Panel 1 Ursula Bsees: Narratives and documents: new directions in middle period historiography
Written source material from all periods of history is generally divided into “documentary” and “literary” or “narrative” texts. While this division is doubtlessly useful for a quick categorization and even necessary from a diplomatic and structural point of view, it can lead to negligence towards other aspects that “documents” or “literary texts” bear, meaning the literary portion of documents on the one hand and the way in which literary narratives can document the circumstances of their time on the other hand.
We commonly expect documents to state simple, straightforward, “neutral” content, but we should not ignore the fact that even historical records were written by people with an agenda, by people who transported their own view on past, but also on present events into the texts they were producing. At the same time, “literature” or mainly narrative texts also have their own ideological framework in which they act. Deviations from an otherwise established text must therefore be regarded as a result of deliberate manipulations; of manipulations whose aim was to lead the prospective audience towards certain ideas. The use of terminology in texts; be they primarily documentary or literary, also points to possibilities of shaping the perception of e.g. a profession or a group of individuals over time.
The shared aim of this panel’s papers is showing the interactions and influences that often occur between texts that receive the categorization “documentary” or “literary,” i.e. narrative. Its disadvantage is that it creates a dichotomy that is mostly based on shape and outer appearance of the texts, but does not take their multiple functions into account. We will present texts and developments that show the interplay between “documentary” and “narrative” aspects of text genres, and the strategies by which writers integrated them into each other.
Ursula Bsees: Historiography in a literary narrative or literature in historical narrative? Transmission
and transformation of a manuscript from Egypt
This paper deals with the broad question of how historiographic accounts, local history and legendary or mythical elements intertwine, correlate and interact in the narrative of a sixth/thirteenth-century manuscript from a private household in Egypt. The manuscript that has no title calls itself a nasab and taʾrīkh and basically recounts the history of the descendants of Saʿd b. ʿUbāda in Egypt and Syria.
In addition to the genealogical aspect, the narrative features a considerable amount of tribal history and scattered, pseudo-historiographic accounts that sometimes do not seem to make much sense in the narrative as a whole.
While the significance of tribal history can be explained approximately by its relevance for local history, the passages that have been borrowed from mainstream Sunni historiography deserve a closer look. They seem to present accounts in the manner of historical akhbār, but when comparing them to the original texts in, for example, Taʾrīkh mandīnat dimashq by ʿAsqalānī, we notice slight deviations. The differences are the result of slight distortions of the original texts, too slight for calling them forgeries, but still clearly carried out in order to serve a certain purpose. In all likelihood, the author of the manuscript’s narrative wanted to convey a certain picture to his potential readership; he aimed at a certain angle from which he wished said akhbār to be seen.
This idea (or these ideas) that underlie(s) the whole literary and (pseudo-)historiographic narrative will be traced and shown in detail, as well as analyzed regarding the group(s) that might have wanted to construct a certain social and political position by shaping the narrative to fit their own view on their collective history
Fozia Bora: Narratives that document and documents that narrate: Intertextuality in the Mamluk
chronicle
In typically resourceful fashion, Mamluk chroniclers often procured a range of documents (letters, state decrees, legal or administrative specimens acquired from decommissioned archives, &c) which they incorporated into historiographical works. This practice was more prominent for the history of the Mamluk era, for which documents were in plentiful supply (note, for example, Ibn al-Furāt’s (d. 1405) adducing of exactly-dated documents for the reign of Baybars (r. 1260-1277)), but is also evinced for pre-Mamluk history, for example that of the Fatimids (969-1171).
In this talk, I explore the heuristic and hermeneutic implications of a fixed distinction between ‘narrative’ and ‘document’ as a product of early modern Orientalist taxonomic norms, and explore the prospects for regarding these categories as reductive of an epistemic culture in which historiographical inscription took in and synthesised ‘information’ from a variety of sources and rubrics. As far as the chronicle is concerned, a seamless textual practice of both narratology and documentation can be discerned, as twin facets of the drive to inscribe history in archival mode.
Taking examples from Ibn al-Furāt’s Ta’rīkh al-duwal, I examine the documentary modes of narratives and the narrative mode of documents within Mamluk chronicles, and assess the implications of these for a field in which new medieval Islamic documentary corpora (for example from the Cairo Geniza and from Mamluk Damascus) are being discovered and investigated. Can it be argued that a culture of documentation, transcending ‘genre’, reached further into different forms of literary composition than has been appreciated heretofore?
