Mapping Sanctity In Ottoman Jerusalem: Genealogy, Geography, And Indices In The Maʿālim Al-Taṣdīq

Abstract

This article examines how Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-ʿAlamī’s Maʿālim al-Taṣdīq li-Maʿrifat Dukhūl al-Faqīr fī al-Ṭarīq (Jerusalem, d. 1628) organizes sanctity—through genealogy, sacred geography, and indices. Whereas studies of early modern Sufi autobiography often foreground literary strategies of humility and authority, this study shifts attention to the apparatus by which sanctity is mapped, classified, and transmitted. First, the al-ʿAlamī genealogical chart is read as a double register: nasab (biological descent) and silsila (custodianship), each anchoring Jerusalemite authority within a Maghribi lineage that reaches back to ʿAbd al-Salām b. Mashīsh. Second, the text’s itineraries are analyzed as cartographies of baraka, linking Jerusalem with Damascus, Qaṭanā, Sidon, and Mecca, while comparative reading with Abū Sālim al-ʿAyāshī’s Riḥla highlights converging Levantine–Ḥijāzī circuits of sanctity. Third, the article considers indices of persons, places, and terms not merely as editorial tools but as epistemic instruments that structure memory and authority, continuing medieval practices of fahrasa and thabat. Methodologically, the study uses a single manuscript witness and one external corroborator (al-ʿAyāshī) and treats paratext—colophon, itinerary, indexing—as positive evidence of curated sanctity. Together, these apparatuses show that Maʿālim al-Taṣdīq was not only autobiography but also archive: a work that preserved Palestinian Sufi experience by encoding it into genealogical, geographical, and lexical maps. More broadly, early modern Jerusalem emerges not merely as a node of devotion but as a center of knowledge organization in the Ottoman Sufi world, offering a replicable method for reading paratext as evidence in Islamic intellectual history.