Abstract
The Mamluk sultan Baybars’ seizure of Safed from the Franks in 1266 was a watershed event which set in motion a process of intensification in Muslim settlement both in Safed and the Galilee region at large. This process was accompanied by the emergence of new Islamic sacred sites which catered to the needs of the growing Muslim population in the region. Drawing mainly on the recently discovered History of Safed by al-ʿUthmānī, written in the late-fourteenth century, this article argues that a new Islamic sacred topography was shaped during this period, through an amalgam of immigrant Sufi saints and preexisting local traditions of sacred sites, mostly preserved among the Jewish communities of the Galilee. These were now integrated into an emerging Islamic sacred topography, formed through a dynamic interplay between local Galilean traditions and wider Islamicate spiritual currents.
1 Introduction
Contemplating the drastic move of abandoning his family and retiring from society, Muḥammad al-ʿUthmānī (d. after 780/1379), the qāḍī and khaṭīb of Safed, decided to visit the pious Sufi shaykh of his town, Ṣafī al-Dīn b. Amīn al-Dawla al-Ḥalabī, and to seek his counsel. The shaykh, through his foreknowledge, knew of al-ʿUthmānī’s intentions and ordered him to forsake them and remain with his family and community. In an emotional moment, the two embraced and the shaykh told his devotee: “My dear, God will not have the umma of Muḥammad lose you. Adhere to the Way of the Prophet (sunna).”1
This anecdote is one of many others, scattered throughout al-ʿUthmānī’s book, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad (History of Safed). In various life situations, be they such existential cases or other, day-to-day affairs, al-ʿUthmānī sought the spiritual advice and blessing of living and dead saints who dotted the Galilean landscape and constituted the sacred topography of his native region: asking for their intercession (shafāʿa) or supplications to God (duʿāʾ); obtaining physical items imbued with their blessing (baraka); receiving the hospitality of a local shaykh on a scorching summer day at the village of al-Shajara, west of the Sea of Galilee – accompanied by cold water and refreshing watermelon; interacting with the saints in dreams; or just performing routine pious visitations (ziyāra) to sacred shrines and living saints.2
But al-ʿUthmānī lived in Safed, a relatively recently founded town, to which his great-grandfather had immigrated just after it was conquered and founded anew by the Mamluk Sultan Baybars in 664/1266. Safed had no Islamic roots and few traditions of local shrines sacred to Muslims in its environs. Those were established by and for the evolving Muslim community, whose members were in need, not only of a mosque in which to conduct their prayers, but of a sacred topography of holy men and blessed places to which they could direct their daily spiritual and mundane needs. This article examines the consolidation of such an Islamic sacred topography in Safed and the eastern Galilee during a formative period in their history, namely the first hundred years following Baybars’ conquest of the region from the Crusaders in 1266. I argue that this drew on an existing Galilean – mainly Jewish – sacred topography and reshaped it to fit the needs of the now dominant Muslim community.
In his study of Jewish pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the later Middle Ages, Reiner shows that a major concentration of Jewish sacred sites was to be found in the eastern Galilee. Arguing for a distinct Galilean cult, or “myth,” which crossed religious boundaries and was shared by Jews and Muslims alike, Reiner maps two concentrations of sites which dominated the sacred landscape of the region: one in the Upper Galilee, focused mainly around Safed and Meron; and the other, in the Lower Galilee, stretching eastward of Tiberias.3 Many of the Jewish sites possibly had ancient roots, were associated with a variety of local traditions, and are attested since the twelfth century by a relative abundance of sources, mainly pilgrimage guides and travel reports written by European Jewish pilgrims. Meanwhile, much less is known about sites deemed sacred by local Muslims, certainly prior to the Mamluk era. This is most likely connected to the fact that the Galilee was considered a peripheral region, and only its most famous sites were mentioned in comprehensive pilgrimage guides or travelogues.
In fact, very little is known about the life and customs of Muslims in the eastern Galilee prior to, and even during, the Mamluk period. Following Ellenblum, it seems that Muslim settlement in the region was very slow to progress prior to advent of the Mamluk Sultanate, and a substantial share of the population was still non-Muslim, even six to seven hundred years after the initial Muslim conquest of Palestine during the seventh century.4 The Mamluk takeover of the region started a process of Muslim settlement and Islamization of the landscape, initiated by the Mamluk state, as well as the local population. The results of this process are clearly seen in the Ottoman population surveys of the sixteenth century, which show a clear Muslim majority in the region.5
Until recently, not much was known on this process, due to a relative dearth of sources depicting a Muslim presence in the Galilee. However, in 2009, Suhayl Zakkār published an edition of al-ʿUthmānī’s important local history of Safed, the aforementioned Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, written in the 1370s.6 This work was considered lost until a manuscript of it was discovered in Diyarbakir (in present-day Turkey), resulting in this published edition. Apart from this recent publication, a section of the work, consisting of its geographical introduction, was published by Bernard Lewis already in 1953.7 The recent discovery of the main body of the text introduces us to many aspects of Muslim life in the province of Safed during the first century after it was established by Baybars.
In what follows, I wish to concentrate on how al-ʿUthmānī portrayed the sacred topography of his town and its region during this formative period. I argue that the intensification of Muslim settlement in the region also brought about the creation of a new, Islamic, sacred topography for the Galilee. This was achieved through a “dialogue” with the already existing Galilean cult – which had Jewish roots but, as Reiner claimed – was shared by Galileans of all religious denominations. My argument draws mainly on the geographical, but also the mental, map of sacred sites portrayed by al-ʿUthmānī, which suggests continuity with the main concentrations of Jewish sacred spaces, as studied by Reiner. However, as will be described later, this does not mean to suggest shared devotion.
The article will start with a brief overview of Muslim presence in the Galilee up to 1266, and the dramatic shift promoted by Baybars after his seizure of Safed. It will then proceed to argue that the new circumstances brought about the consolidation of an Islamic sacred topography in the region, reflected in al-ʿUthmānī’s history of Safed. It will argue that this topography was shaped by a combination of local traditions and wider currents which were part of the Zeitgeist of the thirteenth-century Islamicate world. Following that, it will highlight the convergences and tensions between the pre-Mamluk Galilean cult and the emerging Mamluk sacred topography and the wider process of the Islamization of the Galilee. To conclude, some preliminary thoughts will be offered on the interrelations between Islam and Judaism in Mamluk Galilee.
2 Safed and the Eastern Galilee: before 1266 and after
Little is known of the eastern Galilee under Muslim rule prior to the Crusader period, with the exception of its main town, Tiberias – an important and prosperous center of Islamic learning which rapidly declined during the second half of the eleventh century and was, by the Mamluk period, a rather minor settlement.8 As Ellenblum convincingly argued, it was only during the Mamluk period that a major intensification in Islamization occurred.9 This is especially true regarding Safed, which, up to the advent of Frankish rule at the end of the eleventh century, was a negligible settlement, hardly mentioned in Muslim sources. This state of affairs changed with the coming of the Crusaders, who founded a fortress there during the twelfth century. This fortress was later razed to the ground by the Ayyubids, only to be later rebuilt by the Templars in the 1240s as one of the major Frankish strongholds in the region. At the foot of the new fortress a burgus (suburb) developed, about which we have almost no information.10
The next major turn of events occurred in 1266, when the sultan Baybars seized Safed from the Templars. Baybars’ conquest of Safed, and subsequently of most of the Galilee, opened a new chapter in the history of this region in general, and of Safed in particular. Immediately after seizing the fortress, in an exceptional move, Baybars turned Safed into a regional military and administrative center for the nascent Mamluk rule over Syria, the capital of a newly made “Galilean province” – mamlakat Ṣafad.11 From this time on, Safed would become the main town in northern Palestine, well into the Ottoman period.12 The drastic change Safed experienced, from Christian stronghold to Islamic town, from a marginal locality to a provincial capital, affected not just Safed but the entire region.
As a newly founded town, Safed clearly lacked the Islamic credentials which other Syrian cities – such as Jerusalem, Hebron, Damascus, and Aleppo – had in plentitude. Thus, the Muslim community of Safed – and the communities of other settlements throughout the eastern Galilee – had to stake their claim to sacred topography, as well.13 In fact, Safed’s emerging Muslim community faced a unique, even unprecedented, situation.14 Following Baybars’ conquest and foundation of the new city, many Muslims settled there, and in its hinterland, as is evident from Taʾrīkh Ṣafad,15 as well as from some laconic statements in other sources.16 For those new immigrants it was imperative to create a “new” Islamic heritage for the rising provincial center.17 Clearly, the author of Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, writing about a century after Baybars’ conquest, took pride in the local shrines and saintly figures, mentioning them among the virtues of his town, in many ways just like Ibn al-ʿAdīm in his history of his native Aleppo or Mujīr al-Dīn al-ʿUlaymī in his history of Jerusalem.18 While we only have information on several of the dozens of sites of ziyāra (pious visitation; pilgrimage) mentioned in Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, it is clear that many of them developed after Baybars’ conquest.
