Sapient Materiality in Medieval Hagiographies of Female Sufi Ascetics

With its focus on self-mortification and withdrawal from the world, medieval asceticism seems entrenched in a rhetoric of immateriality. The materialities of the world—the human body, physical objects, natural phenomena—all seem to decay when subject to the withering glare of the ascetic. But upon deeper inspection, it becomes clear that asceticism and materiality have a much more intimate and dialogic relationship in medieval texts. This intimacy and dialogue are abundantly clear in medieval Arabic Islamic hagiographies about Sufi women, as in Abū ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān as-Sulamī’s (d. 1021) Dhikr an-Niswa al-Mutaʿabbidāt aṣ-Ṣūfiyyāt (Remembrance of Women Sufi Devotees) and Abū al Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī’s (d. 1201) Ṣifat as-Ṣafwa (The Features of the Elect). Asceticism (zuhd) denies materiality whilst at the same time situating itself within inescapable material objects and frameworks: the enclosed space, the prayer rug, the hairshirt, to name only a few examples. I argue that we can harness a ‘material hermeneutic’ to decode the ascetic materialities (a key example of ‘sapient materiality’, to use Daniel Miller’s term) at the heart of these Islamic hagiographies.