Mut'a in the formation of sectarian identity, law, and morality: a digital humanities approach

Introduction

This co-authored paper examines the highly debated practice of temporary marriage (muʿa) as a window onto the relationship between law and morality and the rise of sectarian identities in late antique Islamic law. While normative marital contracts in Islamic law could not stipulate a time elapse, an early precedent from Muhammad allowed temporary marriages. Hadith reports transmitting and debating this allowance became the locus classicus for the enduring disputes about the permissibility of temporary marriage, from the seventh century to the present day. 

While the Twelver Shiʿism sanctioned the practice (albeit with conditions) the Sunni majority wholly proscribed the practice, making temporary marriage an important marker for sectarian identity-formation.

This paper will present a comprehensive analysis of reports on muṭʿa found in Sunni hadith and legal collections. It will examine, for the first time, the large body of reports documenting the debates in the first three centuries about the permissibility and morality of the practice. In addition to analyzing the arguments made in favor of and against temporary marriage, the paper will analyze the underlying jurisprudential issues at play, and will historicize the debate by reconstructing the network of individuals involved in the transmission of the muṭʿa reports , while analyzing their sectarian affiliations and the geographic movement of their transmissions. Finally, the paper will make a significant methodological contribution by testing how digital datasets and methods of analysis can facilitate the analysis of a large data set to draw new historical conclusions.

Survey of Existing Scholarship on Mutʿa

Very little research has explored early legal debates about temporary marriage. A recent monograph on Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq analyzes the reports underlying the Twelver allowance (Modaressi, 2022), another book examines the exegesis of the Qur’anic verse believed by Twelvers to permit temporary marriage (Iqbal, 2016), and a chapter-length study discusses temporary marriage in Jewish law within late antique Muslim societies (Salaymeh and Septimus, 2017). None of these studies critically examine the very large pool of seemingly contradicting hadiths from Muḥammad and early authorities in the first century of Islam debating the legitimacy of the practice.  

Our study utilizes digital tools to compile the hundreds of transmitted hadith reports documenting statements of the Prophet on mutʿa. We use them to reconstruct early debates about marriage practices, sexuality, and juristic authority and interpretation. We also analyze what this body of reports reveals about the hadith networks at the time, such as geographic circulation, and sectarian affiliations of transmitters, proponents, and opponents of the practice. This data will enable us to evaluate the extent to which early debates on temporary marriage played a role in the differentiation of early proto-Sunni and Shīʿite sectarian identities. More broadly, through a close study of the legal reasoning and rationale presented in the course of these debates, the paper will consider how late antique jurists negotiated the disjuncture between law and morality that the practice reveals.

 

Survey of Existing Approaches to Hadith Literature

The mutʿa legal hadith corpus in Sunni sources is very large. The largest and most extensively annotated digitized collection of Sunni sources, Jawāmiʿ al-Kalim (JK), tagged 511 hadiths as addressing mutʿa in some way. These hadith are found in 139 unique Sunni sources, and record 1278 unique isnads (chains of transmission) documenting the transmission histories of the 511 hadith. The isnads document the presence of 1126 narrators, which JK identifies as stemming from 41 cities. Basic statistics of the mutʿa corpus reveal it to be quite extensive, evidence that it was a topic that occupied early and classical Sunni Muslims to a considerable extent.

The trouble with dealing with a corpus as large as the mutʿa one is the considerable amount of labor required in traditional source-critical hadith analysis. The current gold standard of such analysis is isnād-cum-matn (ICMA). This analytical method requires diagramming all isnads of the mutʿa corpus, identifying common links, and correlating whether and the extent to which variation in the texts of hadiths correlate with changes in isnads, particularly with respect to common links. It also involves looking up biographical information on, at a minimum, the most important and frequently occurring narrators. For this reason, almost all existing scholarship utilizing isnad-cum-matn unanimously focus on a single theme and take scholars a significant amount of time to complete.

To a large extent, the JK digitized dataset has expedited the labor involved in some of the core processes in isnad-cum-matn. Our project takes this digitized dataset and experiments with digital humanities methods that can facilitate and automate ICMA. 

 

Conclusion: Expected Contribution

This co-authored study will make two significant conclusions to the fields of early Islamic history, Islamic law, and Islamic studies more broadly. First, it will fill the gap in our knowledge of early debates concerning temporary marriage, furthering our knowledge  of early marriage practices, the formation of sectarian identities, and the negotiation of law and morality. Second, it will show how one can use social network modes of organizing data to automatically diagram isnads and identify common links. It will show how natural language processing (NLP) methods can be used to quantitatively measure variation between texts. By offering a new approach to automating ICMA’s core analytical procedure for reliably dating texts, the discovery of whether text variation correlates with isnad variations it breaks new ground for expanding the study of large bodies of early hadith reports.