This resulting Islamic sacred topography was shaped by combining the already existing local map of sacred places – one heavily influenced by Jewish, as well as Christian traditions, or, following Reiner, a shared Galilean tradition – with wider phenomena prevalent throughout the late medieval Islamicate world, namely the cult of the Sufi saints and of pious visitation (ziyāra) to sacred shrines and tombs. To reformulate Redfield’s thesis and apply it to our context, we notice here the melting of a Little Tradition (the local Galilean cult of holy places) with the Great Tradition, that of the Islamic cults of saints and ziyāra. As noted by Taylor, the phenomena of ziyāra and the cult of the Sufi saints were deeply intertwined, mainly from the thirteenth century onwards. Both were global Islamic developments, on the one hand, and had local vernacular manifestations, on the other.19
While prior to the Mamluk period we have almost no indications in the sources as to the presence of living Sufi saints or to sacred shrines associated with them in the region, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad (and occasionally, other sources) supplies abundant evidence for such. I am not arguing ex silencio that no Sufi saints were active in the region before 1266 – in fact, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad indicates otherwise;20 but it clearly suggests a significant growth in the presence of such saintly figures and the shrines associated with them. It was also during the Mamluk period that the Jewish ziyāra itineraries of the Galilee were shaped and institutionalized, incorporating a host of preexisting sites within fixed routes. It is thus fair to assume that the local Galilean development was part of the wider, Islamicate popularity of the ziyāra.21 Thus, while advancing Redfield’s argument, I suggest that the Great and Little Traditions were in dialectical relations: the local traditions of sacred spaces – shaped through Jewish and Christian traditions – offered an existing infrastructure for the wider emerging phenomenon of ziyāra, and the latter, in turn, affected the local traditions by shaping their customs.
The creation of an Islamic sacred topography in the Galilee was also part of a larger process of Islamizing the Syrian landscape in post-Crusader times. As argued by Talmon-Heller, this started already during the Zengid and Ayyubid periods, when many traditions associating “secondary” locations in Syria (secondary in terms of their Islamic sanctity) with venerated Islamic figures and their burial places were disseminated, thus catering to the growing demand for such sites.22 In a statement which strongly relates to the Galilee, Talmon-Heller adds that, “[s]trikingly, many of these new or renovated sites emerged in provincial towns and rural areas, spreading, as it were, the centuries-old Islamic sanctity of al-Shām from its grand traditional loci […] to lesser settlements and faraway mountains.”23 This process of Islamizing the landscape was led by such heroes of the counter-Crusades as Saladin and Baybars, but was also initiated from below.24 As Frenkel demonstrated, Baybars’ intensive building activities in Bilād al-Shām (Greater Syria) were intended, alongside legitimizing his rule, to reinforce Islam’s hold over the region and to cleanse it from the presence of the infidels. In doing so, the sultan achieved religious, political, and military aims.25
Safed is a case in point, since after its seizure, Baybars had, in the wording of his own inscription, “replaced infidelity by the faith.”26 This was a symbolic statement with tangible manifestations: the inscription commemorates the conversion of the church found within the citadel into a mosque, one of two mosques Baybars established in Safed, the other being a monumental Friday mosque in the heart of the newly founded town.27 Throughout his reign, Baybars continued to combine an aggressive military campaign to eliminate the Frankish presence from Syria with architectural endeavors meant to solidify and demonstrate Islamic hegemony over the land. Subsequent Mamluk sultans and emirs followed suit.28 Thus, the Islamization policies promoted by the Mamluk regime remind us that the landscape is also shaped by power relations and struggles over hegemony.29
However, this process was not only motivated by a struggle against Christianity but also driven by the search for legitimacy and personal piety. Moreover, it catered to the needs of the Muslim population. After all, erecting, renovating, and maintaining religious sites were considered part the Muslim ruler’s duties, and in military patronage states (of which the Mamluks were a clear example), it was one of the key expectations of the ruler and a main way to legitimize his rule.30 Besides the initiatives of sultans such as Baybars, it was mostly the local governors of Safed who patronized and participated in the creation of new sacred sites and in shaping the town and region’s sacred topography. They did so both out of pious motivations, as well as out of their sense of attachment to the localities where they were posted. Moreover, the Mamluk governors were responding to the needs of their subjects, represented by the local elite – namely the ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars), with whom the governors interacted and formed amicable relations. Several examples preserved in Taʾrīkh Ṣafad illustrate the expectations the town’s inhabitants had of their governors, the gratitude and appreciation they held for those who fulfilled them, and their dismay at those who failed to do so.31 The spread of ziyāra sites was thus driven from “below” as well as “above,”32 or better – through the collaborative efforts of rulers (mostly local governors) and subjects. After all, with the establishment of the new provincial center of Safed and the general intensification of Muslim presence in the region, such sites were a desideratum for the religious life of Muslims: “since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for consecrating space.”33
3 The Sacred Topography of the Eastern Galilee According to al-ʿUthmānī’s Taʾrīkh Ṣafad
Taʾrīkh Ṣafad names over twenty sites of ziyāra in the eastern Galilee (see Figure 1). Following Meri, those sites can be divided into two main groups: one related to “traditional saints,” such as prophets and biblical figures; and the other to “historical saints,” mostly Sufi shaykhs, but also rulers, martyrs and others who lived during the Islamic period.34 This second group has to be expanded further to include, alongside tombs and shrines associated with deceased historical saints, living saintly figures who were the object of ziyāra during their lifetime: ziyāra – with its spiritual objects of asking the intercession of the saints for a variety of purposes, of both immanent and soteriological nature – was performed not only to saints’ tombs but to living saints as well.
Distribution of the sacred sites in Eastern Galilee. Triangular shapes indicate the main discussed sites
Citation: Medieval Encounters 32, 1 (2026) ; 10.1163/15700674-12340234
Most sites are found in two main clusters, one being Safed and its hinterland,35 and the other stretches from Tiberias in the east to the area of Nazareth in the west – the Lower Galilee.36 Before surveying some of the sites mentioned in Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, it is important to stress that, being a unique source for the history of the region during the first century after Baybars’ foundation of Safed as an Islamic city, I rely mostly on this work. This poses some methodological problems, both because the author’s agendas may have played a role in his preferences of which sites and people to include or exclude from his work and because this work was criticized by contemporaneous scholars for being unreliable, though for reasons that are largely unclear.37 In many ways, we are engaging with the sacred topography of the eastern Galilee “as described by one local notable,” which arguably follows his own personal and highly subjective mental map of his region. Be that as it may, there is an important element in Taʾrīkh Ṣafad which other sources lack: it has a distinctly local view, that of a native of Safed and third-generation inhabitant of the town. As such, it introduces us to a host of persons and sites of obviously only local importance, unknown to contemporary authors who lived in the main cultural and political centers of the Sultanate and for whom Safed and the Galilee were marginal, and in many ways unimportant.
