At the time when the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid bin Abdul Malik (d. 95 AH / 715 AD) established the first hospital in Islam, among its services was the provision of care for mental health patients at the beginning of the eighth century AD;
The European countries did not know the first psychiatric hospital until the ninth century AH / 15 AD, by building the first shelter for people with mental illnesses in France, on the example of “Bemaristan Qalawun”, which was built in Cairo in 683 AH / 1284 AD.
It is known that the Arabs were not only concerned with the phenomenon of insanity as a treatment and care, but also as a cognitive condition;
The Arabs designed a very in-depth systematic system to monitor the phenomenon of madness, and collected the traces of the insane, their poems and sayings, and made a precise distinction between cases of insanity that afflict the mind due to a congenital defect, and the confusion, delusions, existence, and love of absence and depression in the soul.
They were also characterized by a degree of flexibility, spaciousness, and extreme tolerance towards these phenomena, at a time when other cultures viewed the madman as a monster, and madness as a demonic condition that must be isolated, exiled and expelled;
As says the French philosopher Michel Foucault (d. 1984 AD), who presented the most important study on the history of madness in the West in the classical era.
In this article;
We will display a pattern of the strange passion of Islamic thinkers by observing another side of the truth that can only be grasped when the mind becomes silent!
The sane of the insane
Perhaps the most important thing with which we can address the Muslims’ approach to the phenomenon of madness and their view of the category of insane is the Qur’anic introduction;
The word "madman" appears in the Qur'an 11 times, and this is often a description of the prophets and a response to the tongues of those who deny their messages.
And Imam Abu al-Qasim bin Habib al-Nisaburi (d. 406 AH / 1016 AD) - in his book 'The Intellectuals of the Insane' - analyzes the reason for throwing the prophets into madness by saying, "The nations called the messengers insane because they split their sticks, so they rejected them, and they came contrary to what they are in."
In the two Sahihs, the word “crazy” or “insanity” appears 21 times.
The first thing that draws attention to the Arabs' view of madness or something similar is the large number of linguistic synonyms for the word madness;
Contemporary researcher Ahmed Al-Khossi monitored in his book "Foolishness and Madness" the abundance of synonyms of madness in the "Lisan Al-Arab" lexicon, as their number reached 80 words, while the derivations of foolishness amounted to about 400 words.
Perhaps that is what prompted Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. after 400 AH/1010 AD) to say that “the mind among its companions has a wide width…, and madness among its people is of wide width.”
It is clear that Muslim thinkers realized the parallel between reason and madness, and that as long as the mind is mobile, madness will keep pace with it in movement and expansion.
Abu al-Faraj al-Nadim (d. 384 AH / 995 AD), the author of the 'Fihrist', amazes us by authoring early Muslims on the phenomenon of madness and foolishness;
He said that the historian Abu al-Hasan al-Madani (d. 225 AH / 840 AD) - who is the "Signature al-Hafiz al-Sadiq" according to the expression of Imam al-Dhahabi (d. 748 AH / 1347 AD) - authored a work that he called "The Book of Fools", perhaps the oldest that was written on this subject.
There are several books written to monitor the phenomenon of madness and madmen mentioned by Al-Nadim and Al-Nisaburi, and the latter confirmed hearing books whose authors lived in the third century AH and are now missing;
He said, "I was in my youth and I heard books on this topic, such as the book of Al-Jahiz (d. 255 AH / 869 AD) and the book of Ibn Abi Al-Dunya (d. 281 AH / 894 AD), Ahmed bin Luqman, and Abu Ali Sahel bin Ali al-Baghdadi."
A knowledge race
. This means that Al-Jahiz has a book for the lunatics who should not be absent from his circle of observation and interest, and he is the researcher who is fond of studying societal phenomena and their strangeness, but the impact of this book is not precisely known, and I do not know whether anyone interested in the man’s heritage noticed the importance of searching for this book. To bring it out to the people, but it seems that the majority of its material is found in his famous books that contain many anecdotes and tales about madmen.
Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 654 AH / 1256 AD) mentioned in his translation of Ibn Abi al-Dunya that he wrote a book entitled “The Wise Men of the Insane,” and perhaps this title fulfilled the popular saying among the people: “Take wisdom from the mouths of the lunatics.”
But what is more striking is that a title such as “The Crazy Minds” is on the covers of a large number of heritage books;
Abu Bakr Ibn Abi Al-Azhar (d. 325 AH / 937 AD) has titled a book on this subject, and there is a printed letter entitled “The wise, the insane and the demented” by Ibn Ismail Al-Darrab Al-Masry (d. 392 AH / 1003 AD).
Although al-Darrab is a contemporary of Nisaburi;
The latter’s book, called “The Intellectuals of the Insane,” remains the most prominent of the writings of this section, as it is written in the manner of narrations, and its author presents it by saying: “I wrote this book without azimuth (= curriculum) of those books [preceding it], and it is a book that suffices the beholder in it to repeat and browse through books And I hope I've never been like him."
As for the saying “the sane of the insane” itself, it was like a wandering term that hoards an epistemological attempt to collect the scattered sayings of historical figures touched by a spectrum of psychological or mental disturbance, so it was collected and documented, perhaps in anticipation of a time when yesterday’s madmen might be sane today.
It is easy to monitor this term in abundance in the books of biography, history and literature;
In “The History of Baghdad” by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 463 AH/1071 AD) it was stated that al-Abbas bin Muhammad Ibn al-Dahhak al-Ashhali (d. 263 AH / 877 AD) “narrated on the authority of his father the news of sane people of the insane, and Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597 AH / 1201 AD) wrote - in “Safwat al-Safwa” '- Entitled: "And among the sane madmen in Basra".
Al-Dhahabi also chronicled a class of these in his book 'History of Islam and the Deaths of Famous People'. He said in the translation of Al-Harfoush Abdullah Al-Fatula Al-Halabi (d. 700 AH / 1300 AD) that "his funeral was witnessed", even though people "considered him as one of the sane of the insane"!!
Insanity is a vaccine for the mind, and
there are other books that dealt with this phenomenon, but within the framework of the category of "fools", which is a broader circle of madness, although it unites with it in many psychological and mental manifestations, such as the author of Al-Katanji's 'The Book of Salt and the Fools' and 'The Book of the Collector of Foolishness and the Origin of the Patches'.
However, Ibn al-Jawzi remains a distinct case in this section with his book 'Akhbar al-Mumwki wa al-mughfalin';
He confirmed to us the idea mentioned by al-Tawhidi regarding the parallelism of the movement of the mind with the movement of madness or foolishness, where he says, "When I began to collect news of the intelligent and mentioned some of what was reported about them to be an example - because the news of the brave teaches courage - I chose to collect the news of fools and fools."
Ibn al-Jawzi singled out a wide chapter to list the meanings of foolishness, their characteristics and their physical forms, and he differentiated between foolishness and madness, defining the first as “the mistake in the means and the way to the desired with the correctness of the intended.”
As for insanity, it is “a defect in the means and the intended purpose.”
Thus, he differentiates between what is pathological, such as madness, and what is weakness or disorder in thinking, which is foolishness.
In addition to books specialized in the world of madmen and fools;
The Arab Heritage Library has known many literary and general books that contain hundreds of stories from their stories, at the forefront of which are the books of Al-Jahiz, Abu Al-Faraj Al-Isfahani (d. 356 AH / 967 AD), Ibn Abd Rabbo Al-Andalusi (d. 328 AH / 940 AD) and Abu Hayyan Al-Tawhidi.
It seems that all of them wanted - by mentioning these stories - to juxtapose and overlap the ordinary with the amazing in some of their compositions. Al-Jahiz says, "We wanted it not to be collected in one place in order to preserve the activity of the reader and listener." In his lost book.
