The Curious Case of Early Muslim Hair Dyeing

Toward the end of his life, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), the hadith expert, jurist, and paragon of Sunni piety, received a sick visit from a group of people, among them an older man with dyed hair. Upon seeing the man, Aḥmad declared, “How it delights me to see an old man with dyed hair!” Then he mentioned someone who was not present and asked, “Why does he not dye [his hair]?” The visitors answered, “He is ashamed.” Aḥmad exclaimed in exasperation, “God be praised; [it is] a tradition from the Prophet!”1 On another occasionAḥmad catalogued the hair-dyeing practices of hadith scholarswhom he personally knew: of the sixty-nine scholars he mentioned, forty-eight dyed their hair and twenty-one did not.2 Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal was by no means the only hadith scholar with a keen interest in hair dyeing: ʿAbd al-Razzāq alṢanʿānī (d. 211/827) transmitted numerous hadith reports from his teacher Maʿmar b. Rāshid (d. 153/770) on the topic, and a generation after Aḥmad, Muḥammadb. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) dedicatedmore than sixty pages of his Tahdhīb al-āthār to citing and discussing reports relating to male hair dyeing (khiḍāb, ikhtiḍāb, ṣibāgh).3 (By “hair dyeing”we shouldunderstand, throughout this paper, the dyeing of grey or white hairs both on the head and in the beard.) This paper argues that the considerable volume of discussion in early hadith literature on the issue of men dyeing their hair can grant us significant insight into the logic of earlyMuslim identity and norm formation. The first to address