Safed features as the main center, with an abundance of sacred shrines and living saintly shaykhs. Safed’s centrality in this regard was probably the result of its role as the region’s new administrative and political center (and al-ʿUthmānī’s home), which attracted many new settlers, and necessitated the presence of local shrines to cater to the growing Islamic community.38 Many pious shaykhs settled in Safed and several shrines and Sufi convents (zawāyā; s. zāwiya) were established there within the first century after 1266. Only two zawāyā are mentioned by name, but it seems very probable that others are not explicitly mentioned due to their humble nature. One of the two that are mentioned explicitly was the “famous” zāwiya of the shaykh Sulaymān al-Saʿūdī, who is briefly described by al-ʿUthmānī with the generic acclaims of piety, asceticism, service to the poor, and disregard for the rich. He died during the great plague of 749/1348–1349 and was interred at his zāwiya.39
The second zāwiya belonged to al-Shaykh al-Ṣāmit (“The Mute”), who was venerated for his karāmāt (miraculous deeds) and mukāshafāt (spiritual unveilings). He, too, was interred inside his zāwiya and his tomb became an object of ziyāra. While al-ʿUthmānī provides us with no dates for his birth or death, we can infer from his phrasing that the shaykh’s son, the shaykh Zayn al-Dīn, was still alive during the writing of the book (i.e. the 1370’s).40 This al-Shaykh al-Ṣāmit may perhaps be identified as Khalīl al-Ṣāmit, whose name is inscribed in an inscription which was discovered in a cave at Safed in 1980, commemorating the foundation of a zāwiya in the year 684/1285–1286, and was related to the Rifāʿī Sufi order.41
Several other tombs of shaykhs were the object of ziyāra in Safed and its immediate vicinity. One such was of the shaykh Zakariyyā, whose tomb was located to the north of Birkat al-dajāj (Chickens’ Pool) in Safed. According to al-ʿUthmānī, he was one of the awliyāʾ (Friends of God), and duʿāʾ (supplications) next to his tomb were known to have been accepted.42 Another was the shaykh Qalībak al-ʿAjamī, whose zāwiya was located at the village of ʿAyn Zaytūn, two kilometers north of Safed. The shaykh was buried in the zāwiya and his tomb became a destination for ziyāra. The zāwiya was built by the emir Sunqur Shāh al-Manṣūrī, who served as the governor of Safed from 704/1304–1305 to his death in 707/1307–1308. He was buried next to the shaykh – a very popular custom aimed at attaining the shaykh’s baraka in the afterlife.43 In the village of Ibnīt (about three kilometers north-east of Safed) lived the shaykh Rabīʿa, “one of the great Sufis of Safed,” who had a domed shrine (qubba), considered one of the famous destinations for ziyāra in this village. Although in this case as well we are only given meagre information, it seems that this shaykh had a group of followers (aṣḥāb) around him and that he was considered a muwallah (holy fool).44 Ibnīt was one of several localities which featured sites revered by both Muslims and Jews. The sixteenth-century Jewish traveler, Rabbi Moshe Basula, to name one example, visited a tomb near the village during his trip to Palestine in 1521–1523.45
Besides ziyāra destinations related to living or dead Sufi shaykhs, Safed was also blessed with sites pertaining to the “traditional saints” group. The most conspicuous of these sites was the Cave of Jacob (Maghārat Yaʿqūb), alternatively named Bayt al-aḥzān (“House of Sorrows”). This site, not mentioned in sources predating the Mamluk period, became Safed’s most venerated site. The cave was renovated by a Mamluk officer in 815/1412 and several Mamluk officers were buried in it.46 Evliya Çelebi, who visited the place in the seventeenth century, describes it as a lively place in which Sufi gatherings are held and relates many traditions regarding it – and Safed generally – which do not seem to have been common during the fourteenth century.47 Another site of the “traditional saints” type is Jubb Yūsuf (Joseph’s Pit), south-east of Safed, which was mentioned by Muslim travelers already well before the Mamluk period.48
The identification of such biblical figures as Jacob and Joseph with Safed and the Galilee should be seen as part of the Galilean myth suggested by Reiner, wherein prominent Biblical heroes were associated with the Galilee, despite no such apparent links in the Bible.49 Following Reiner’s thesis, Ellenblum – with reference to exactly those sites related to Joseph and Jacob – also speculates that a local Galilean tradition, which existed alongside other regional Jewish traditions (e.g. “Judean” and “Israelite”), preserved such traditions as the one associating Joseph with the Galilee. When the Muslim presence in the Galilee increased, the Muslims adopted those local Galilean traditions.50 It should be remembered that in close vicinity to Safed stood the most important Jewish sacred site in the Galilee – the cave containing the graves of Hillel and Shammai at Meron. The annual gathering of Jews there on the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Iyyar also drew many Muslims, who came to witness the miracle in which water gushes forth from a spring in the cave.51 According to Reiner, this festival was probably formalized during the thirteenth century.52 It is mentioned by the Ṣafadī authors al-Dimashqī and al-ʿUthmānī in the fourteenth century, as well as by numerous Jewish travelers. Evliya Çelebi, who visited the region during the seventeenth century, writes that “several thousands of people” gather there to witness the miracle and seek blessing (tabarrukan) in the water.53
At this stage we may already point to a significant congruence of Muslim and Jewish traditions of sacred spaces in the Upper Galilee. This is discernable at the localities in which such sites were found – Safed, ʿAyn Zaytūn and Ibnīt all hosted shrines sacred to both religious communities;54 in the traditions associating biblical figures with the Galilee; and even in the shared cult at Meron. While the Islamic sacred topography of the Upper Galilee was formed in close dialogue with its Jewish traditions, the second concentration of sacred sites, in the Lower Galilee, roughly corresponding with the district (ʿamal) of Tiberias, was also conversant with Christian traditions, as this region is dotted with shrines related to the early ministry of Jesus.55
Tiberias, though a far cry from its glorious past,56 nonetheless featured many sacred shrines in and around it, associated with Muslim saints of the “traditional” type – some pre-dating the Mamluk period – or with Christian and Jewish figures.57 One of the major Muslim sites in Tiberias was the shrine (mashhad) of Sitt Sukayna, daughter of al-Ḥusayn, which was constructed by the Mamluk governor of Safed, Fāris al-Dīn Ilbakī, in 694/1295, although its tradition can be traced to an earlier period.58 Al-ʿUthmānī also mentions two contemporaneous Sufi shaykhs who seem to have resided in Tiberias and whom he personally used to visit.59
West of Tiberias, al-ʿUthmānī also paid several visits to the village al-Shajara, where a great shrine (al-maqām al-ʿaẓīm) was found. It was the object of ziyāra and supplications to God were known to have been accepted there.60 While al-ʿUthmānī does not specify to whom this shrine was devoted, al-Harawī, who passed there in the late twelfth century, mentions a grotto containing several tombs of companions of the Prophet and martyrs.61 Al-ʿUthmānī does write about his interactions with several Sufi shaykhs who lived in this village – one of whom was the master of the aforementioned shrine – as well as about some of their miraculous deeds.62 About two kilometers north-west of al-Shajara, in the village of Turʿān, al-ʿUthmānī mentions a shrine (maqām) dedicated to the shaykh ʿAlī al-Bakkāʾ, in which lived the shaykh Muḥammad al-Turʿānī, a descendant of the former. He too was known for his karāmāt and successful supplications to God and seems to have still been alive when the book was written.63 The shaykh ʿAlī al-Bakkāʾ (d. 670/1272) was a well-known Sufi shaykh who had his zāwiya complex at Hebron. He was a contemporary of sultans Baybars and Qalāwūn and supposably predicted their future rule, subsequently being rewarded with their patronage, still visible to this day at his zāwiya in Hebron, where he is known to be buried. It would seem, then, that he was not buried in the shrine at Turʿān, which was associated with him in some other way. We can assume that his descendant, the shaykh Muḥammad al-Turʿānī, was attached to this shrine. This evidence might suggest that the shaykh’s influence reached all the way from Hebron to the Galilee.64
About three kilometers further to the west, at the village of al-Rūma, we find another site venerated by both Muslims and Jews: a domed shrine containing the tomb of the prophet Rūbīl, identified with Reuben, son of Jacob. The twelfth-century traveler al-Harawī identified the site as the tomb of Judah, Reuben’s brother, while Jewish traditions identified the place with either Reuben or Benjamin, his brother. Reiner differentiates between “a simple tomb tradition, which undoubtedly was the accepted cause for the common pilgrimage to the site,” and a main, more amorphous tradition associated with al-Rūma, bearing eschatological overtones.65 Be that as it may, the site was clearly part of the sacred topography of both Islamic and Jewish traditions during the thirteenth century, both associating it with a son of Jacob.66
Another site venerated by both Muslims and Jews was the tomb of the prophet Shuʿayb (Jethro), at the village of Hittin, west of Tiberias. This was an important site for ziyāra, especially on Fridays, and the revenue from the entire village was endowed by the Mamluk authorities for its upkeep. The endowment provided for attendants and shaykhs, as well as a soup kitchen for the poor and hospitality for notable wayfarers journeying through the barīd route. We also have evidence for the presence of a Sufi khānqāh (hospice) in this village – the only khānqāh we know of in the entire Galilee during this period – which was founded by Saladin.67 Establishing a khānqāh in such a provincial locality is rather peculiar for the Ayyubid-Mamluk period, as khānqāhs were mostly an urban institution, usually patronized by the ruling elites. It is not clear if there was any direct connection between the khānqāh and the shrine, and it is possible that Saladin founded the khānqāh to commemorate his triumph over the Crusaders at this site, where he also erected a short-lived victory monument (qubbat al-naṣr).68 The presence of a khānqāh surely bolstered the sacred atmosphere of this remote village.69 Yet, al-ʿUthmānī writes that he was uncertain that the prophet Shuʿayb was indeed buried in this location, until he experienced a vision in which he made ziyāra to the shrine and Shuʿayb came out of the tomb chamber (ḍarīḥ) to greet him.70
A little further to the west lay the village of Kafr Kannā, which contained sites sacred for the three monotheistic religions: for the Christians, it was identified as Cana of Galilee, where Jesus turned water into wine; for both Jews and Muslims it contained the shrine (maqām) of the prophet Yūnus (Jonah), attested in Islamic sources since the twelfth century and by a Jewish traveler in the fourteenth century.71 From a purely Islamic perspective, Kafr Kannā features as a main regional center of piety. Al-ʿUthmānī describes it as “the place of origin of the righteous and the native land of the Friends of God (awliyāʾ),” which was “always occupied by a group of righteous men.”72 Ten such persons are mentioned in Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, most of whom can be identified as Sufi shaykhs and are described as possessing thaumaturgic capabilities and esoteric knowledge. The tomb of one of them, the shaykh Ibn ʿĪsā, was the object of ziyāra. Another one, shaykh ʿAntar, is said to have been known for his karāmāt and aḥwāl (spiritual states), as well as for the acceptance of his supplications to God.73 Al-ʿUthmānī personally knew some of these shaykhs and made several visits to the village,74 while others seem to have lived a generation or two before him, though no specific dates are provided.
