DĀREMĪ, ABŪ SAʿĪD ʿOṮMĀN

 

DĀREMĪ, ABŪ SAʿĪD ʿOṮMĀN b. Saʿīd b. Ḵāled SEJESTĀNĪ, Persian traditionist and jurist (b. ca. 200/816, d. Herat Ḏu’l-ḥejja 280/February 894, sometimes incorrectly reported as 282/896). He belonged to a family of Sejestānī cloth merchants and was educated in a Hanafite environment. Through extensive travel, probably in connection with his business, he became acquainted with Hadith scholarship in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. In Baghdad he met (Aḥmad) Ebn Ḥanbal (q.v.; 164-241/780-855), but his main teacher seems to have been Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn (d. 233/847), from whom he preserved a collection of notes on earlier traditionists, among them eastern Persian Hanafites like Ebrāhīm b. Rostam Marvazī (cf. Ebn Abi’l-Wafāʾ, I, p. 38). In Egypt he studied with (Abū ʿAbd-Allāh Moḥammad) Šāfeʿī’s most important pupil, Yūsof b. Yaḥyā Bowayṭī (d. 231/846). These contacts seem to have led him to a more rigorous reliance on tradition when he settled finally in Herat.

Abū ʿĀṣem Moḥammad ʿAbbādī, who came from the same city, reported (pp. 45 ff.) that Dāremī joined the Shafiʿites, though they had probably not yet succeeded in establishing themselves in the area. As a result, he clashed with the Karrāmīya, adherents of (Abū ʿAbd-Allāh Moḥammad) Ebn Karrām (d. 255/869), who had Hanafite leanings and were less scrupulous in dealing with Hadith, and was forced to leave Herat; a sojourn in Jorjān is attested for the year 273/886-87 (Sahmī, p. 258 no. 505; for additional details, see Ebn Abī Yaʿlā, I, p. 221 no. 298; Sobkī, Ṭabaqāt (Cairo2), pp. 302 ff. no. 71; Ḏahabī, XIII, pp. 319 ff. no. 148; Sezgin, GAS I, pp. 600-01).

Dāremī’s discontent with antitraditionist tendencies persisting among eastern Persian Hanafites is reflected in his two surviving books, both directed at the so-called Jahmīya, a group of theologians, especially influential in Persia, who, because of their transcendentalist and antianthropomorphic outlook, were connected by their opponents with the early Islamic thinker Jahm b. Ṣafwān (executed 128/746); they drew their ideas mainly from the Baghdad Hanafite jurist Bešr Marīsī (d. 218/833). In his Radd ʿala’l-Jahmīya (ed. G. Vitestam, Lund and Leiden, 1960)Dāremī followed the line of Ebn Ḥanbal’s Radd ʿala’l-Zanādeqa wa’l-Jahmīya, attempting to prove that the Jahmīs were heretics and therefore deserved capital punishment. He was criticized for this fanaticism by an unknown individual who had met Bešr personally and maintained that Jahmī theology lay within the radius of normal doctrinal differences. This critic cited Moḥammad b. Šojāʿ Ṯaljī (d. 266/880), whose views were highly influential among Persian jurists and who, like Marīsī, had not completely rejected the traditions adduced against Jahmī theology; both had instead simply interpreted them in metaphorical terms. This attack led Dāremī to write Radd ʿala’l-Marīsī al-ʿanīd (ed. M. Ḥ. Feqī, Cairo, 1939; for a more recent reprint of both Dāremī’s works, see ʿA. S. Naššār and ʿA. J. Ṭālebī, ʿAqāʾed al-salaf, Alexandria, 1971, pp. 254 ff., 359 ff.), in which he in no way softened the aggressiveness of his style.

 

Bibliography:

Abū ʿĀṣem Moḥammad ʿAbbādī, Ṭabaqāt al-foqahāʾ al-Šāfeʿīya, ed. G. Vitestam, Leiden, 1964.

Šams-al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd-Allāh Moḥammad Ḏahabī, Sīar aʿlām al-nobalāʾ, ed. Š. Arnāʾūt, Beirut, 1401/1981.

ʿAbd-al-Qāder Ebn Abi’l-Wafāʾ, al-Jawāher al-możīʿa fī ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanafīya, 2 vols., Hyderabad, 1332/1914.

Abu’l-Ḥosayn Moḥammad Ebn Abī Yaʿlā, Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābela, ed. M.-Ḥ. Feqī, 2 vols., Cairo, 1952.

J. van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra, Berlin, 1991, II, p. 71; III, pp. 181-82.

Ḥamza b. Yūsof Sahmī, Tārīḵ Jorjān, Hyderabad, 1369/1950.

 

(JOSEF VAN ESS)

(Josef van Ess)

Originally Published: December 15, 1994

Last Updated: November 17, 2011

This article is available in print.
Vol. VII, Fasc. 1, pp. 31-32