Amenah Fairouz Abdulkarim: The Mamluk miʽmār: A new interpretation of endowment deeds and
chronicle narratives
It has been prevalently argued in modern scholarship that the Mamluk miʽmār had a low status working for endowed properties as a repairman. However, a comparative approach to endowment deeds and chronicle accounts reveals that in ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo he was recognized as professional specialist at the top of the building profession. A chronological order of the historical accounts of al-Maqrīzī, Waliyy al-Dīn al-ʽIrāqī, Ibn Taghrībirdī, Ibn Ṭūlūn, Ibn Fahd, and al-Nahrawālī, where specific references to the figure of miʽmār were made, indicates that the term miʽmār emerged in Mamluk Egypt during the ninth/fifteenth century to designate a group of professional expert builders – closer to architects in our modern understanding to the term – who conducted construction projects for Mamluk sultans. A parallel emergence of the term miʽmār in ninth/fifteenth-century Cairene endowment deeds to designate a professional expert is also visible. Evidence from both chronicles and endowment deeds for specific individuals shows that this newly emerged miʽmār in ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo was interchangeable with the muhandis, who was summoned by Mamluk qādīs (judges) to court as an authoritative expert representing the building craft. A new interpretation of these sources suggests that this interchangeable use of the terms muhandis and miʽmār for certain individuals with the same qualifications, skills, and responsibilities implies a change in the building profession, which could possibly be viewed as a step towards a professionalized craft, and as a development in the social recognition of its practitioners.
Mohammad Gharaibeh: Narrative strategies in biographical dictionaries
Biographical dictionaries provide the researcher with a wide variety of personal information about individuals. However, a comparison shows huge differences between each biographical dictionary, so that researchers often conclude that a certain historian is better informed, closer to the reality of his time or sloppy in his work and missing “important” information in comparison to others. This conclusion draws from the assumption that these dictionaries were impressive monuments of knowledge management, of which information could be taken out to rebuild the reality of the past. By contrast, this paper understands the differences between the dictionaries as conscious decisions of the author to design their work in a certain manner. By leaving out or including additional material they (re)produce knowledge to support their own worldview and their religious and intellectual agenda. Moreover, the authors choose certain narrative strategies to strengthen their point of view, to create a (literary) story out of past events, and finally to fit the overall orientation of a certain work.
This paper will focus on the of narrative strategies authors of biographical dictionaries use to depict religious scholars. First, a comparison of different works of one author shall demonstrate how the author arrange his material for each work differently according to the purpose of the work. Second, the works of two authors will be contrasted to highlight the difference between the narrative strategies of each author. An analysis of the social and intellectual context shall then, in a third step, reveal additional motives behind narrative strategies.
Panel 2 Amir Mazor: Jews in the Mamluk sultanate: social, political, and religious aspects
The panel will discuss several aspects of Jewish life under the Mamluks, in the light of recent developments in research, and based on Jewish sources such as travel literature and Genizah documents. The first talk will argue that the stress that was placed upon dhimmis, and especially Jews, should be placed in the right cultural and social context; the second talk will shed light on the social and political life of the Jews of Alexandria, and the third talk will discuss the influence of Sufi ideas and practices on the Jewish communities.
Amir Mazor: Jews in the Mamluk sultanate: Nadir, decline or change?
The situation of the dhimmis, and especially the Jews, under the Mamluks, has in the process of revision due to several recent studies. While the accepted view regarding this topic tended to describe the situation of the Jews as a general decline or sometimes even as almost a catastrophe, scholars such as Tamir el-Leithy, Nathan Hofer, Marina Rustow, Mark Cohen, Dotan Arad and myself discuss several aspects of Jewish life which moderate this impression. Some scholars now maintain that one should use the term “change”, instead of “decline”, to describe the situation of the Jews of that time, a change that was the destiny of society in Egypt and Syria generally. According to these new studies, the stress that was placed upon dhimmis, and especially Jews, should be placed in the right cultural and social context. In addition, the legal latitude that Jews enjoyed during this period should also be taken in account.
In my lecture, I will discuss these recent developments in research. I will strengthen this notion by discussing my recent studies, which show that Jews did not disappear from high governmental and court positions in the Mamluk period. The accepted view about the removal of Jews from high positions is somewhat deceptive, since it is based on the main contemporary historical literary sources, most of which were written by strict “orthodox” ulama and hence meant to serve the legal Islamic discourse. However, Muslim sources which were not committed to this theoretical discourse, in addition to Jewish sources such as travel literature and Genizah documents, help to reconstruct a more adequate and balanced picture of the situation of the Jews under the Mamluks.
Dotan Arad: The Jews of Alexandria in the Mamluk period
While the social and economic life of Jews in the Fatimid and Ayyubid Empires (10th-13th) has been the subject of numerous books and articles, relatively little attention has been paid to the late Mamluk period. The limited research that exists, focuses on specific communities, mainly Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo. Small communities, such as that of Alexandria, are still terra incognita.
How many Jews were living in Alexandria? What was the character of their relations with the Mamluk Amirs and their Muslim neighbours? What association did they have with the European traders? What information do we have regarding their spiritual world? Who were their leaders?
