Bandali Jawzi’s Hermeneutics

Abstract Bandali Jawzi’s Min Ta‘rikh al-Harakat al-Fikriyyah fi‘l-Islam (“The History of Intellectual Movements in Islam; Jerusalem, 1928) is part one (“The Social Movements”) of what was intended to be a two-part work. It consists of five chapters, tracing the nature of Islamic social values and their fate at the hands of various regimes from the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphates (661-750 C.E. and 750-1258 C.E., respectively) to the constitutional movement in Iran in the early twentieth century. Throughout, Jawzi characterizes Islam as a social reform demanding the end of oppression. The exigencies of power politics under the dynastic caliphates, according to his portrayal, vitiated and actually distorted that message, until it was virtually unrecognizable in any practical form. But Islam’s egalitarian spirit was kept alive, Jawzi argues, in various reform movements throughout Islamic history. Jawzi focuses in particular on the Babakis, the Qaramatis, and the Isma’ilis. These µiovements were motivated, Jawzi argues, by demands for social justice entirely in keeping with Islamic principles. They chal lenged the caliphal authorities because of inequities in the imperial sys tem. Jawzi considers it perfectly natural that the official historians and heresiographers of the eras in question would condemn these movements as rebellious; those whose reports were promulgated and passed down through the ages to become the accepted wisdom of later scholars were actually spokespeople for the caliphal authorities. Just as naturally, reports sympathetic to the rebellious movements, such as their own manifestos, would be marginalized or suppressed.