Marion Katz
New York University
It is tempting to imagine Islamic ritual as a phenomenon fundamentally defined by the discourse of Islamic law. Medieval legal compilations give pride of place to the rules regulating ablution, prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage, subjects that often comprise a significant proportion of their total content. Rituals that appear to have arisen independently of the legal tradition (for instance, the celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad) were nevertheless often contested in terms of their legal permissibility. However, the voluminous analyses of ritual in Islamic legal texts should not distract us from the many other frameworks through which medieval Muslims understood and valorized ritual activities. In particular, the use of narrative sources can help us to escape the closed circle of legal discourse. This paper uses the narrative of the twelfth-century Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr as a window into the existence of alternative frameworks through which people understood and evaluated ritual performances and the resulting fluidity in ritual ideals and practice.