And if Michel Foucault saw the Arabs as tolerating a human phenomenon such as madness;
Perhaps he did not realize that the matter goes beyond tolerance, sarcasm, and collecting jokes to an effective epistemological stance. This massive, collected heritage reveals, in part, another aspect of Arab life, which is the discourse of madness that has not been rejected, marginalized, or expelled from its societies, as happened in European cities. Through the famous "ships of fools" in Western literature.
If we try to understand some of the secrets of the formation of the ancient Arab mind feat;
We will find that one of the important keys - which must be subject to the attention of researchers in history - is the keenness of a large section of the various classes of Muslim scholars to form a mentality fraught with abduction and strange patterns of thinking, and to strive to acquire it from the explosive language that these absentees mention.
Imam al-Shafi’i (d. 204 AH/819 AD) was one of the most famous narrators of the poetry of the insane.
The two modern imams Al-Bayhaqi - (in Manaqib Al-Shafi’i - and Al-Nawawi - in Tahdhib Al-Asmaa wa Al-Lughat - narrated that Muhammad bin Abdul Hakam (d. 268 AH / 881 AD) - who was a student of Al-Shafi’i - said: “I heard Al-Shafi’i say: I narrate to three hundred crazy poets.” .
Ibn Abd Rabbo summarizes the function of this type of etiquette by saying that if the listener “attentively listens to it, he finds it a place to listen, a place to look, a place for the soul, a vaccine for the intellect, bright in loneliness and comfort in loneliness.. As they said: May God shoot without one.
And Ibn Abd Rabbo accepted decades;
Al-Jahiz saw that "a thing without its metal is stranger... and the more amazing it is, the more creative it is. But that is like the anecdotes of the words of boys and the urgency of the insane."
The Dialogue of Reason and Madness
It is surprising that the Mu'tazilites paid attention to the madmen and took care of their imams in collecting their anecdotes, news and interviewing them.
What prompted them to search for the opposite of reason and jump into the spaces of madness?!
This al-Nisaburi mentions on the authority of the sheikh of the Mu’tazila sheikhs, Abu al-Hudhayl al-Allaf (d. 235 AH/850 AD) that he went down in one of the monasteries and looked at one of the madmen residing in it, and after the insane asked him several questions, he knew from the pattern of his pilgrims, so he addressed him saying to him: “Be the father of al-Hudhayl al-Allaf.”
The imam linguist Abu al-Abbas al-Mubarrad (d. 285 AH/898 AD) - who is described as retiring - was very frequent on the homes and councils of the lunatics, which the Dutch orientalist Reinhart Dozy (d. 1300 AH / 1883 AD) - in his book 'The Complementation of the Arabic Dictionaries' - used the name of Haris and named one of them. Arfasha.
And the cooler with these crazy people had amazing scientific experiences and attitudes.
One of his companions asked him once, saying: “Oh, Abu al-Abbas, it has been reported to me that you are leaving our council and going to the Mukhais (= a prison place), and to the place of the madmen and the therapists, so what is your meaning in that?” He said, and I said: There are anecdotes among them!
As Abu Ishaq al-Ketbi, known as the Bat (d. 718 AH / 1318 AD), tells us that the imam of the Mu'tazila Thumama bin Ashers (d. 213 AH / 828 AD) said: "Al-Rashid sent me to the house of the lunatics (= their hospital) to fix what had been corrupted from their condition", meaning that he was taking care of their situation by commissioning formal authority.
Thumama narrated to us a funny situation that happened to him in a “verbal discussion” that took place between him and one of them in one of the insane asylums.
The truth is that the Arabs realized early on the presence of literary and artistic brilliance in the valleys of madness, and the term “madness is an ancient art” that we found in al-Zamakhshari al-Mu’tazili (d. 539 AH/1144 AD) in the fifty-sixth of his shrines and it was titled: “Madness is arts, and arts are madness”!!
Al-Jahiz relates from what he calls the “Masjids” that they considered those who “did not narrate the poems of lunatics” as not from the narrators.
