Port cities of the eastern Mediterranean: urban culture in the late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

and rhetoric). A short concluding section reviews the causes of the downturn in Ibn Tulun’s fortunes prior to his death and the legacy of the state inherited by his son and successor, Khumarawayh. This biography provides a much-needed replacement for Zaky Hassan’s outdated study, Les Tulunides (1933). An exceptionally well-written, tightly constructed, and immersive study of a leading Abbasid personality, Gordon’s work makes the reader think about the social and political environment in which he acted and the nature of the surviving evidence of his life. It addresses the knotty problem of the source material for Ibn Tulun’s life, noting the lack of archival materials as well as physical evidence (the one exception being Ibn Tulun’s mosque), as well as the difficulties of using the two important biographies of Ibn al-Daya and al-Balawi. Constructed mainly from anecdotal testimony, these biographies present a mostly favorable view of their subject, praising him for his moral commitment and piety, as well as his determination and energy. But too little is known about their authors to judge how far their largely positive endorsement reflects the realities of his rule. As for the wider historical context, Ibn Tulun’s biography prompts us to wonder how was it that the Turkish ghilman corps, to which Ibn Tulun’s father belonged, had come to dominate the caliphal court by the time that Ibn Tulun set out for Egypt. What happened to the eastern Iranian noblemen and their Transoxanian soldiers that al-Muʿtasim had billeted alongside the Turkish military slaves in the barracks of Samarra less than three decades earlier? Second, where (and who) were the Egyptian elite in this story of the emergence of Egypt’s first independent Islamic governorate? The first opponents whom Ibn Tulun faced on his arrival were mostly expatriate members of the Abbasid elite, with strong connections to the caliphal court. The absence of local power brokers and militias at the center of power in Greater Fustat is striking, and provides a marked contrast to the politics of emergent regional polities elsewhere. The notion of a Tulunid “dynasty,” itself a product of the taxonomic imperatives of earlier scholarship, is rightly called into question by Gordon’s exposure of the fragility of ties that held the Tulunid household together after its founder’s death. Although the restricted format of the series in which the book appears precludes extensive contextualization, some reference to the wider issue of the emergence of contemporary “successor” states (Aghlabids, Saffarids, and Samanids) would have been helpful, in highlighting both the uniqueness of Ibn Tulun’s situation (in that he remained throughout his governorship a fully engaged member of the Samarran Turkish elite) and the diverse origins of contemporary regional governors. That apart, Gordon’s careful and judicious reconstruction of the career of Ibn Tulun provides a model for the kind of fine-grained biography that needs to be replicated for other rulers of emergent regional polities, before the causes and consequences of the decline of Abbasid authority and power in the later 9th century CE can be properly assessed.