4 An Evolving Map of Living Saints and Dynamic Traditions
In the preceding paragraphs we briefly surveyed some of the sites conceived as sacred by the emerging Muslim community of Safed and the eastern Galilee during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as described by al-ʿUthmānī. His mental map consists of sites which were venerated by the Galilean community for ages and were deeply rooted in local tradition, alongside newly founded, or “discovered” Islamic sites.75 While some clearly corresponded with this earlier tradition, others related to recently deceased or living Muslim saintly figures, mostly Sufi shaykhs.
It is notable that many of the agents who mediated the holy for al-ʿUthmānī were either his contemporaries or lived in the area after 1266, with only rare examples of Muslims who inhabited the Galilee prior to that watershed year. Many had attributions (nisba) to foreign cities and regions or are explicitly said to have been recent immigrants – whether from nearby regions in Bilād al-Shām and Egypt, or from further regions such as Iran. This strengthens the hypothesis that they were part of a wave of Muslims who settled in the Galilee post-1266, setting in motion a process of Islamization which eventually led to the formation of a clear Muslim majority by the end of the Mamluk period.76 The importance of al-ʿUthmānī’s account lies in the local or peripheral perspective he offers: only a handful of the dozens of Safedi or Galilean notables he mentions are included in other contemporaneous works, which present us with a view from the cultural centers of the Sultanate. Thus, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad offers a snapshot of an emerging sacred topography, one shaped by a dialectic relationship between existing traditions and new actors who left their own imprint in it.
“Locations were not holy in and of themselves, but became so through their association with saints,” writes Meri, pointing at the interrelation between holy places and holy men.77 But this dynamic is more intricate than suggesting that sacred places formed around saints. In fact, an alternative approach to the formation of sacred places is that such sites were identified for their unique natural qualities, which stood out from the surrounding landscape, that is, they possessed an “inherent” sanctity.78 Those sites, whether formed around a saint’s tomb or an unusual natural phenomenon, may be classified as “energized” sites, which drew the attention of local devotees, intending on tapping into the power associated with the place.79 It is thus extremely difficult to decipher what comes first: the “energy” present at the site, which drew the presence of the saint; or the presence of the saint, who imbued the site with the sanctity he generated.80
Whatever the primordial stages of this process may have been, by the thirteenth century the Galilee was filled with sites deemed holy by locals of different religious denominations. A sacred topography was already mapped. Thus, the new wave of Muslim settlement drew on these existing resources of sanctity, as “the nature of a holy place retains its sanctity when it changes hands. Once a site has been recognized as holy, the sanctity adheres to it, irrespective of political and religious vicissitudes.”81 Especially regarding the Holy Land, this phenomenon is pronounced in the common topos of the Jew who uncovers the location of sacred sites to members of the new, hegemonic religions, be they Byzantine Christians, Latin Crusaders, or Muslims.82
What al-ʿUthmānī offers us, thus, is a “transparent slide” of an emerging Islamic sacred topography to be placed above the preexisting Galilean map of sacred sites. It shows that Muslims recognized and appropriated the local traditions and built upon them. This congruence suggests, moreover, that sacred spaces drew holy men – in this case, Sufi shaykhs – who settled in and around them. These holy men, in turn, imbued the place with further holiness, during their life and through their tombs posthumously.83 In al-ʿUthmānī’s mental map of holy sites, living and dead, traditional and historical saints played the role of forming a channel of communication with the divine: be it through a dream interpreted by a Sufi shaykh, a vision experienced at the shrine of the prophet Shuʿayb, a visitation to a shaykh’s tomb for attaining blessing or intercession with God, keeping baraka-containing items attained from saints, or something else.84 It is thus evident that al-ʿUthmānī’s sacred topography was dynamic, evolving, and, quite literally alive; living saints played a spiritual role which was certainly not secondary to their deceased peers.
The abundant presence of living Sufi shaykhs in villages throughout al-ʿUthmānī’s Galilee is a far cry from the picture portrayed by Grehan in his study of rural religious life in Palestine during the late Ottoman period. Grehan writes that, “Sufi lodges … were barely detectable in the countryside,” and that “[o]nly a truly privileged village could attract and retain its own resident Sufi master.”85 The difference between these conclusions and those which emerge from Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, I argue, is that for the late Ottoman period no such local source is available as Taʾrīkh Ṣafad is for the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries. In fact, we do not possess an equivalent source for Islamic life in the Galilee in the centuries following al-ʿUthmānī’s Taʾrīkh Ṣafad. Thus, we cannot tell what the posthumous fate of the shaykhs still living in al-ʿUthmānī’s time was. Yet, it seems reasonable to assume that the tombs of at least some of the saintly figures he associated with were to become destinations for ziyāra, further expanding the emerging Islamic sacred topography of the Galilee. This played a key role in generating an “Islamic ambience” conducive to the Islamization of the region throughout the Mamluk period, as previous research has shown regarding other regions in Palestine, and in other regions of the Islamic world, such as Anatolia.86
5 A Shared Sacred Topography?
While I suggest that Muslims recognized the sanctity of sites venerated by Jews in the region and incorporated them into their own emerging sacred geography, often it is not clear if they venerated the very same sites or formed their own sites in adjunct locations.87 Nor do we have explicit evidence of the appropriation or conversion of Jewish sites. Nonetheless, Jewish sources present us with some indications of shared veneration of tombs associated with Jewish historical figures.88 This convergence does not necessarily imply harmonious relations in ritual, though, and as Kedar has pointed out, we should be cautious of applying an idealized picture to interfaith relations in “shared sacred spaces.” Kedar claims that, rather than speaking of “shared sacred spaces,” it would be more accurate to speak of “convergences” or even “contested sacred places.”89 Kedar’s proposed typology of interconfessional relations at such spaces was further nuanced by Weltecke, who emphasized, among other things, the power relations ever present at such meetings.90 Though the evidence regarding Galilean “shared” sites is too laconic to draw any substantial conclusions, Luz, who studied Sufi settlement in and around Christian sites in Mamluk Jerusalem and its hinterland, have shown that the Sufis’ presence embittered the Christians’ lives, eventually even leading to demographic change.91
Indeed, these sites often have contentious or polemical overtones: In Jewish legends associated with such sites of shared devotion, the Muslims’ veneration of a Jewish sage serves as a proof to the Jews’ claims to the land, and the dead sage does not forget on whose side he is.92 A common miracle associated with such sites has the local saint help the Jewish community against their Muslim neighbors or hurt Muslims who attempted futilely to damage his shrine or to appropriate it.93 This type of miracle probably represents the hope of the subordinated vis-à-vis the hegemonic in society and strikingly resembles common miracle stories of Muslim saints who defend their communities in face of oppressive (Muslim) governors.94
In fact, the only site which appears consistently in the sources as having attracted a somewhat egalitarian participation of Muslims and Jews alike was Meron, which was clearly recognized in Muslim sources as a Jewish site, though the participation of Muslims in its annual pilgrimage and rituals was widely acknowledged.95 Though the Jews led the rites at Meron and the Muslims appear as no more than passive participants, following Weltecke, we should be conscious of the social and political power relations at the background: even if the Jews were the “landlords” at the site, the Muslims’ hegemonic position in society at large could not be ignored.96 It would seem that what those Muslims who participated in the Meron ritual – as in other Jewish sites – sought was to tap into the imminent powers associated with the site, while the Jewish traditions associated with it were irrelevant for them.97
Eventually, over the longue durée, the cult at many of the Jewish sacred tombs ceased to exist, with the disappearance of many of the Jewish communities in the Galilee during the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century, many of these sites were in Muslim hands, and frequently it was the local Muslim inhabitants who preserved their traditions, until many of them were re-appropriated by the Jews, after the foundation of the State of Israel in the twentieth century.98
6 Between Sufism and Kabbalah
This article has investigated the emergence of an Islamic sacred landscape in the eastern Galilee during a formative period for Islamic dominance over the region following the expulsion of the Franks. It emphasized the ways by which the nascent Islamic community of Safed – the new provincial capital of the Galilee – and other, smaller though expanding Muslim communities throughout the region, shaped their sacred topography, focusing on the dynamic interrelations with the preexisting Jewish, or Galilean, cult of holy places. Before concluding, I would like to briefly address an indirect affect these dynamics might have had on Judaism as well. Since Safed eventually became the most thriving center of Kabbalah during the sixteenth century, modern scholars have been intrigued by the question of possible influences – perhaps better, dialogue – between Sufism and Kabbalah in the Galilee. Some have postulated substantial Sufi influence over the development of the Kabbalah in Safed. Idel, for example, speculated that such encounters occurred already during the late thirteenth century and influenced the thought of Abraham Abulafia (d. c.1291) and his disciples,99 while Fenton have shown convincingly parallel developments in Sufi and Kabbalistic practices and terminology, in which he suggests (cautiously) that the former influenced the latter.100 The discovery of a Sufi zāwiya inside a cave near Safed in 1980 was for both scholars a sort of “smoking gun,” proving that indeed there was Sufi activity in the region, thus allowing the supposed influence to take place.101
I wish to offer a somewhat nuanced approach to this issue. First, as clearly seen from Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, Sufi presence in the region went much further than the discovery of one cave would allow for. But this should come as no surprise: by the thirteenth century, Sufism was one of the most popular and widespread trends of Muslim spirituality, influencing Muslims of all walks of life from Central Asia to al-Andalus. Safed surely had a Sufi presence, but there is no reason to assume that it was more significant than in virtually any other Muslim town or region.102 What might be significant regarding Safed – indeed, the Galilee in general – was that this was a region that drew European Jewish pilgrims. As Reiner has shown, the phenomenon of Jewish pilgrimage from Europe to the Holy Land grew significantly after the Crusader period, and the Galilean cult of holy sites played a key role in the pilgrims’ itinerary.103 In this regard, thus, Safed and the Galilee might have been indeed a key locus for the encounter between western Kabbalah and eastern Sufi traditions.