Here we can understand the secret of what Al-Nisaburi said, “I have heard books on this topic,” meaning the news of the insane, and also what Imam Al-Dhahabi mentioned about himself in his translation of this Al-Nisaburi that he is “the author of the book ‘Sane of the Insane’ which we “heard” (= we studied)”, And he said in the translation of Kamal al-Din bin Warida al-Hanbali (d. 697 AH / 1298 AD) the reciter and “Sheikh of Dar al-Hadith al-Mustansiriya” in Baghdad that he heard “the sane part of the insane” on Ibn Abi Harb.
And Abu Yaqub al-Attar al-Baghdadi said that the historian al-Safadi “compiled a book on the sane of the insane and narrated it to Petrosos…, and it was narrated from him by Abu Amr” Ibn Hakim al-Madani al-Asbahani (a student of Imam Ibn Majah, the author of Sunan who died 273 AH / 886 AD).
If the imams of hadith like al-Dhahabi record in their biographies “sama’” (study) books of the news of the madmen and fools, and they study them in places like Syrian Tarsus, which was one of the outposts of jihad and stationing, and compose them with their pens, as we see for Imam Ibn al-Jawzi and others;
This indicates that the learned and educated class in the past celebrated such topics and their works, and that they did not consider them to be absurd.
Rather, Al-Dhahabi described one of the most famous idiots in the third century AH - Abu Al-Abr Al-Hashimi (d. 250 AH/862 AD) - as "one of the smartest people in the world", and Al-Dhahabi does not use the description of "the smartest of the world", not for the few who translate for them.
The need for madness is
one of the things that can be observed in the history of madness and foolishness in the Arab heritage, the phenomenon of “foolishness” or “madness”, and it can be traced back to several reasons, including adapting and keeping pace with the domination of madness and its dominance over the public sphere in a historical moment in which the mind becomes marginalized and alienated, and sanity becomes The cause of his misery.
Among this is what was reported by Al-Khatib Al-Baghdadi in “The Collector of the Ethics of the Narrator and the Listener” that “Othman Al-Warraq saw Al-Atabi the poet (d. 220 AH/835 AD) eating bread on the road in Bab al-Sham [in Baghdad], and he said to him: Woe to you, are you not ashamed? He said: Do you see If we were in a house of cows, would you be ashamed to eat while they see you? Al-Warraq said: No. He said: Be patient until I tell you that they are cows!
So Al-Atabi got up, preached, told, and called;
Until there was a lot of crowding on him, then he said to them: More than one person told us that he whose tongue reaches the tip of his nose will not enter Hell!
There is no one left who does not stick out his tongue, gesturing towards the tip of his nose and assessing whether he will tell her or not.
When they dispersed, Al-Atabi turned to his companion and said: Did I not tell you that they are cows?!
Al-Nisaburi tells that a poet and writer was deprived of poetic prizes, and then "played foolishly and began to joke, so his condition improved and his affairs became popular, even kings and nobles took care of him."
The judge and historian Ibn Khallikan (d. 681 AH / 1282 AD) narrates that our friend Abu al-Abr al-Hashimi is said to have “was in the beginning of his command good poetry. ".
Rather, Abu Al-Abr himself explained that he received a scientific qualification in the origins of foolishness in order to raise the level of his living and financial fortunes. He said: “We used to disagree - while we were young - about a man who taught us humor. And if it becomes: How have you become?” And this sheikh complied until he permitted him in the “arts” of foolishness and its principles!
There is a pattern of foolishness that throws his companions to evade the punishment of the authority, as we see in the story narrated by Ibn al-Jawzi on the authority of Thumama bin Ashers that he said: “I witnessed a man who presented an opponent to one of the rulers and he said: May God fix you, I am a Rafidi Nasibi, and my opponent is a Jahmee, a mashbih.” Mujassam, my destiny, insults Al-Hajjaj bin Al-Zubayr, who demolished the Kaaba on Ali bin Abi Sufyan, and curses Muawiyah bin Abi Talib. Writers until I learned all this!!