In this talk I will try to give at least a partial answer to these questions, based on various sources, including travelogues of European and Jewish travellers, Genizah documents, Arabic chronicles. The main source will be a special collection from the Bodleian Library, the archive of Moses ben Judah, which until today has almost never been utilised in research. A distinguished leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, Moses ben Judah was also an intellectual and a prominent business man. The documents, which include letters in Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic as well as fragments of Hebrew books, shed light on the world of the Jewish elite of that Mediterranean city at the end of the Mamluk period.
Not only do these documents provide us with new data about the local leadership in Alexandria and its relations with the Nagidate (the central Jewish leadership), they also teach us about communal life, intellectual trends among educated Jews in the city, and about inner tensions within the Jewish society. In conclusion, I hope to discuss the potential contribution of the collection to understanding the history of the Mamluk period in general.
Paul Fenton: Jews and Sufis in Mamluk Egypt and Syria
The extraordinary development of Sufism under the patronage of the Mamluk reigning class in 13th/14th century Egypt, which took the form of organized brotherhoods living a monastic life in the khanqah-s the Mamluk patrons built for them, did not go unnoticed by the local Jewish communities. By virtue of a certain symmetry between the social and religious situation of the Jewish minority and the Muslim majority, the Jews became pervious to many Sufi ideas and practices which were absorbed by the Synagogue. The transformations that took place within specific segments of the Jewish community, which were far from peripheral, justify the use of the concept of ‘Judaeo-Sufism’. Using both Jewish and Muslim literary sources as well as archival material derived from the Cairo Genizah documents, the present lecture proposes to examine the nature of this receptivity and discuss the sometimes startling relationships between Sufis and Jewish pietists that resulted from it during the Mamluk period both in Egypt and Syria.
Panel 3 Konrad Hirschler: Reading the library: Mamluk manuscripts in modern-day collections
Mamlukologist scholarship has increasingly turned over the last years to the formation and shape of the ‘archive’ as a site of historical enquiry. In this context, the forms of archives and archival practices have especially come into scholarly focus. However, most scholarship rather accesses Mamluk-period material via the modern-day library as the prime repository of manuscripts. For current scholarly practices it is thus not so much the archive that plays the prime role in shaping research, but rather the Dār al-kutub, Bibliothèque nationale de France or Princeton University Library. In the same vein as document users have shaped our ‘archives’, libraries and collectors have been active agents shaping what Mamluk-period material is available to us and in what forms. This panel thus aims at problematizing the modern library as historically shaped depositories where the choices of Ottoman-period institutions and individuals as well as those of European collectors and libraries have played a crucial role. Papers in this panel look at case studies with a particular focus on the 19th and early 20th centuries as particularly vivid moments when manuscript collections were reshaped and rearranged. Central questions are who the main actors were and what broader economic, cultural and political logics contributed to framing the library.
Konrad Hirschler: The emergence of the ‘modern’ library: Tracing the Syrian national library back to
the late Ottoman al-Maktaba al-ʿumūmīya (and beyond)
The Syrian National Library in Damascus (Maktabat al-asad al-waṭanīya) is currently the main Mamluk-period manuscript library for bilād al-shām. Having emerged out of the Ẓāhirīya collection, it has its roots in the late Ottoman drive of reforms among which the foundation of ‘modern’ libraries prominently featured. The Ottoman Public Library, that took shape in the 1880s, was in turn assembled by the de-waqfization of numerous Damascene libraries. However, these pre-Public Library collections have so far remained below the radar of scholarship. This paper takes the foundation of the Public Library as a starting point to reflect upon the ways in which Mamluk-period manuscripts were brought together and organized in new ways. This process took place right in the heydays of European purchase activities and these two trends closely interacted in shaping the modern-day corpora of Mamluk-period manuscripts. In many ways, reading the Syrian National Library thus requires taking into account the development and profile of libraries such as the Princeton University Library and the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin.
Elias Saba: Centering archives: a different approach for Mamluk studies
How should we study Mamluk intellectual history? What texts and authors should be the bases for our work? The search for answers usually begins with secondary sources. These works give us an overall idea of the field of study and point us towards the key figures or texts that form the basis for further scholarship. In this way, our work is shaped by research carried out by previous scholars. In this paper, however, I suggest a different model for the study of Mamluk intellectual history, one that centers the archive as the starting point rather than a work of secondary scholarship or a primary source.
By taking the manuscript archive as the initial site of inquiry, we begin from a new vantage point. This paper introduces a broad methodology for carrying out projects of Mamluk writing with the archive as its center. I first examine some of the advantages of this method along with some of the potential pitfalls and theoretical concerns associated with using the archive as research guide. In particular, I am interested in thinking through the theoretical and practical issues of choosing an archive over a written source as the starting point. Then, I briefly discuss some of the issues that have come up through my research relating to notions of authorship and textual integrity. In this way, this paper proposes a new model for the study of Mamluk intellectual history and urges us to reconsider the archive and its role in the production of knowledge.