7 Postscript: Baybars – a Galilean Hero?
Baybarsʾ conquest of Safed in 1266, and even more so his subsequent actions, set in motion a process which was to have far-reaching consequences for the Galilee. As we saw, the moves initiated by this fierce sultan, known for his harsh treatment of non-Muslims – be it his Frankish and Mongol enemies or even his dhimmī subjects – eventually had, ironically, a substantial, albeit indirect, impact on a key development in Jewish culture. But for the Galileans, and especially the Muslim inhabitants of Safed, Baybars instantly became a founding figure of sorts, with almost mythical significance: the two mosques he founded – one in the fortress and the other at the heart of the new town – remained Safedʾs main devotional sites for generations. Taʾrīkh Ṣafad makes it clear that Baybars had a special status within the Muslim community of Safed, starting with an emphatic description of the conquest, followed by a unique piece of information: apparently, the silk cloth the sultan had wrapped around his head on the day of the conquest remained in the citadel’s mosque, being worn by the khaṭīb during Friday prayers until the time the book was written, over a century later.104
While his memory in other localities throughout the Mamluk Sultanate was ever evolving and often negative,105 in Safed Baybarsʾ image was utterly positive, even imbued with legitimizing qualities. Thus, another clearly local tradition associates Baybars with the shaykh Ḍaḥyān of the village ʿAkbara, south of Safed, who founded a zāwiya there around the time of the conquest that was still functioning in the 1370s. According to the story, preserved only in Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, the shaykh met Baybars during the siege of Safed and the sultan assigned him the lands on which he later founded his zāwiya.106 Other sources provide details about a host of land grants the sultan distributed after the conquest, mostly to military commanders but to Sufi shaykhs as well.107 That the grant to shaykh Ḍaḥyān is not mentioned except in the local history implies that his association with Baybars – and the event of the conquest – had a positive legitimizing affect within local contexts.
Finally, at some point Baybars even came to be associated with a local Jewish saint, Jonathan b. ʿUzziel, whose tomb at ʿAmuqah, north of Safed, was a popular pilgrimage destination (and remains so to this day). A local Jewish tradition – preserved in a manuscript probably dated to the early sixteenth century – has Baybars encountering the Jewish sage in a dream, on the eve of the conquest, with the latter predicting the successful outcome of the sultan’s siege. After the fulfillment of the prediction, Baybars went to the tomb to pay his respects.108 However this clearly local tradition came about and whatever functions it was to fulfill, it seems that we may add Baybars to the list of figures who made the pantheon of the “Galilean myth,” shared by Muslims and Jews alike.
Acknowledgements
The study leading to this article was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant number: 1676/09), while its final version was written during my fellowship in the research project “VISIONIS: Visuality in the Quran and Early Islam,” supported by the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 948051). An early version of this article was presented in the conference “Between Saladin and Selim the Grim: Syria under Ayyubid and Mamluk Rule,” at the University of Bonn, in 2015. I wish to thank Reuven Amitai, Daniella Talmon-Heller, Nimrod Luz, Omer Shadmi and Leigh Chipman for reading various drafts of the article and for their insightful remarks. I owe special gratitude to Ido Wachtel, for generously producing the map of Figure 1.
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, ed. Suhayl Zakkār (Damascus: Dār al-Takwīn, 1430/2009), 163.
For example, al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 157–158, 200 (intercessions and supplications); 176–177 (physical items carrying baraka); 183 (hospitality); 184–185 (ziyāra). The topic of interactions with saints and with the dead in dreams and visions, as well as oneiromancy, which are of great interest, take a central place in the work, but will not be dealt with in this article. Although it is tempting to consider the world of dreams as constituting another dimension of sacred topography, this will be left for another day.
Elchanan Reiner, “Olim ve-aliya la-regel le-Eretz Yisrael, 1099–1517 [Pilgrims and Pilgrimage to Eretz Yisrael 1099–1517]” [Hebrew] (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988), 252–253.
Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 257–276. While Islamization progressed slowly, Arabization was much swifter in the region: Milka Levy-Rubin, “Arabization versus Islamization in the Palestinian Melkite Community during the Early Muslim Period,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, First-Fifteenth Centuries CE, ed. Arieh Kofsky and Guy G. Stroumsa (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1998), 149–162.
Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the Late 16th Century (Erlangen: Palm and Enke, 1977), 40.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad.
Bernard Lewis, “An Arabic Account of the Province of Safed–I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 15 (1953): 477–488.
Gideon Avni, The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 71–88.
Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 257–276. Ellenblum’s conclusions are corroborated by Nimrod Luz regarding the Jerusalem region: Nimrod Luz, “Aspects of Islamization of Space and Society in Mamluk Jerusalem and its Hinterland,” Mamlūk Studies Review 6 (2002): 133–154.
Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 214 n. 2; Hugh Kennedy, Crusader Castles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 190–198; Reuven Amitai-Preiss, “Ṣafad,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P.J. Bearman et al. (Leiden, Boston: E.J. Brill, 1960–), 8:757–759; Nimrod Luz, The Mamluk City in the Middle East: History, Culture, and the Urban Landscape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 33–36.
Joseph Drory, “Founding a New Mamlaka: Some Remarks Concerning Safed and the Organization of the Region in the Mamluk Period,” in The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics and Society, ed. Michael Winter and Amalia Levanoni (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004), 163–190.
Amitai-Preiss, “Ṣafad,” 758.
Daniella Talmon-Heller, “Graves, Relics and Sanctuaries: The Evolution of Syrian Sacred Topography (Eleventh-Thirteenth Centuries),” ARAM 19 (2007): 601–620, at 617.
Drory, “Founding a Mamlaka,” 168.
Among these new immigrants we can count at least several Sufi shaykhs of whom we know for certain, who migrated to the Galilee from such places as Damascus, Northern Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iran: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 157–158, 162–163, 174–175, 196, 201. It should be mentioned that the great-grandfather of the author of Taʾrīkh Ṣafad was among those immigrants, as well as many others mentioned throughout the book. On the author’s family: Or Amir, “Forming a New Local Elite: The ʿUthmānī Family of Ṣafad,” in The Mamluk Sultanate and Its Periphery, ed. Frédéric Bauden (Leuven: Peeters, 2023), 1–22.
Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir, al-Rawḍ al-zāhir fī sīrat al-malik al-ẓāhir, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Khowayter (Riyad: Muʾassasat Fuʾād, 1396/1976), 262–263; Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk li-maʿrifat duwal al-mulūk, ed. Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Ziyāda, 4 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1936), 1:548.