The phenomenon of revolutionary madness
came in the book 'A Brief History of Madness' by Roy Port, quoting one of the madmen: "We madmen have the freedom to express what is going on in ourselves, so a person says whatever he wants without anyone asking him."
It is the revolutionary madness that is based on criticizing and resisting tyranny, but in the manner of madmen, and the madness may be real or a claim to escape punishment;
Where the revolutionary opponent is holed up in madness to pay the price of power.
The Umayyad governor Al-Hajjaj Al-Thaqafi (d. 95 AH / 715 AD) had famous tales with fools, and the following story seems of special significance in understanding how the political opposition took madness within its mechanisms to tell the hidden truth, and then a way to escape from the consequences of that;
As Al-Nisaburi tells that the pilgrims went out for a walk one day and found an old man and asked him: “How do you see your workers? He said: Evil workers, they oppress people and take their money as permissible!
He said: How do you say about the pilgrims? He said: That is what the ruler of Iraq is worse than him, may God ugliness and the ugliness of those who use it! He said: Do you know who I am? He said: No. He said: I am Al-Hajjaj. He said: May I be your ransom! Or do you know who I am? He said: No. He said: I am... a madman of Bani Ajil. I have seizures twice a day...; Al-Hajjaj laughed at him and ordered him to pray (= reward).
During the time of the Abbasids, many personalities appeared that were characterized by some strange behavior in order to be able to oppose the authority safely; During the time of the Caliph Al-Mahdi (d. 169 AH / 785 AD), the star of one of these revolutionary lunatics rose from the narrators of the forbidden truth, and he was - as Ibn Abd Rabbo narrated - riding a reed every Friday on Mondays and Thursdays, "If he rides on these two days, no teacher has judgment on his boys nor Obedience, so he goes out and brings with him the men, women and boys, then he goes up a hill and calls out at the top of his voice: What did the prophets and messengers do, are they not in the highest ranks? They say: Yes. The subjects. You have done justice and have done justice and succeeded Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, so the caliphate was good, take him to the highest level.” He does this with all the Rightly Guided Caliphs.
Then this crazy rebellious continued to monitor the caliphs, reviewing the sultans of Bani Umayyah, one by one, distributing them between heaven and hell according to what he decided from their justice with their subjects, and when he reached the time of the Abbasids, he was silent.” He was told: This is Abu al-Abbas [Mahdi] the Commander of the Faithful. He said: He reached We are commanded to Banu Hashim, take these people to account and throw them all into the Fire!!
Madness, love and mysticism The
Arabs knew in their heritage the phenomenon of crazy lovers, and they are a wide range of people who have robbed their hearts of love, even if their souls are still filtered with the sweetest and most cheerful poetry.
Al-Naysaburi listed them within the layers of 'the sane of the insane', and singled out a chapter on the poet Qais bin al-Malouh al-Amiri (d. 68 AH / 688 AD) and his psychological attractions that elicited hopeless love.
Abu al-Tayyib al-Washa (d. 325 AH / 937 AD) described him as "unreasonable, so if Laila is mentioned, his mind will return to him."
Ibn Hazm (d. 456 AH/1065 AD) - in his letters and book 'The Pigeon Collar' - narrated several tales about this type of madness, and it is striking that his stories about him were related to some social and scientific classes, and that this disease may affect some senior scientists;
He says: "Abu Bakr Muhammad bin Baqi Al-Hajri (died after 400 AH/1010 AD), and he was wise in nature, sane and understanding, told me about a man from among our sheikhs who cannot be mentioned.. he loved [a slave girl in Baghdad]... so his mind was mixed and he lived in the Maristan (= hospital). suffers for a long time."
In his treatment, Ibn Hazm was not satisfied with monitoring, but also presented a deep psychological analysis of this phenomenon;
Where he saw that love results from “the addiction to thought,” and that “if the idea prevails and it becomes possible to confuse and leave medication, the matter goes beyond the limit of love to the point of madness and madness.”