Garrett Davidson : Abraham Shalom Yahuda and the Princeton collection of Islamic manuscripts
Princeton University’s collection of Islamic manuscripts, as is well known, is by far the largest collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Western hemisphere and one of the most valuable collections in the world. Consisting of some 13,500 manuscripts and approximately 20,000 individual texts, the collection has diverse origins in public and private collections in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Dagestan and other locations ranging from the Western to the Eastern Islamic lands. The collection is not only notable for its size and diversity, but also for its quality, containing a large number of autograph and otherwise unique manuscripts. In spite of its importance, the collection remains under-studied, the provenance of the manuscripts of the collection is one aspect of this. Until now there has yet to be a detailed account of the origins of the collections’ manuscripts and how they came to Princeton. This paper begins to fill this gap, tracing the nineteenth and twentieth century origins of the collection and its acquisition by Princeton. The Princeton collection is made up of a number of sub-collections and in many cases these sub-collections contain entire or large portion of earlier manuscript libraries. Based on both archival sources at Princeton and the National Library of Israel, this paper tells the story of the largest of the collections at Princeton and its collector, Abraham Shalom Yahuda (d. 1951), as well as this collection’s connections to other important manuscript Collections, including the National Library of Israel, the Harvard Collection, the University of Michigan and the Chester Beatty Collection.
Panel 4 Reuven Amitai: Palestine under Mamluk Rule
The impact of a quarter millennium of Mamluk rule left a large imprint on the history of the country, in the realm of demography, landscape, social history, economics and cultural life. At the same time, Palestine – while smack in the center of the Mamluk Sultanate – has perhaps not received the attention that it deserves (with the clear exception of Jerusalem). This panel comes to show some of the recent research in Israel on this history of the country in the late middle ages, putting local history into the larger Mamluk context, while looking at this key period in the longer flow of history.
Reuven Amitai: The economic development of Mamluk Gaza: Much better than expected
It seems to be a commonplace in Mamluk studies to see the “long 15th century” as a time of economic decline, certainly in Syria. Without questioning this generalization (although others have begun this, at least with regard to international trade), this talk will look at one area of Palestine – Gaza and its immediate countryside – so as to examine at long-term economic trends since the beginning of Mamluk rule in 1260. There is clear evidence for local prosperity in the late 13th and 14th century, and little evidence for a serious decline in the 15th. This paper will review the evidence, analyze the trends and see if this has wider implications for the study of Mamluk Palestine and Bilad al-Sham as a whole.
Joseph Drory: A fifteenth-century Palestinian sufi leader from Ramla
The lecture recounts the career of Muhammad Abu al-‘Awn , a rural Qadiri leader, who reputed himself as miracle worker, pious, just and initiator of a Sufi center resembling seashore fortification, which attracted admirers for generations to come and is still operative.
Hatim Mahamid: Contributions of the Mamluks to religious and educational institutions in Jerusalem
The Mamluks tried to entrench their social and religious standing through the allocation of financial endowments and the construction of educational and religious institutions in the main cities of their domain. Jerusalem was one of the
significant cities in Syria, attracting special attention from Mamluk rulers of all levels in Syria’s southern regions (Palestine and the coastal area). This paper presents a comparison between the processes involved in erecting educational institutions in Mamluk Jerusalem. Likewise, it draws what comparison is possible, highlighting the similarities and differences, between those institutions in Jerusalem and in other cities of the Mamluks in the same period, such as Damascus, Aleppo and Cairo. The main claim is that Jerusalem’s geographic location and its status as a holy city aided in preserving and maintaining the charitable endowments of the city’s educational institutions through the end of the Mamluk period. This is contrasted with the drastic reduction in educational activities in other cities throughout the Mamluk Empire, particularly those of Greater Syria (Bilād al-Shām).
Michael Ehrlich: Pilgrimage shrines in Bilād al-Shām’s southern coastal plain during the Mamluk
period
This paper explores the reasons to the establishment of large pilgrimage shrines in Bilād al-Shām’s southern coastal plain, especially during the 15th century. In the aftermath of the Crusader period, the Mamluks destroyed the Levantine coastal cities. As a result, Bilād al-Shām’s coastal plain remained an abandoned region for many centuries. So, if the region was desolated for centuries, why were these shrines established? Who established these shrines and why? Moreover, assuming that the coast was a depopulated area, who were the shrines’ potential pilgrims?
I would like to suggest that these shrines were established as an initiative of local religious leaders in inland regions, who wanted to add religious aspects to social and economic activities of their parishioners. These initiatives were supported by the Mamluk authorities.