{"title":"History Writing, Adab, and Intertextuality in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria: Old and New Readings","authors":"J. Steenbergen","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_002","url":null,"abstract":"Fifty years ago, in 1969, the Islamicist, historian, and pioneer of so-calledMamluk studies Ulrich Haarmann (1942–99) submitted his PhD dissertation on history writing in Egypt and Syria in the period 1260–1340ce.1 Haarmann transformed the text of his dissertation almost immediately into a monograph, which was published in 1970 and entitled Source studies for the early Mamluk period (Quellenstudien zur frühen Mamlukenzeit).2 Its main findings were soon also communicated in the summarized format of an article that was published in 1971.3 In the same period, almost simultaneouslywith the youngHaarmann’sQuellenstudien, another dissertationonexactly the same topicwaspublished in monograph format. This was the work of the American historian and “Mamlukist” Donald Little (1932–2017), entitled Introduction toMamlūk historiography: Analysis of Arabic annalistic and biographical sources for the reign of al-Malik al-NāṣirMuḥammad ibnQalāʾūn.4 BothHaarmann’s andLittle’s dissertationswerepublished in twonewly establishedGerman series, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen and Freiburger Islamstudien respectively, each closely related to the invigorating scholarship and academic leadership of Haarmann’s PhD supervisor in Freiburg, Hans Robert Roemer (1915–97). Ever since the early 1970s, these publications of Haarmann and Little have had a substantial impact on the relatively small field of the study of latemedieval Arabic historiography. With that field’s relative growth from the late 1990s onwards, they have continued to retain referential status, even when some of the methods and assumptions that had informed Haarmann’s and Little’s PhD research in the 1960s came under increasing scrutiny. In fact, as will be further detailed in this introduction, the work they began and the insights they brought to the field have continued to inspire, and even define, the study of Arabic history writing in Egypt and Syria between the 13th and 16th centuries.","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123676908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba (1377–1448): His Life and Historical Work","authors":"Tarek Sabraa","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_006","url":null,"abstract":"The Mamluk period witnessed a substantial number of scholarly families that appeared as dominant in many places in Egypt and Syria. This is due to several factors, such as the interest of sultans and amirs in promoting scholarship through the construction of madrasas and related infrastructures and the bestowal of money and gifts on scholars.1 One of the most important factors that played a role in securing the prominence of scholarly families is the inheritanceof religiouspositions among the familymembers, inwhich someof them inherited their fathers’ positions while they were still younger than eight or nine years of age.2 This played an important role in encouraging scholars to direct their children and grandchildren to study the Islamic sciences (e.g., jurisprudence, ḥadīth, theology, literature, etc.) in order to take over their positions after them. Among the families that were famous during the Mamluk era is the family of Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba, which had a significant role and impact on the political and scientific life during the Ayyubid and Mamluk eras. Taqī al-Dīn Abū Bakr b. Qāḍī Shuhba (1377–1448) is probably the most famous person in this family, and perhaps he is the one who played the most prominent role in its fame. Since, to my knowledge, this scholar has not received much attention in modern academia, this paper is meant to be the first of several ones to follow thatwill shed light on IbnQāḍī Shuhba, his significance as a scholar, andhis work as a historian.3 In the current paper, Iwill give anoverviewof his historical","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"182 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121023672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social and Intellectual Rivalries and Their Narrative Representations in Biographical Dictionaries: The Representation of Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ—A Case Study","authors":"Mohammad Gharaibeh","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_008","url":null,"abstract":"Biographical dictionaries are important sources for the study of the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the premodern Islamicateworld. And although documentary sources (including archeological artifacts, architecture, endowment deeds, numismatic evidence, manuscripts, and certificates of transmission [samāʿ]) have been used with increased regularity since the 1970s, the long-lasting mainstays for social and intellectual historians still remain biographical dictionaries in addition to other narrative sources.1 Especially the rich material of the Mamluk period provides the researcher with a wide variety of information about individuals, their social contacts, and their education. Biographical dictionaries also allow conclusions about larger trends regarding society or mobility, for example, if analyzed quantitatively.2 However, as tempting as the information provided by biographical dictionaries is for the study of social and intellectual history, it has certain limits due to the selection of material that the compiler needs to make from the sources he has at his disposal. These processes of selection, (re)arrangement, and altering of the materials result in a narrative framing of the past that is shaped by the worldview of the compiler and that is often described as authorial agency. While a growing number of studies analyze narrative strategies and authorial agency in chronicles,3 there are comparatively few studies that approach biographical dictionaries in the samemanner.4 However, scholars such asMakdisi,","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125271557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Historical