The epic of Muḥammad Ḥanafiyya: A preliminary study of the transregional circulation, language localization, and narrative variation in a Persianate historical romance

Sacha Alsancakli, University of Münster

This presentation examines a cycle of epics centered on Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya (henceforth Muḥammad Ḥanafiyya, d. 701), the son of the first Imam, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 661), and Khawla bt. Jaʿfar al-Ḥanafiyya. Once regarded as a potential caliph by the early Shia community, Muḥammad Ḥanafiyya emerged as a significant figure in early Islam, shaping key Shia concepts—most notably that of the Mahdī, the “rightly guided” restorer of faith, which became a central tenet of Twelver Shia doctrine (Madelung 1986: 1231–1232; Cahen 1963). Within this context, it is unsurprising that Muḥammad Ḥanafiyya became a popular subject in folk epics, particularly in the Eastern Islamic or Persianate world (Hodgson 1974; Green 2019, 2024), where he was often portrayed within the Persian javānmardī (lit. “young man”) tradition (Cahen and Hanaway 1987; Ridgeon 2018).

To date, several epics centered on Muḥammad Ḥanafiyya have been identified, circulating across present-day Anatolia, Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. However, with the exception of the Hikayat Muhammad Hanifa in Malay—which has been edited, translated, and extensively studied (Brakel 1975, 1977; Daneshgar 2018)—most of these individual epics remain largely unexplored.

In this presentation, I aim to introduce the versions of the epic produced in Persian, Anatolian and Eastern Turkish, and Kurdish. I will address foundational questions such as the number of extant manuscripts for each version and their spatio-temporal distribution, as an initial step toward developing a transregional history of the epic’s circulation. I will also undertake a preliminary investigation into the interconnections among the various narratives and their mutual influences, examining how specific versions relate to particular regions and languages as part of vernacularization processes, and exploring how these connections may have evolved.

Sacha Alsancakli is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster, working within the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “Inner-Islamic Transfer of Knowledge within Arabic-Persian-Ottoman Translation Processes in the Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1750)”, TRANSLAPT. He received a PhD in Oriental Languages and Civilizations from Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, in 2018, with a doctoral dissertation on “Sharaf Khān Bidlīsī’s Sharafnāma (c. 1005/1597): Composition, Transmission, and Reception of a Chronicle of Kurdish Dynasties between Safavids and Ottomans”. As a cultural historian of the early-modern Turco-Iranian world, he researches historiography, popular literature, and the history of the book through the actors and processes involved in the production and circulation of manuscript texts. He has worked as a lecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2019–21) and at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco, Paris, since 2021), and has co-edited a collective volume on Authorship and Textual Transmission in the Manuscript Age (2023) and published book chapters and articles in various journals including Eurasian Studies, Kurdish Studies Journal, Diyâr, and Die Welt des Islams.