Abstract Although the authoritative collections of hadiths, fragmentary texts that enshrine the Prophet Muhammad’s sunna , or way, provide detailed guidance on how Muslim men should style their beards, it was not always clear how to interpret them. Later generations of Muslim scholars fashioned a discursive tradition around styling the beard that clarified the meanings entangled within these holy but cryptic texts to define the elements of Muslim style. This article examines Islamic etiquette on grooming the beard through the eyes of three brilliant but overlooked early modern Muslim thinkers living in Ottoman Arabic-speaking lands: Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1651) and his student ʿ Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), both of Damascus, and Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī (d. 1605), an émigré from Herat who settled Mecca. All were religious polymaths, scholars of both the exoteric discipline of jurisprudence ( fiqh ) and the esoteric discipline of Sufism ( taṣawwuf ), which figure into their imaginative treatment of beard grooming as a form of Muslim ethical self-fashioning. Nābulusī and Qārī composed independent treatises on grooming the beard that are examined here for the first time in the Euro-American academy. Their scholarly discourses reveal spirited inter-Muslim debates on growing, trimming, and combing the beard that elicit how Islam defined the well-groomed man.
Youshaa Patel (Wed,) studied this question.