Drory, “Founding a Mamlaka,” 168.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 126–127; Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab fī taʾrīkh Ḥalab, ed. Suhayl Zakkār, 11 vols. (Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 1408/1988), 1:459–470; Mujīr al-Dīn al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl bi-taʾrīkh al-Quds wa-l-Khalīl, ed. Maḥmūd ʿAwda al-Kaʿābna, 2 vols. (Hebron: Maktabat Dandīs, 1420/1999).
Christopher S. Taylor, In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyāra and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in late Medieval Egypt (Leiden, Boston, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1998), 225–226.
For example, the shaykh Yūsuf al-Ḥamrāwī, who had a zāwiya at al-Ḥamrāʾ during the period of Frankish rule and is even said to have been venerated by the Franks: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 158–159. For early Sufi presence in Palestine – though with a focus on Jerusalem and Hebron: Daphna Ephrat, Spiritual Wayfarers, Leaders in Piety: Sufis and the Dissemination of Islam in Medieval Palestine (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Reiner, “Pilgrims,” 226–242.
Talmon-Heller, “Graves,” 617.
Talmon-Heller, “Graves,” 620.
On Saladin’s policy after the reconquest of Jerusalem: Yehoshua Frenkel, “Political and Social Aspects of Islamic Religious Endowments (awqāf): Saladin in Cairo (1169–1173) and Jerusalem (1187–1193),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 62 (1999): 10–16.
Yehoshua Frenkel, “Baybars and the Sacred Geography of Bilād al-Shām: A Chapter in the Islamization of Syria’s Landscape,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 25 (2001): 153–170; Anne Troadec, “Baybars and the Cultural Memory of Bilād al-Shām: The Construction of Legitimacy,” Mamlūk Studies Review 18 (2014–2015): 113–147.
Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, ed. Fahīm Muḥammad ʿAlawī Shaltūt, 33 vols. (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1410/1990), 30:137 (quoted in Troadec, “Baybars,” 144).
Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn Shaddād, Taʾrīkh al-Malik al-Ẓāhir, ed. Aḥmad Ḥuṭayṭ (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1403/1983), 353, 357–359.
Frenkel, “Baybars and the Sacred Geography,” 167.
William J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Said Amir Arjomand, “Philanthropy, Law, and Public Policy in the Islamic World before the Modern Era,” in Philanthropy in the World’s Traditions, ed. Warren F. Ilchman, Stanley N. Katz and Edward L. Queen II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 109–132; Luz, The Mamluk City in the Middle East, 140–141. On the conceptualization of the Mamluk Sultanate as a military patronage state (a concept coined by Marshall Hodgson): Jo Van Steenbergen, “The Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State: Household Politics and the Case of the Qalāwūnid bayt (1279–1382),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013): 189–217.
A clear example is that of Ariqṭāy, the most prolific (and enduring) governor of Safed (r. 718–736/1318–1336). He was cherished by the inhabitants, inter alia due to his massive patronage of religious institutions, including a madrasa and a mosque. He is also associated with several Sufi saints who lived in Safed and the Galilee during his long tenure. Al- ʿUthmānīʾs admiration for the esteemed governor goes so far that he divides the governors of Safed to those who held office before Ariqṭāy, and after him: al-ʿUthmānī, Ta ͗rīkh Ṣafad, 148 (for Ariqṭāyʾs relations with local saints and notables, see pp. 162–163, 172, 196–197); for a biography of Ariqṭāy: Abū Bakr b. Aḥmad Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba, Ta ͗rīkh Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba, ed. ʽAdnān Darwīsh, 3 vols. (Damascus: Institut Français d’Études Arabes, 1994), 1:681–682. Of another popular governor of Safed, Uzdamur al-Khizandār (who ruled briefly between 762–763/1362–1363), al-ʿUthmānī writes that, “He became one of the people of the town, even more so than the emir Sayf al-Dīn Ariqṭāy, despite his short tenure in office.” When Uzdamur returned for a second term in Safed, he was joyfully received: al-ʿUthmānī, Ta ͗rīkh Ṣafad, 148 (and see pp. 138–46 for further, similar examples). On the flip side, the case of the governor Bilik al-Jamdār (r. 743–746/1344–1345) illustrates the hostility towards corrupt, abusive, or simply incompetent governors: al-ʿUthmānī, Ta ͗rīkh Ṣafad, 136–137.
Talmon-Heller, “Graves,” 620.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Williard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 28. I am drawing here on Eliade’s ideas, but only partly, since after all, the Galilee was no terra incognita for the Muslims. The Muslim presence in the region went back over six hundred years and, in that sense, there was no need to symbolically “found the world,” as Eliade has it.
Josef W. Meri, The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 60. Claude Conder, writing in the late nineteenth century, proposed dividing Islamic sacred shrines into seven categories. His more specific categorization is essentially in the same spirit: Claude R. Conder, “The Moslem Mukams,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (April 1877), 89–103, at 91.
This includes Safed, ʿAyn Zaytūn, Farādiyya, al-Hamrāʾ, Qadītha, Ibnīt, al-Ḥiqāb, Jubb Yūsuf and ʿAkbara.
Here we can mention Tiberias, al-Sāhiliyya, al-Shajara, Kafr Sabt, Ḥiṭṭīn, Turʿān, Kafr Kannā, Nazareth, al-Rūma and Sepphoris.
In fact, the very same authors who criticize Taʾrīkh Ṣafad as unreliable do not have an issue with quoting passages from it: Amir, “New Elite,” 12.
Meri, The Cult, 27–29.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 171.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 161. He uses the term “may Allāh spare his life” (abqāhu Allāh; translation O.A.).
Paul Fenton, “Solitary Meditation in Jewish and Islamic Mysticism in the Light of a Recent Archeological Discovery,” Medieval Encounters 1 (1995): 295–296; Yosi Stepansky, “Archaeological News from Caves in the Eastern Galilee [Ḥadashot arkheologiyot be-meʿarot ha-Galil ha-mizraḥi],” Niqrot Zurim 17 (1990): 27–29 [Hebrew]. This cave- zāwiya is one of several indications of the presence of the Rifāʿiyya order in the area. The two other indications are from Nazareth (al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 122) and Wādī al-Ḥamrāʾ, located just below Safed (al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 158–159). On the Rifāʿiyya in the Mamluk Sultanate: Ernst Bannerth, “La Rifa‛iyya en Egypte,” Mélanges de l’institute dominicain d’études orientales 10 (1970): 1–35.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 161.
On the shaykh see: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 162. The shaykh’s name indicates that he was also a recent immigrant from the east – probably of Turkish origin. On the governor see: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 133; Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, Aʿyān al-ʿaṣr wa-aʿwān al-naṣr, ed. ʿAlī Abū Zayd et al., 6 vols. (Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 1418/1998), 2:483. For the Mamluks’ desire to be buried next to saints and this being one of their prime motivations for founding Sufi institutions: Th. Emil Homerin, “Saving Muslim Souls: The Khānqāh and the Sufi Duty in Mamluk Lands,” Mamlūk Studies Review 3 (1999): 59–83.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 161. About the muwallah: Meri, The Cult, 91–100.
Avraham Yaari (ed.), Masaot Eretz Israel [A Journey to Israel] (Tel Aviv: Gazit, 1946), 157 [Hebrew]. In fact, the phrase al-ʿUthmānī uses here (“wa-hiyya min al-mazārāt al-mashhūra bi-qaryat Ibnīt”) could be read as “one of the well-known places of ziyāra, [which is located] at the village of Ibnit,” but also as “one of the [many or several] well-known places of ziyāra in the village of Ibnīt.” (translation O. A.). The second option implies that there were several such places in this village, which might correlate with the several Jewish sacred tombs which were (and still are) to be found there. For another pious Muslim scholar who settled in Ibnīt: Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-ʿUthmānī, Ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ al-kubrà, MS Princeton University Library, Garrett Collection 692, ff. 131a-b.
Andrew Petersen, A Gazetteer of Buildings in Muslim Palestine (Part 1) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 265–267.
St. H. Stephan, trans., with notes by L.A. Mayer, “Evliya Tshelebi’s Travels in Palestine,” The Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 4 (1935): 162–164. The Ottoman traveler actually mentions many sites in Safed that were obviously founded after the writing of Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, including seven zawāyā, among them one called zāwiyat al-ʿUthmānī, perhaps somehow related to the family of the author of Taʾrīkh Ṣafad: Maḥmūd al-ʿĀbidī, Ṣafad fī al-taʾrīkh (Amman: Jamʿiyyat ʿUmmāl al-Maṭābiʿ al-Taʿāwuniyya, 1397/1977), 91.
Petersen, Gazetteer, 189–190. The site is mentioned by various Muslim writers from the ninth century onward and was visited by such travelers as al-Harawī in the early thirteenth century and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa in the fourteenth: Petersen, Gazetteer, 189. During the Mamluk period a khān was built on the site, and it was a stopping station on the barīd route: Katia Cytryn-Silverman, The Road Inns (Khāns) in Bilād al-Shām, BAR International Series 2130 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010), 212–220.
