Rasmus Bech Olsen
If a governor falls in Damascus: Early Mamluk historiography analyzed through the story of Sayf al-Dīn Karāy al-Manṣūrī
In October 1311 the Mamluk governor of Damascus, Sayf al-Dīn Karāy, was arrested and exiled to Jordan on orders from Cairo.
The background for the arrest was a combination of local resentment and regional politics: In Damascus the governor had been confronted with street protests against his taxation policies. Parallel to the tax disputes, Karāy had become entangled in a protracted conflict between the sultan and a group of officers from the Manṣūrī Corps to which Karāy belonged. This overlap between a local and a regional context has ensured the arrest of Karāy a place in both Syrian and Egyptian chronicles, which makes it an excellent case for comparative analysis.
In my paper I thus analyze how three Damascene scholar-chroniclers and three Egyptian soldier-chroniclers narrate Karāy`s demise according to their respective authorial agendas.
In the first part, I argue that Karāy’s story gives us a prism through which to regard the competing world-views, which dominated Mamluk historiography on a general level. As I show, the social and geographic backgrounds of the authors in question as well as the political interests of their respective classes have a profound influence on how they choose to balance regional and local forces when explaining the arrest of Karāy.
The second part of my paper focuses on the authorial agency of the individual chronicler. As I argue here, a close comparison of the narratives of Karāy’s arrest also reveal connections and fault lines within the landscape of early Mamluk historiography which socio-political or geographical schools cannot account for, but which require careful examination of the individual chronicler, his personal political interests and the specific ideological trends of his oeuvre.
Doris-Behrens-Abouseif
Polymathy in Mamluk biographies
Mamluk biographical literature is a copious source of knowledge on the social and cultural life of the period. However, the scope of this literary genre being focused on the elite of the administrative and religious establishments, the picture conveyed is incomplete. Little is reported about scientists, professionals, practitioners, artists and craftsmen whose significant achievements are known to us rather through the physical evidence of their writings and works. An exceptional glimpse on non-traditionalist activities is given in some biographical entries dedicated to polymaths. My paper deals with some careers that combined a kaleidoscopic array of activities and discusses the status of the Mamluk polymath.
Victor de Castro Leon
Ibn al-Khaṭīb and his Mamluk reception
The main purpose of my paper proposal is to focus on the figure of the fourteen Grenadian polymath Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb and how his literary and historical production was received by Mamluk authors of his time and later. Ibn al-Khaṭīb is well known by his labor as a secretary and vizier of the Nasrid sultans Yūsuf I (1333-1354) and Muḥammad V (1354-1359/1362-1391), but also for being a very prolific author, mainly in History.
But one issue that has not yet been given much attention is the question of authorship in thirteen and fourteen authors, like Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Ibn Khaldūn and Mamluk scholars as al-Suyūṭī, al-Maqrizī and al-Sakhawī, for whom questions like authorship, plagiarism and fame were very important.
This “obsession” to make his works known to an extended audience was very significant in Ibn al-Khaṭīb´s life. His privileged position in the Nasrid court allowed him to establish a huge and extended network of personal and diplomatic relationships that contributed to the spreading of his works. But besides that, he employed every means at his disposal to make his works known in North Africa and especially in the East, and we have testimonies by himself, in his own works, but also in the production of contemporary authors and later, like mamluk scholars.
One of the means that he used to spread his fame was the sending of copies of his works to his colleagues in the East, like Ibn Khaldūn, who having settled in Egypt used Ibn al-Khaṭīb pieces for teaching in Cairo. Among the most important works which were sent by the Grenadian vizier in life to the East are the Kitāb Rawḍat al-ta´rīf, and mainly al-Iḥāṭa fī akhbār Gharnāṭa (a historical work composed according to adab criteria), exemplars that were sent to the Sufi Lodge Sa´īd and Su´adā` in Cairo and were received and used like models for the mamluk authors in the composition of their own works.
David Larsen
Judge, witness, and Lisān al-ḥāl in the “Disputation of night and day” by ʿAlwān al-Ḥamawī
The event that marked the end of Mamluk resistance to Ottoman rule in Syria was the defeat of Jānbardī al-Ghazālī. Appointed by Selim I to govern Damascus, Jānbardī began his uprising there five weeks after Selim’s death (21 Sep 1520). His siege of Aleppo in December 1520 was unsuccessful, and on 6 Feb 1521 Jānbardī was killed outside Damascus.
