中世イスラム世界におけるウラマーの移動性

エジプトにおける西方イスラム世界出身のウラマーの活動

抄録

One of the characteristic features of the medieval ‘ulama’ was their high geographical mobility. Pilgrimage, travelling for academic purposes and commercial activities, sometimes a combination of some or all of these, were its important factors while many ‘ulama’ were attracted for better job opportunities in other places.
A need for Sunni ‘ulama’ in Egypt was first created by Saladin when he destroyed the Fatimids and began to rebuild Sunnism in Egypt. During the Ayyubid and early Mamluk period more ‘ulama’ flowed into Egypt from different parts of the Islamic world. Among them were many from the Islamic West. Even during the Fatimid period there was a connection between Western and Egyptian ulama i n the fields of hadith and Maliki law studies.
Those Western ‘ulama’ can be classified into two types; one was the transit type and the other the settler type. Those belonging to the first contributed to the exchange of scholarship, bringing to Egypt some of Western achievements and back home more knowledges and skills from the East. But more important was their contribution to the promotion of the general feeling of Islamic unity and solidarity by teaching the population both of Egypt and the West through their contacts with local ‘ulama’ and their other travelling experiences in other lands.
The contributions of the second type was more concrete; many Maliki fuqaha' who came to Egypt and lived there permanently played a significant role in establishing the Maliki law school there by working as teachers and sometimes as qadis. In other fields of scholarship, many individual scholars from the West made great contributions; to name a few, al-Shatibi in the qira'a, al-Qurtubi in the tafsir and Abu Hayyan in the philology. Another point we cannot neglect is that the western ‘ulama’ in Egypt were mostly Sufi is or zahids and helped the diffusion of sufism in Egypt.
All in all, they were the beneficiaries of the general feeling of Islamic unity and they themselves in turn strived to promote and materialize this feeling.