Elchanan Reiner, “From Joshua Through Jesus to Simeon bar Yohai: Towards a Typology of Galilean Heroes,” in Jesus Among the Jews: Representation and Thought, ed. Neta Stahl (London: Routledge, 2012), 94–105; Reiner, “Pilgrims,” 259–262.
Ronnie Ellenblum, “Joseph’s Story in Jacob’s Fords,” in Ut loca videant et contingent: Studies in Pilgrimage and Sacred Space in Honour of Ora Limor, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Iris Shagrir (Raʿanana: Open University, 2011), 201–214.
On the participation of Muslims in this festival: Reiner, “Pilgrimage,” 302; Mahmoud Yazbak, “Holy Shrines (maqamat) in Modern Palestine/Israel and the Politics of Memory,” in Holy Places in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Confrontation and Co-Existence, ed. Marshall J. Berger, Yitzhak Reiter and Leonard Hammer (London: Routledge, 2010), 133.
Although the site was well known much before that time: Reiner, “Pilgrimage,” 295–305.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 118; Muḥammad b. Abī Ṭālib al-Dimashqī, Kitāb nukhbat al-dahr fī ʿajāʾib al-barr wa-l-baḥr (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1928), 118; Stephan, “Evliya Tschelebi,” 155. It was probably during the sixteenth century that the local cult focusing on the cave of Hillel and Shammai was overshadowed by that of the adjacent tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai: Boaz Huss, “Sacred Space, Sacred Time and Sacred Book: The Impact of Sefer ha-Zohar on the Pilgrimage to Meron and Lag ba-Omer Celebrations [Maqom qadosh, zman qadosh, sefer qadosh: hashpaʿat Sefer ha-Zohar ʿal minhagey ha-ʿaliya la-regel le-Meron ve-ḥagigot Lag ba-ʿOmer],” [Hebrew] Kabbalah 7 (2002): 237–256.
On ʿAyn Zaytūn: Yaari, Masaot, 139–140; Nurit Lissovsky, “From Travelers’ Descriptions of the Holy Land to the Survey of Western Palestine. An Integrative Approach for the Study of Sacred Sites in the Galilee,” Revue des études juives 171, no. 1–2 (January–June 2012): 75–78.
On the evolution of Byzantine sacred topography in the Holy Land: Glenn W. Bowman, “A Textual Landscape: The Mapping of a Holy Land in the Fourth-Century Itinerarium of the Bordeaux Pilgrim,” in Unfolding the Orient: Travelers in Egypt and the Near East, ed. Paul and Janet Starkey (Reading: Ithaca Press, 2001), 7–40; Ora Limor, “Conversion of Space,” in Religious Conversion: History, Experience and Meaning, ed. Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin (London: Routledge, 2016), 31–59.
During the Mamluk period Tiberias was the center of a district (ʿamal; pl. aʿmāl), one of ten districts which comprised the province (mamlaka; niyāba) of Safed: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 123–124.
Muslim sources mention, for example, a tomb related to King Solomon, as well as “numerous churches/synagogues (kanāʾis)”: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 124; Taha Thalji al-Tarawneh, The Mamlakah (Province) of Safad during the Mamluk Times (Beirut: Dār al-Āfāq al-Jadīda, 1402/1982), 263. For Jewish sacred shrines in Tiberias and its vicinity, as mentioned by Jewish travelers of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries: Yaari, Masaot, 59, 91–92, 113, 156–157. For Christian pilgrims’ visits in Tiberias: Denys Pringle, Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land 1187–1291 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
Étienne Combe, Jean Sauvaget, and Gaston Wiet (ed.), Répertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe, 18 vols. (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1944), 13:127. Al-Harawī mentions the site in the late twelfth century. Another shrine dedicated to Sitt Sukayna is in Damascus, and al-Harawī mentions it as well: Josef W. Meri (trans.), A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage: ʿAlī ibn Abī Bakr al-Harawī’s Kitāb al-Ishārāt ilā Maʿrifat al-Ziyārāt (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2004), 30, 38; Yaron Friedman, The Shī ʿīs in Palestine: From the Medieval Golden Age until the Present (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020), 38–42.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 184–185. These shaykhs carried the attribution (nisba) al-Ṭabarī, which although according to genealogy manuals should be related to the region of Tabaristan, south of the Caspian Sea in Iran, seems to refer here to Tiberias. It was quite common to mix up the nisba of those two places. The proper nisba for a person from Tiberias should be al-Ṭabarānī, but a general search through Islamic sources shows that this distinction was not always kept.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 125.
Meri, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide, 40.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 183–184. Curiously, al-ʿUthmānī (183) describes one of the shaykhs of al-Shajara as “khādim awlād al-anbiyāʾ” (servant of the children of the prophets; translation O. A.), which might relate to tombs of prophets located around the village.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 125, 184. Again, al-ʿUthmānī uses the phrase “may Allāh spare his life” (abqāhu Allāh; translation O. A.).
For the prediction story: Baybars al-Manṣūrī, Zubdat al-fikra fī taʾrīkh al-hijra, ed. Donald S. Richards (Beirut-Berlin: al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1419/1998), 34–35. For the subsequent relationship and patronage: Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir, al-Rawḍ, 238, 250; Ibn Shaddād, Taʾrīkh al-malik al-ẓāhir, 275; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, 2:144, 2:245–246; Moshe Sharon, Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae, 7 vols. (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013), 5:58–67. The descendants of the shaykh ʿAlī retained a prominent position in Hebron for centuries after his death: al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, 2:144, 252–254.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 124; Meri, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide, 40; Reiner, “Pilgrims,” 293–294.
On the phenomenon of sites deemed holy by adherents of different religions who, nonetheless, associate it with different mythical figures: Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Studying the Shared Sacred Spaces of the Medieval Levant: Where Historians May Meet Anthropologists,” al-Masāq 34, no. 2 (2022):111–126, at 115.
Reiner, “Pilgrims,” 255. This site is also mentioned by al-Harawī: Meri, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide, 40. On the endowments for the maintenance of the site: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 123–124. Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (al-Rawḍ, 262–263) writes that, after conquering Safed, Baybars endowed some lands for the upkeep of this shrine. One of the governors of Safed, Shihāb al-Dīn b. Ṣubḥ (r. 753–759/1352–1358), built a khān at Hittin, the income of which he endowed for the local shrine: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 143. On Saladin’s khānqāh: Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī bi-l-wafayāt, ed. Aḥmad al-Arnaʾuṭ and Turkī Muṣṭafā, 29 vols. (Bayrūt: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1420/2000), 3:136–137, 29:61.
Baybars also had a monument (mashhad al-naṣr) built at the site of the Mamluks’ triumph over the Mongols at ʿAyn Jālūt: Troadec, “Baybars,” 140–142.
Some evidence that the khānqāh functioned into the fourteenth century is found in the biography al-Ṣafadī dedicated to Muḥammad b. Abī Ṭālib al-Dimashqī (d. 727/1327), who was the shaykh of the khānqāh. There is also one Sufi, Nujaym al-Ḥiṭṭīnī, who lived at the khānqāh and was accused of a mysterious murder which occurred in its precinct: al-Ṣafadī, Aʿyān al-ʿaṣr, 4:475–480, 5:496–498.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 124.
On the Christian sites: Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1:285. For the Jewish traveler, a student of Nahmanides: Yaari, Masaot, 93. For a Muslim account of the site: Meri, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide, 40; al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 124–125. On the cult of the prophet Yūnus: Shmuel Tamari, “The Nabī Yūnus Masjid in Ḥalḥūl (Judea),” Annali 44, no. 3 (1984), 373–398.
al-ʿUthmānī, Ta ͗rīkh Ṣafad, 124, 169.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 169–170, 175, 179–180.
E.g. the shaykh Muḥammad al-Miṣrī, whom al-ʿUthmānī visited several times. He died of the plague in 765/1363–1364: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 179–180.
Meri, The Cult, 43.
Most immigrants came from within the Mamluk Sultanate, i.e., Damascus (including al-ʿUthmānī’s great-grandfather), Aleppo, ʿAjlūn and Egypt, but some came from Iran (Nahāwand, Tabrīz), Iraq and Anatolia (al-Rūm). For some explicit mentions of immigrants who settled in the region post-1266: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 151, 157–158, 162–164, 175, 185, 192–193, 196, 200–201.
Meri, The Cult, 27. On the crystallization of “saintly spheres” around living Sufi saints, as well as around their tombs, focusing on urban settings in Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria: Daphna Ephrat, Sufi Masters and the Creation of Saintly Spheres in Medieval Syria (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2021).