Our main sources for these events are the chronicles of Ibn Ṭulūn (d. 1546). Elsewhere in the written record, more immediate traces of Jānbardī’s rebellion appear in an allegorical debate by the Sufi shaykh ‘Alwān al-Ḥamawī (d. 1530), whose career spanned the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. Entitled Nuzhat al-asrār fī muḥāwarat al-layl wa-’l-nahār (GAL II.333, S II.461), this heretofore unedited text self-dates to 22 Feb 1521, and stands out from ‘Alwān’s large corpus of writings in that it is his only adab work. As such, it belongs to a genre predating Arabic literature: forms of allegorical debate are known in virtually every literary language of the ancient Near East. In Arabic too it was a productive genre, and an especially popular pair of disputants were Night and Day, whose contests are represented in (at least) five extant works of the 10th-19th centuries besides ‘Alwān’s.
My paper’s approach to Nuzhat al-asrār renders it available for historiographic analysis by locating the text within its generic and literary-historical contexts, as well as ‘Alwān’s Maghribī-influenced Sufi milieu. Only by attending to genre, subgenre, form and idiom is it possible to evaluate ‘Alwān’s reaction to the events “brought down on the lands of Syria by Jānbardī al-Ghazālī and the military might of the Ottoman regime, to whom God granted victory – a thing that had not entered our mind,” ‘Alwān says, “nor was it in our calculations.”
Christian Mauder
“And they read in a book of history” – Consuming, presenting, and producing texts about the past in al-Ghawrī’s majālis as legitimatory practices
The eyewitness accounts of the majālis or learned salons hosted by the pen-ultimate Mamluk Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501-1516) allow deep insights into the dynamics of the consumption, performative presentation and production of texts about the past as legitimatory practices at the Mamluk court. Bearing themselves witness to the adabization of literary elite communication, these texts show that central works of the Arabic historiographical tradition were not only physically present as objects in the Sultan’s majālis, but also consumed as adab by the attendees of these events. Moreover, historiographical works were presented in a way that encouraged impromptu practices of commenting, scrutinizing and questioning, while the works themselves possessed agency in influencing and shaping the course of debate. Finally, the accounts of al-Ghawrī’s salons produced at the Mamluk court constitute literary texts about the past that defy easy generic classification and abound in intertextual relations with the historiographical works discussed during the majālis.
The paper argues that the cultural practices of the consumption, performative presentation and production of texts about the past in al-Ghawrī’s majālis served to represent and legitimate the social status of the participants in these events in general and the Sultan in particular. To this aim, the attendees of the majālis used their multilevel engagement with the historiographical tradition to demonstrate their possession of cultural and economic capital, integrate themselves symbolically and discursively into a carefully constructed tradition of legitimate Muslim rule, and enact and reaffirm their own identity as members of a refined elite of udabāʾ.
Evan Metzger
Historical representation as resurrection: al-Udfuwī and the imitation of Allah
It has been claimed that Muslims in the Islamic Middle Periods did not recognize the legitimacy of the concept of imitatio Dei, in part due to the prevalence of aniconism within Islamic traditions. Yet this is far from an obvious conclusion if one considers he implications of Qur’anic verses 24:55, 2:30 and 38:26, the ṣaḥīḥ hadith about God making Adam in his image, and, in particular, the importance of the Ṣufī tradition of theosophy after its amelioration with the Sunnī-Jamā‘ī tradition following the writings of al-Ghazālī. A study of one Mamluk-era text reveals the limitations of assuming a profound ontological gap between humans and Allah in Islamic representations of humanity. In this paper, I show how an Upper Egyptian historian and biographer – Kamāl al-Dīn al-Udfuwī – employs language and mimicry to produce a text imitative of God’s act of creation.
In his biographical history of Upper Egypt, al-Ṭāli‘ al-Sa‘īd al-Jāmi‘ Asmā‘ Nujabā‘ al-Ṣa‘īd, al-Udfuwī uses parallel structure to place his craft (fann) of historiography in a direct relationship to God’s ability to bring humans back to life. Rather than the mystics’ theosophy, al-Udfuwī semiotically elevates history to a discourse which consciously echoes the Resurrection. This sublimification of mundane history is possible in part because al-Udfuwī’s task is to record for posterity the transmission of religious knowledge (‘ilm) among the ‘ulamā’ of Upper Egypt. Employing Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, this study explores the ways in which al-Udfuwī interweaves multiple meanings and registers of discourse to transform mundane history into a supramundane act of creation.
This essay also posits a significant relationship between al-Udfuwī’s defense of the lyrical encounter of the soul with the Divine and his heteroglossic approach to history.
Nobutaka Nakamachi
Why did al-ʿAynī erroneously note his source as Ibn Kathīr?
Badr al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-ʿAynī, an intellectual representative of the Circassian Mamluk Period (1382–1517), is known as the author of the universal history, titled ʿIqd al-Jumān fī Taʾrīkh Ahl al-Zamān. Like other mamluk historians, while writing ʿIqd al-Jumān, al-ʿAynī frequently referred to several historical works, written by his predecessors. In particular, since his colleague and rival Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalānī indicated in the preface to his chronicle Inbāʾ al-Ghumar that al-ʿAynī cited Ibn Kathīr, many researchers, to this day, have had noted that al-ʿAynī considered Ibn Kathīr’s al-Bidāyah wa’l-Nihāyah as one of the main source. However, comparing the text of ʿIqd al-Jumān to that of al-Bidāyah wa’l-Nihāyah, demonstrates that the latter does not contain the information described by al-ʿAynī. Why does such an inconsistency occur between them? Does this error stem from a misconception by al-ʿAynī or was this an intentional forgery?