But on the other hand;
There are those who sought from the sigh of the desert the heat of love, but directed it in another direction towards a higher Beloved, that is “divine love”.
It seems that the love of Majnoun Bani Amer (known as Majnoun Layla in 68 AH / 688 AD) inspired lunatics of another kind who are lovers of the Most Merciful, the Most High, and those who are looking for their original springs should go after those lunatics who lived in the ancient deserts of the Arabs.
Majnoun Layla's poems and pictures on "The Home, Laila, and the Wall" have become a source of inspiration for Sufis through the centuries;
It was borrowed by Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (d. 505 AH / 1111 AD) when he wrote about witnessing, experience and love that transcends the self of the beloved to its impact, as well as the love of God Almighty if it is strong and overcomes the heart.
Imam Ibrahim Al-Samhoudi (one of the men of the 10th AH / 16th century AD) relates on the authority of his sheikh Sharaf al-Din al-Manawi (d. 871 AH / 1466 AD) that he used to “when he went out to his vestibule going to the lesson, he would stand until he made the intention and invoke it for fear of showing off, then he would go out; Layla]: If this tear flows like a stream ** on someone other than Layla, then it is wasted tears. Then he weeps hard.”
The crazy, loving wandering mystics of Sufism, such as "Saadoun al-Majnun" and "Ulayan al-Majnun" were all of the mad dervishes.
Imam Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH / 1328 AD) said about this type of personalities: “They have hearts in which are deification (= reverence) and turn to God Almighty and love for Him, and turn away from the life of this world. He received and responded to him from love, fear, sadness or joy until his mood deviated.
And he felt that it is not permissible to follow them except in accordance with the Sharia.
The lunatics between two cultures and
after this long journey with madness, madmen and fools in the space of Arab culture;
We find that we are faced with a comparison written about by Michel Foucault briefly in the book 'Madness in Classical Ages', when he dealt with the differences between the Arabs' approach to dealing with the phenomenon of lunatics and the position of the West, especially in the post-Enlightenment eras.
Foucault praised - in places in his book - the Arabs' tolerance of madness speeches, and saw that they built early hospitals for the insane in Baghdad and Cairo, and that these therapeutic institutions "were used in treatment as a spiritual recipe that used music, dance, watching and listening to strange stories", and that hospitals The lunatics moved to Europe from Islamic Andalusia.
Foucault wrote chapters on the tragedies of exclusion, ostracism, and brutal treatment of the lunatics in the European region, and how they were sent on so-called "ships of fools" far from the cities, so that they would be thrown into any land.
He also spoke about hospital cells and prisons, misery, misery and torture, and monitored how dervishes, beggars, the poor, and the unemployed were added to the categories of fools and madmen, beggars and unemployed, to throw everyone into the “world of terror.”
Foucault traces the reason for that curse that befell the madmen of the West to the moment when the Western world entered the sphere of hegemony of the deified mind, and the starting point was when Descartes declared his saying: “I think, therefore I exist,” which turned into “I think, therefore I monopolize existence, life and knowledge.” Only the wise and the intelligent have the right to life, and there is no consolation for the ignorant.
This is something that the Arab civilization did not know, which believed in the existence of the mind as well as in the existence of metaphysical knowledge and revelation above the mind, and that the moment of silence of the mind does not mean the death of the truth, as Ibn Khaldun says (d. The lunatics are a type of human being who has lost a kind of mind, which is the subsisting mind, “and he who has lost this trait is not lost or ignorant of his truth.”
This complex Arab cognitive approach is the basis of pluralism among the Arabs, which granted a large segment of the insane and absentees the right to life and the right to speak and object, according to the principle of Ibn Khaldun, which contradicts the Cartesian formula.
In fact, it was this position that prevented the emergence of this exclusion, savagery, and genocide that took place in the West against the lunatics and transgressors. Therefore, there remained a space of juxtaposition and coexistence between the “house of reason” and the “circle of madness.”
As Imam Ibn al-Jawzi says.