Sabine MacCormack, “Loca Sancta: The Organization of Sacred Topography in Late Antiquity,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. Robert Ousterhout (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 10; Ralph Häussler and Gian Franco Chiai, “Interpreting Sacred Landscapes: A Cross-Cultural Approach,” in Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity: Creation, Manipulation, Transformation, ed. Ralph Häussler and Gian Franco Chiai (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020), 1–13; Glenn W. Bowman, “Popular Palestinian Practices around Holy Places and Those Who Oppose Them: An Historical Introduction,” Religion Compass 7, no. 3 (2013): 69–78; John Renard, Crossing Confessional Boundaries: Exemplary Lives in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 24–28. As Renard (p. 30) writes, “Many Muslim religious facilities arose near a Christian structure because Muslims recognized the site as inherently sacred …”.
Peter Gottschalk, “Introduction,” in Muslims and Others in Sacred Space, ed. Margaret Cormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6–7. In the words of Mircea Eliade, the sacred place “constitutes an opening in the upward direction and ensures communication with the world of the gods”: Eliade, The Sacred, 26.
I am here paraphrasing from Häussler and Chiai, “Interpreting Sacred Landscapes,” 8.
Ora Limor, “Sharing Sacred Space: Holy Places in Jerusalem Between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,” in Laudem Hierosolymitani: Studies in Crusades and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar, ed. Iris Shagrir, Ronnie Ellenblum and Jonathan Riley- Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 219.
Ora Limor, “Christian Sacred Space and the Jew,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996), 55–77; Uri Zvi Shachar, “Enshrined Fortification: A Trialogue on the Rise and Fall of Safed,” The Medieval History Journal 23, no. 2 (2020): 273–280.
As Eade and Sallnow write, paraphrasing Weber, “we might call this process the ‘spatialization of charisma’: the power of the living person is sedimented and preserved after his death in the power of place”: John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, “Introduction,” in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (London: Routledge, 1991), 8.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 165–167, 182 (on dreams); 124 (a vision at the shrine); 167–169 (visitations); 167–168, 177 (on objects imbued with baraka); and more occurrences scattered throughout pages 157–186.
James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 48–50.
For indications of the role played by Sufi shaykhs in fostering the Islamization of predominately Christian villages in Palestine: Luz, “Aspects of Islamization,” 35 (on the Jerusalem hinterland); Aharon Layish, “‘Waqfs and Ṣūfī Monasteries in the Ottoman Policy of Colonization: Sulṭān Selīm I’s Waqf of 1516 in Favour of Dayr al-Asad,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50, no. 1 (1987): 61–89 (on the Galilee in the early Ottoman period). For similar conclusions regarding the role of Sufi shaykhs and their shrines in the Islamization of Anatolia: Ethel Sara Wolper, Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Medieval Anatolia (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Speros Vyronis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 378–402.
Consider, for example, the different approaches of the Umayyads: at al-Ruṣāfa (Sergiopolis), caliph Hishām established a mosque adjunct to the basilica in which the saint was entombed, allowing Muslims a separate access to the relics. Meanwhile, the church dedicated to Sergius and Bacchus in Umm al-Surab was converted into a mosque during the Umayyad period. See: Dorothea Weltecke, “Multireligiöse Loca Sancta und die mächtigen Heiligen der Christen,” Der Islam 88 (2011), 80–83; Renard, Crossing Confessional Boundaries, 31–32; Elizabeth Key Fowden, The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 174–183.
Reiner, “Pilgrimage,” 253–255; Meri, The Cult, 243–250.
Kedar, “Studying Shared Sacred Spaces,” 124–125. For an earlier typology of cults shared by members of different faiths proposed by Kedar: Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Convergences of Oriental Christian, Muslim, and Frankish Worshippers: The Case of Saydnaya,” in De Sion exibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy, and Literature in Honour of Amnon Linder, ed. Yitzhak Hen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 59–61.
Weltecke, “Multireligiöse Loca Sancta.”
Nimrod Luz, “Islam, Culture and the ‘Others’: Landscape of Religious (in) Tolerance in Jerusalem, 638–1517,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 40 (2013), 301–334; Nimrod Luz, “Reconstructing the Urban Landscape of Mamluk Jerusalem: Spatial and Sociopolitical Implications,” in The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of Regional and World History: Economic, Social and Cultural Development in an Era of Increasing International Interaction and Competition, ed. Reuven Amitai and Stephan Connerman (Gottingen: V&R Unipress and Bonn University Press, 2019), 123–148; Luz, “Aspects of Islamization.”
Meri, The Cult, 248.
For some examples of shared (and contested) sacred spaces, as well as miracles of this sort: Yaari, Masaot, 59–60, 139–142, 153–154; Lissovsky, “From Travelers’,” 71–72, 76–77, 85–86, 88–89; Eli Yassif, “Sepharadic Memories: Legend and History in an Early 16th Century Collection of Tales,” Sefunot 12 (2022): 408–413; Meri, The Cult, 243–250.
This is a very common type of miracle (karāma). For an example of a Safedi shaykh performing it: al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 181–182. The real issue behind this type of miracle is the Sufi claim that the saints (awliyāʾ) are the true possessors of authority in the world, and not the worldly rulers. See: Giuseppe Cecere, “Lo shaykh Ḥasan al-Ṭawīl e la chiesa costruita sulla moschea: autorità spirituale e dinamiche socio-politiche nell’ Egitto di età ayyubide,” Rivista di Studi Indo-Mediterranei 10 (2020), 1–27.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 118; Stephan, “Evliya Tschelebi,” 155. On the participation of Muslims in this festival: Reiner, “Pilgrimage,” 302; Yazbak, “Holy Shrines,” 133.
Weltecke, “Multireligiöse Loca Sancta.”
Weltecke, “Multireligiöse Loca Sancta,” 89–91.
Lissovsky, “From Travelers’,” 92–93. For a more comprehensive survey of this phenomenon, see the numerous studies of Doron Bar, e.g. “The Changing Identity of Muslim/Jewish Holy Places in the State of Israel, 1948–2018,” Middle Eastern Studies 59, no. 1 (2023): 139–150.
Abulafia was active mainly in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Malta, but also visited Palestine briefly in 1260. Though he lived under Christian rule, the Islamic heritage of these lands was heavily present.
Moshe Idel, “Eretz-Israel and Prophetic Kabbalah,” Shalem: Studies in the History of the Jews in Eretz-Israel 3 (1981): 119–126; Paul Fenton, “The Ritual Visualization of the Saint in Jewish and Muslim Mysticism,” in Entangled Hagiographies of the Religious Other, ed. Alexandra Cuffel and Nikolas Jaspert (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 193–231; Paul Fenton, “Influences soufies sur le développement de la Qabbale à Safed: le cas de la visitation des tombeaux,” in Études sur les terres saintes et les pèlerinages dans les religions monothéistes, ed. Daniel Tollet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012), 201–230.
Fenton, “Solitary Meditation,” 295–296; Jonathan Garb, “The Cult of the Saints in Lurianic Kabbalah,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 2 (2008): 203–229.
In relation with Jewish engagement with Sufi thought, we may mention – to name just one example – Abraham Maimonides (d. 1237) and his circle of Pietists, often portrayed as “Jewish Sufis,” who were active in the context of an Egyptian society “in which Sufism was exploding in popularity.” Nathan Hofer, “Training the Prophetic Self: Adab and riyāḍa in Jewish Sufism,” in Ethics and Spirituality in Islam: Sufi adab, ed. Francesco Chiabotti et al. (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016), 325–355. Also consider the popularity of al-Ḥallāj among Jewish writes in diverse cultural contexts, as shown in Paul Fenton, “Les traces d’al-Ḥallāǧ, martyr mystique de l’islam, dans la tradition juive,” Annales Islamologiques 35 (2001), 101–127.
Reiner, “Pilgrimage.”
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 128.
Amina A. Elbendary, “The Sultan, the Tyrant, and the Hero: Changing Medieval Perceptions of al-Ẓāhir Baybars,” Mamlūk Studies Review 5 (2001): 141–157. In Damascus, for example, Baybars was remembered as a villain, due to his seizure of the revenue extracted from the fertile lands of the Ghūṭa surrounding the city: Jacqueline Sublet, “Le Séquestre sur les jardins de la Ghouta (Damas 666/1267),” Studia Islamica 43 (1976): 81–86.
al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 159–160.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir, al-Rawḍ al-zāhir, 262–263; al-ʿUthmānī, Taʾrīkh Ṣafad, 160. Those were shaykhs who were present at the time of the conquest.
Shachar, “Enshrined Fortification,” 284–287; Lissovsky, “From Travelers,” 69–73. On the manuscript containing the story: Yassif, “Sepharadic Memories” (the story itself is translated and analyzed in pp. 413–419).