A comparison between several editions of al-ʿAynī’s chronicles and the other historians’ works, including al-Bidāyah wa’l-Nihāyah, clarifies the citational relation between al-ʿAynī and his contemporaries. There are two possible explanations: first, al-ʿAynī had simply misconceived his source as Ibn Kathīr, or, second, he had intentionally made false references. In case of the former, it should be asked what al-ʿAynī’s true source was and what circumstances made him to contaminate these sources. In case of the latter, we focus on what the merit of his forgery was. This paper illustrates the mamluk intellectual’s practice of citation in writing history.
Clement Onimus
al-ʿAyni, a committed historian
The study of the life and historiographical works of al-‘Aynī (1362-1451) is concerned with his interactions with the ‘ulamā’ and the umarā’. Al-‘Aynī’s successful career made him one of the most powerful scholars of his time. A variety of interactions may describe his interpersonal relations with other scholars, such as friendship, rivalry or a master/disciple relation. Through the biographies and the occurrences of al-‘Aynī in the works of contemporary historians, it is possible to retrace his ascension and setbacks and to define the evolution of al-‘Aynī’s position in the mamluk scholarly field. His works have been as criticized as they have been incensed through satires and praises. At times, the literary rivalry changes into a theoretical controversy that can be found in books on ḥadīṯ as well as in their historiographical works.
The way the authors deal with contemporary events in their works can be studied in connexion with their interactions with the Mamluk factions as they were dependent to the favours and the intercessions of the emirs and sultan. Not only al-‘Aynī’s social mobility strategies are closely linked to the history of the Mamluk factions’ balance of power but the way he wrote and rewrote History reveals this factional involvement. The edition and study of a forgotten part of his ‘Iqd al-ǧumān that I am preparing, compared to the works of the other historians and to the panegyrics he wrote in order to obtain the sultans’ favour, shows how History, historiography and the discourse on the historians are interwoven.
Iria Santas De Arcos
Andalusian ʾadab in the Mamluk period
The aim of my proposal is to deepen in the Andalusian adab production and particularly try to figure out the reception process of this kind of multivolume encyclopedias in the East, mainly in the Mamluk authors.
Works of adab regularly incorporate moralizing and instructive elements to the vast knowledge that the adīb was supossed to acquire but, unfortunately, the importance of the adab works has been neglected by scholarship until a few decades ago so it is now when adab is taking the place deserved. This literary genre was taken into consideration again by the mamluks scholars and they composed a great number of works around him, for instance: al-Qalqashandī and his Ṣubḥ al-ʿashā, Ibn Tagribirdī, and his al-Nujūm al-Zāhīra fī mulūk Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira and al-Nawājī and his Ḥalbat al-kumayt, among others.
Between the Andalusian adab works I´ve focused the attention firstly in one of the earliest and most representatives examples of this genre, the Andalusian encyclopedia al-´Iqd al-farīd “The Unique Necklace” composed by the Cordoba author Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi (860-940) in the second Ummayad caliphate (929-1031).
Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi’s composition is one of the first dated historical texts preserved and produced in al-Andalus, but despite its importance and magnitude its central aspects remain unstudied and the full impact of al-´Iqd al-farīd inside and outside Andalusia remains to be investigated.
So, in this process of trying to figure the impact of this particular Andalusian adab composition in the East, I resort to Mamluk sources that took into consideration this work. We know is true that probably it was during the Mamluk period when al-´Iqd al-farīd reached the highest point of its diffusion and compilations like the Nihāyat al-ʿarab of al-Nuwayrī or Subḥ al-ʿashā of al-Qalqashandī used al-ʿIqd al-farīd as a model and as an important source.
