Based on material collected during fieldwork in 1992-3 (partly published in the author’s Minstrel Poetry of the Pamir Mountains: A Study on the Songs and Poems of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2004), this article shortly introduces the Isma‘iliyya in Badakhshan and the tradition of maddah-khwani — lit. ‘singing of praise’, the cycles of religious poetry performed by predominantly non-professional musicians (maddah-khwans) on varied occasions of community life. The author describes the performance in traditional Pamirian houses in the presence of a khalifa (the local religious leader of a rural Ismaili community), the singer accompanying himself on the rubab or on other string instruments, sometimes with a tambourine player. Almost exclusively in Persian language, the maddah is characterised by its themes: mystical love and the praise of the key figureheads of the Isma‘iliyya in Badakhshan (Prophet Muhammad, Nasir-i Khusraw, Agha Khan IV, but first and foremost Imam ‘Ali together with his mule Duldul and his two-edged sword Dhu’l-Fiqar. Trough the Bahr al-asrar, a collection of stories on Nasir-i Khusraw attributed to Sayyid Jalal Munji (published in Dushanbe in 1992), the author develops on the activity of maddah-khwans in pre-modern Badakhshan. A piece of this text — a locally well-known qasida on the heroic and noble deeds of ‘Ali, endowed with a divine status — is compared with texts of the Ithna-‘Ashari tradition (notably the tenth-century gnostic Hadiqat al-haqiqat by Sana‘i and the late sixteenth-century more official Kitab-i farigh by the Safavid court poet Farigh Gilani), all seen as traditional reinterpretations of the Sura al-Ma’ida (‘The Table’) of the Qur’an (5: 55), known in Badakhshan as the ‘Sura of the Gift (sura al-‘ata’)’. Pedagogically written for readers unfamiliar with Central Asian realities, this article sheds light on the function of maddah as a provider of examples of behaviour for Ismaili audiences. Besides, the author also astutely notices the absence of the hostility to Sunnis that remains conversely a characteristic of the Ithna-‘Ashari tradition, especially in Iranian ta‘ziyya and rawzakhwani.
Berg, Gabrielle van den. “The ‘Sura of the Gift’ in the Oral Tradition of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan”. In The Other Shiites: From the Mediterranean to Central Asia, edited by Alessandro Monsutti, Sylvia Naef, and Farian Sabahi, 219–30. Worlds of Islam 2. Bern et al.: Peter Lang (Worlds of Islam: 2), 2007.
CER: II-4.2.A-340