, etc.) but few distinct authors.5 As Ibn al-Jawzī himself tells us, this book speaks for the whole Ḥanbalī tradition, not for him as an individual (see, e.g., 100.1). Of course, the book as we have it reflects the preoccupations of his time and place. As it happens, one chapter of my 2001 book Classical Arabic Biography deals with this topic, and for the most part I have preferred not to repeat myself here. Even so, points that help make sense of the text are included in the notes to this edition (see, for example, notes 335, 337, 342, 371, 379, 385, 386, and 422).
Leaving aside the matter of length, this book was not particularly difficult to translate. Unlike some of the other works published in this series, it is not a collection of arguments about a once-burning issue, a guide for specialists in a technical field, or a monument to verbal cleverness. It is a book by and about people who believed in simple truths expressed in simple language—even if some of that simplicity has been lost to us with the passage of time. In a sense, the difficult parts were also the most enjoyable to work on. These include the references to daily life and material culture: everything from “a dried-whey stew full of meat and chard” (38.11) to the galoshes a Turkish general wears as he splashes his way through the mud to Ibn Ḥanbal’s door (73.41). The book is a trove of information on the physical and social world of the third/ninth century, and I hope some readers, at least, will mine its riches.
What I most wish the tradition had preserved for us is the voices. Ibn Ḥanbal’s life is told as a series of reports, each narrated by an eyewitness, or by Ibn Ḥanbal himself. If the words on the page really are transcriptions of speech, each report should represent a distinct voice. In practice, though, there does not seem to be much variation in register, possibly because reports originally narrated in informal Arabic, and perhaps even other languages, have been put into literary Arabic of a more or less uniform kind by one or another of the transmitters (see, e.g., 38.10). Beyond the voices of the eyewitnesses, we also have the voices of all the people they quote. These include everyone from caliphs, judges, and jailors to doctors, grocers, and bandits. Unusually, if all too briefly, we also hear the voices of women (e.g., 61.7) and children (65.9). Here again, though, all of these people seem to be speaking the same sort of Arabic, making it difficult to give them distinctive voices in English.
Another problem was names. As in nineteenth-century Russian novels, all of the important characters seem to have several names, and authors seem to use them indiscriminately. In fact (as in Russian novels) there are reasons why one name might be used rather than another. In Ibn Ḥanbal’s case, those who write about him usually call him Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (“Aḥmad the descendant of Ḥanbal”), or Aḥmad for short. But his friends, associates, and students called him ʿAbū ʿAbd Allāh, “father of ʿAbd Allāh.” This form conveys both intimacy and respect. Unfortunately, it is easily confused with ʿAbd Allāh, the name of Ibn Ḥanbal’s son. Also, Abū ʿAbd Allāh happens to be the form of address for at least two other figures in the book. After much reflection, I decided to call him Ibn Ḥanbal in the introduction and notes, where it was necessary to refer to him as unambiguously as possible, but in the translation to call him Aḥmad wherever it was necessary to convey warmth or admiration.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1 Al-Dhahabī, Siyar, 10:15.
2 Melchert, Ibn Hanbal, viii.
3 On his life see Laoust, “Ibn al-Jawzī,” which erroneously gives his birthdate as 510/1126 instead of 510/1116.
4 Perkins, “Hagiography.”
5 Kilito, Author, esp. pp. 17–23.
THE LIFE OF IBN ḤANBAL
IN THE NAME OF GOD, FULL OF COMPASSION, EVER COMPASSIONATE 0.1
The Virtues of Abū ʿAbd Allāh Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥanbal, of the tribe of Shaybān—God be pleased with him!—by the great religious authority Abū l-Faraj ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Jawzī, God be