Daniella Talmon-Heller
Historiography in Ibn Taymiyya’s treatises against ziyārāt
“Ibn Taymiyya was little interested in history and wrote none,” claims a leading Mamlukist in an essay about Mamluk writers. This paper begs to differ, and bring to light Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement with historiography in iftāʾ. It draws upon his fatwās and treatises on pilgrimage to Ascalon (one of the erstwhile thughūr – frontier garrison towns, on the southern coast of Jund Filastin), to shrines dedicated to the head of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī in Ascalon and in Cairo, and to the sacred precincts (ḥarams) of Jerusalem and Hebron. Ibn Taymiyya weaves sophisticated historical narratives into his legal reasoning against the authenticity of venerated tombs of prophets and members of Ahl al-Bayt, exposing lacunas, contradictions and unreasonable assertions in the accepted truisms about the whereabouts of the bodies of prophets and saints, and their cults. He also argues against the widespread practice of ziyāra (visitation) to such sites, blaming Shi`i dynasties for spreading the bidʿa at a particularly vulnerable time for the Islamic polity. His reconstruction of the history of the Islamic frontier leads him to stress the temporality of territorial definitions and their dependence on historical context, rather than on inherent eternal properties. Hence he argues against conventional notions of the religious merits of certain places, Jerusalem included, and of murābaṭa (safeguarding the frontiers of Islam). Ibn Taymiyya’s reasoning obviously did not convince his contemporaries, yet it resonates in the works of later Mamluk historians and of present-day scholars, demonstrating – again – the continuing relevance and originality Ibn Taymiyya’s work.
Gowaart Van Den Bossche
“Literarisierung” reconsidered in the context of sultanic biographies: the case of BnF Arabe 1705
In Ulrich Haarmann’s seminal article on Literarisierung, he made an exception for the sultanic biographies written by Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir and Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī: he claimed that these were texts that followed in the footsteps of an older chancery tradition and thus fell outside of the influence of new historiographical tendencies. This paper will challenge that exception and reconsider the value of Literarisierung by applying it to these texts in particular. This will be done specifically by looking at a hitherto unstudied text belonging to this genre, found in the unique manuscript Arabe 1705 of the French Bibliothèque Nationale. It will be shown that this undated manuscript can be identified as part of Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī’s biography of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, which originally probably consisted of several volumes. Containing alternate accounts of a crucial phase in al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s career, especially the period leading up to his third ascent of the throne and the short-lived sultanate of al-Muẓaffar Baybars (1309-1310), this surviving bit is clearly of interest to historians wishing to study this period. However, similar to Shāfiʿ’s better known biographies of Qalāwūn and Baybars, the text also offers much material for the study of the fruitful intersection of adab, especially as it was cultivated in the chancery, and historiography. Here too, the majority of the text is written in sajʿ, frequently includes (self-written) poems, correspondence, and official documents, and is replete with panegyrical passages. Furthermore, a large part of the surviving text transcends chronography, and integrates historical happenings into a powerful and recognisable heroic narrative of the loss and reclaiming of power.
Koby Yosef
Al-Maqrīzī’s Sulūk, Muqaffā, and Durar al-ʿUqūd: Trends of ‘literarization’ in the historical corpus of a fifteenth-century Egyptian religious scholar
Speaking of a ‘Literarization’ of history writing during the Mamluk period, Ulrich Haarmann referred mainly to the increasing use of dialectal elements, dialogues, anecdotes, and other adab materials, in the historical narrative in chronicles written mostly by Egyptian chroniclers related to the military institution. After Haarmann, much attention has been given to such historians who were active mainly during the fourteenth century (Ibn al-Dawādarī, al-Yūsufī, Qarāṭāy). Li Guo focused on a different trend of ‘Literarization’ current among Syrian Ḥadīth scholars active in the early fourteenth century.The ‘Literarization’ in these chronicles is much more conspicuous in the obituary notes that record learned men’s adab product, mainly high quality poetry. Trends of ‘literarization’ during the fifteenth century, a period dominated by Egyptian historians who were mostly religious scholars, have received much less attention. In fact, according to Haarmann, al-Maqrīzī’s writing show a “conservative anti-literary historiographical ethos”, however, other scholars noted that he combined “entertaining” or adab-like materials in his historical writing. It would be argued that al-Maqrīzī combined earlier Egyptian and scholarly historiographical trends.
When reporting on fourteenth-century events in al-Sulūk al-Maqrīzī relies heavily on the ‘highly literarized’ chronicle of al-Yūsufī but ‘translates’ his colloquial usages into classical Arabic. When describing contemporary events, however, al-Maqrīzī’s chronicle is almost totally ‘de-literarized’. In biographical entries of fourteenth-century amirs in al-Muqaffá, al-Maqrīzī combines anecdotes on the amirs from al-Yūsufī and again gets rid of colloquial usages. In biographical entries of al-Maqrīzī’s contemporaries in Durar al-ʻUqūd, the amirs’ biographies are ‘dry’ and contain no anecdotes on them or adab-like reports from them. In contrast, biographies of scholars contain their poetry, but also stories and wisdom sayings, sometimes in a clear istiṭrād style. It would seem that for al-Maqrīzī contemporary history was a ‘serious’ thing. In contrast past events and biographies of past amirs could be used for entertainment purposes. Biographies of contemporary scholars contain also ‘popular’ lore that now becomes part of their cultural heritage, but transmitted in classical Arabic. Contemporary amirs are mentioned in a functional way and are not considered ‘interesting’ or able to contribute to the literary heritage.