Representation as Resurrection: Al-Udfuwī and the Imitation of Allāh","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_014","url":null,"abstract":"In commencing his exceptional study of Qūṣ, the important medieval regional center that produced so many ʿulamāʾ in the 13th and 14th centuries, JeanClaude Garcin noted that “notre étude n’aurait guère eu de sens, si nous n’avions disposé du dictionnaire biographique des notabilités du haut Saʾid composé à l’époque mammelouke.”1 The biographical dictionary to which he was referring, so essential to his study and, indeed, to any study of Upper Egypt during the 13th and 14th centuries, is al-Ṭāliʿ al-Saʿīd al-Jāmiʿ Asmāʾ Nujabāʾ alṢaʿīd by Kamāl al-Dīn Jaʿfar b. Thaʿlab al-Udfuwī (d. 748/1347).2 This biographical history is a unique source for Mamluk history. Its extraordinary nature and value are due to not only its inclusion of 594 biographies, including fourwomenwhowere either born or spent a considerable amount of time in Upper Egypt, but also the detailed geographical description of Upper Egypt that al-Udfuwī included at the beginning of the text. It should be noted for the sake of accuracy that al-Udfuwī’s Upper Egypt begins around Ikhmīm and ends byAswan at the border of Nuba—the area known as al-Ṣaʿīd al-Aʿlā— and not everything south of the Giza up to Aswan. Beyond this introductory geographical description, the bulk of the text is dedicated to biographies of various individuals who were either born in Upper Egypt or lived there for a large part of their lives. The vastmajority of these individuals died in either the 7th/13th or 8th/14th century and are mostly scholars or poets. Because al-Udfuwī’s text is the only biographical dictionary dedicated solely toUpperEgyptwrittenduring this period tohavebeenpreserved (and likely the only one written during the premodern period at all), it has long been mined as a source of information about the condition and people of the region. This is a centuries-old tradition. One of the earliest Westerners to have done this","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126654487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ibn al-Khaṭīb and His Mamluk Reception","authors":"Víctor de Castro León","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_005","url":null,"abstract":"Every scholar working on the history of the IslamicWest is familiar with the life and works of the Granadian polymath Ibn al-Khaṭīb (714–76/1313–74), while maybe that is not the case with those working on other regions, mainly the Islamic East. For this reason, it is important to briefly introduce this famous Western scholar. He was born in Loja (Granada) in November 714/1313. Educated in all the subjects and knowledge of his time, he became the famous secretary and head of the chancellery and a powerful vizier of the Naṣrid kingdom of Granada during the period of its greatest splendor: the reigns of Sultan Yūsuf i (r. 733–54/1333–54) and his son Muḥammad v (754–60/1354–9, 763– 93/1362–91). In the year 772/1371, tired of the courtly work and worn out by a lifetime full of power, ambitions, conspiracies, intrigues, and personal misfortunes, he decided to escape from the kingdom of Granada toward the Merinid kingdom of Fez of the Sultan ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 768–74/1366–72). Ibn al-Khaṭīb spent the last years of his life under the latter’s protection, and subsequently under that of his minor son Muḥammad al-Saʿīd iv (r. 774–6/1372–4) and his powerful vizier Ibn Gāzī, while he was accused in Granada of treason, disloyalty, and heresy. In the year 776/1374, a series of adverse events finally led his adversaries from Granada, and also from the Maghreb, to get Ibn al-Khaṭīb imprisoned and murdered in prison. From a historical point of view, Ibn al-Khaṭīb1 is the most important Naṣrid polymath, the author of many books on different topics (Sufism, law, poetry,","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115359093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“And They Read in That Night Books of History”: Consuming, Discussing, and Producing Texts about the Past in al-Ghawrī’s Majālis as Social Practices","authors":"ChristianMauder","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_013","url":null,"abstract":"[Al-Walīd b. Yazīd] once grabbed his brother and fornicated with him. Moreover, he wanted to drink [wine] on top of the Kaʿba. The author of the work of history (ṣāḥib al-tārīkh) said: “No one from among the Muslims did (ʿamila) what al-Walīd did.” Bon mot (durra): He whose victorymay be glorious [i.e., Sultan al-Ghawrī] said: “Nay, neither a Christian nor a Mazdaist nor any other person who ever did anything (aḥad min al-ʿāmilīn) did something similar to what this ill-fated sinner (al-fājir almanḥūs) did.”1","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125783148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Language and Style in Mamluk Historiography","authors":"Koby Yosef","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_004","url":null,"abstract":"The increasing use of nonstandard Arabic by Mamluk historians in the historical narrative (ḥawādith) of chronicles has been considered as one of the most noticeable characteristics of the process of “literarization,” or the popularization of Mamluk historiography,1 which went hand in hand with the increasing use of stylistic elements drawn from the literature of adab, perhaps most notably anecdotes or story-like reports with dialogues or utterances in direct speech.2 While some, mainly editors of Mamluk historical works, made notes and observations on the language of specific works or historians, to date, there have not been too many attempts at an overall survey of different general trends of language use in Mamluk historical texts. Notwithstanding this, it has been suggested that usages of nonstandard Arabic are more typical of the 9th/15th century,3 andmore specifically of Egypt in the second half of the 9th/15th century (the so-called “Cairo narrative style”).4 This chronological/geographical perspective, however, downplays the facts that many Mamluk historians used nonstandard Arabic before the 9th/15th century and that some Syrian historians also used nonstandard Arabic. Alternatively, it has been suggested that differences in background and life experience of the historians affected their language and style. Ulrich Haarmann perhaps did not state explicitly that usages of nonstandard Arabic are typical of historians related to themilitary institution; however, he highlighted the fact that many of the historians who wrote “literarized” histories employ-","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124590854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Texts and Contexts: Producing a Sufi Environment in the Cairo Sultanate","authors":"Z. Pierrepont","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_009","url":null,"abstract":"Aḥmad b. Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (773–852/1372–1449) was a famous religious scholar and historian, whose reputation in ḥadīth studies was unparalleled in Cairo at the time of his death.* He stood and was remembered as a man of knowledge, wealth, and influence, both socially and scholarly. Son of a wealthy merchant family on his maternal side and a famous and ancient Shāfiʿī bayt al-ʿilm on his paternal side, he occupied a position of mudarris in various institutions of Cairo and was appointed many times as qāḍī l-quḍāt of the Shāfiʿī school, for a total of 23 years. His life is relatively well known, mainly due to his fame but also the very extensive biography that his student Muḥammad al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497) dedicated to him, al-Jawāhir wa-l-durar fī tarjamat shaykh al-islām Ibn Ḥajar. Ibn Ḥajar himself wrote his autobiography and gave the list of his mashāyikh, and most of the 9th/15th-century historians of the Cairo Sultanate provided information and biographic notices about him. Modern research also took an interest in this character and at least four academic books have been written in the last decades that deal with Ibn Ḥajar’s life: S. Kawash’s Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (1372–1449ad), Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī muʾarrikh by K. ʿIzz al-Dīn, The life and works of Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī by Aftab A. Raḥmānī, mostly an organized compendium of al-Sakhāwī’s Jawāhir, and IbnḤajar by R. Kevin Jacques. Thus, when it comes to his personal life, his writings, his institutional positions and his travels, we comparatively know a lot about him. It should not come as a surprise, since Ibn Ḥajar was remembered as one of the greatest Islamic scholars of his time, due mainly to his involvement inḥadīth studies and, amongmanyworks, his famous commentary on the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, the Fatḥ al-bārī. Nevertheless, many things are still unknown","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115225589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Andalusi Adab in the Mamluk Period","authors":"Iria Santás de Arcos","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_007","url":null,"abstract":"We currently know a lot about the enormous cultural transfer from the Islamic East that reached al-Andalus, particularly in the course of the 3th/9th century when Andalusi scholars started to visit themain Eastern centers of knowledge, resulting, as Isabel Toral-Niehoff stated, in “a creative incorporation of knowledge, textual material, cultural models and attitudes of Abbasid Baghdad in Umayyad Córdoba.”1We know less about the reception process, influence, and impact in the Islamic East of the vast amount of knowledge produced in alAndalus, particularly when it comes to works belonging to the literary genre of adab. Compilations of this genre of adab, normally thematically arranged and presented in different chapters or books, gathered all the knowledge that an educated man was expected to possess. The first manifestations of this type of Arabic prose writing corresponded to the 8th century and happened especially in the Islamic East. Adab, however, reached a Golden Age during the 9th and 10th centuries due to the important work also carried out in alAndalus.2 This paper intends to reconstruct the reception process in the Islamic East of the most important adabworks of al-Andalus. It wishes to do so specifically for al-ʿIqd al-farīd, the excellent adab compilation of the 10th-century Andalusi","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126040691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Literarisierung Reconsidered in the Context of Sultanic Biography: The Case of Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī’s Sīrat al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (BnF MS Arabe 1705)","authors":"Gowaart Van Den Bossche","doi":"10.1163/9789004458901_015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004458901_015","url":null,"abstract":"While the historiography of late medieval Egypt and Syria is exceptionally well documented and many, if not most, of its major sources have by now been edited and studied, manuscript repositories still contain several historical texts that have received little to no attention from scholars. This essay will present one such unpublished and mostly unstudied excerpt of a historical biography devoted to Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (r. 693–4/1293–4, 698–708/1299–1309, 709–41/1309–41) preserved in the manuscript Arabe 1705, held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. It will be argued that its author can be identified as Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī (d. 730/1330), who also wrote two well-known historical biographies of the sultans Baybars (r. 658–76/1260–77) and Qalāwūn (r. 678–89/1281–90). Using this particular text as a case study, I will discuss how the concept of “Literarisierung,” first applied to Mamluk historiography by Ulrich Haarmann almost half a century ago, may still be used fruitfully to think about how historiography and literary modes of expression interacted. In a which defined Form,” the inner","PeriodicalId":401754,"journal":{"name":"New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131590679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}