Panel 5 Mohamad El-Merheb: New approaches to Islamic political thought: Authors, texts, and conceptions in the Mamluk period
Islamic political thought of the late medieval period in the Syro-Egyptian lands was rich and original, and warrants further scholarly attention. While it was presented as barren and unoriginal (with some ‘exceptions’ such as Ibn Khaldūn), the vast corpus of extant administrative manuals, political treatises, mirrors for princes, juridical works, official documents, and other expressions of political thought attest to a different reality. Likewise, the wide array of authors of diverse backgrounds indicates a flourishing period in the production of political thought.
This proposed panel aims to contribute to the study of Islamic political thought at large by exploring and highlighting several traits pertinent to the study of the Mamluk period’s output. It will highlight the need for a greater attention to the rich corpus of political texts available to us. This not only includes the necessity to edit and publish little-known or ignored texts, but extends to the revision of available editions of important texts and the implication this may have on our current understanding of the period’s political thought. Furthermore, the panel will examine the authors’ aims in writing, the ideas they proposed, their choice of literary genres, and the practical relevance of their ideas, and how this may have been interrelated with their professional background.
Additionally, this panel hopes to present the rich contribution of the Mamluk period outside the confines of the presumed ‘theory of the caliphate’. It will try to present the period’s political thought within the wider conceptions of legitimacy, just rule, restraint of political power, and preservation of religious guidelines while, at the same time, maintaining a feasible balance between the ideal and the practical.
Stefan Leder: Working with the frameworks of religious legitimacy: The rationality of power and the
common good
Authors of political literature (mirrors, treatises of governmental administration, official documents and correspondence), especially when they are not religious scholars themselves, tend to confirm religious legitimacy of political rule in general terms, mobilizing a value oriented discourse derived from religious precepts and yet restraining claims to hegemony. From the Ayyubid period onwards, two tendencies attempt to justify, encourage and regulate governmental agency, often built upon practical insight and pragmatic intentions, coexist with the elaboration of public law. This paper pursues both lines of thought (and practice) and looks into conjunctions and tensions between them.
Caterina Bori: A neglected version of al-Siyāsa al-sharʿīya fī iṣlāḥ al-rāʿī wa-l-raʿīya from the Mamluk
period and its importance
A new edition of Ibn Taymiyya’s famous work, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-rāʿī wa-l-raʿiyya, has been published almost ten years ago. This edition is a based on a so far unknown manuscript of the text that is considerably longer than the one which is found in the many printed versions of the text nowadays in circulation. The manuscript presents whole passages missing from the shorter and most widespread version of it. Surprisingly, this situation has gone unnoticed by those scholars who have recently published in Western languages either specifically on this writing of Ibn Taymiyya or on Ibn Taymiyya’s political thought as a whole. The paper would like to present the manuscript which contains this neglected and longer version of Ibn Taymiyya’s famous treatise, discuss its importance and place it within Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya’s manuscript tradition.
Mohamad El-Merheb: Competing strands of political thought in the early Mamluk period: a case for
‘Rule of Law and Limited Government’ in medieval Islam
Authors with different madhhab affiliations produced a considerable corpus of political treatises and mirrors for princes in the early Mamluk period. This corpus displays a remarkably shared and genuine concern for specific constitutional themes, here understood as two interlocked basic concepts: rule of law and limited government. Rule of law refers here to attempts by early Mamluk thinkers to restrict the arbitrary exercise of power by referring to broad and recognized legal and social concepts including the sharīʿa, justice, and guarantee of private life and property. Similarly, limited government refers to restraining the discretionary exercise of power by implementing a division of political, legal, and administrative labor that was now possible owing to the professionalisation of the Mamluk administration.
This paper will show that these political works were authored by jurists form various madhhabs in stark or subtle contention to each other. The questions thus arise how these authors, within this context of Mamluk competition, emphasised the exceptionality of their political ideals, to whom they elected to present their works (such as leaders of competing Mamluk households), and what they expected in return both individually and as members of wider social groups?
These strands of political thought, I will argue, were competing proposals for an ‘official madhhab’ or a ‘law of the state’. Despite the fact that they were competing, the various strands displayed the same concern for the nascent constitutional themes. They were arguably expected to strengthen each Mamluk contestant’s chances to gain power or to secure the longevity of a sultan’s reign. However, some authors showed an unanticipated level of intransigence towards upholding the rule of law at the risk of antagonising the dedicatees whom they were trying to persuade of their own strand.
Panel 6 Samet Budak: A Mamluk-Ottoman cultural zone in the late Medieaval Mediterranean
A strong dialogue between the historiographies of Ottomans and Mamluks has proven exceptionally difficult. Belonging to different traditions and isolated from each other, modern studies of Ottomans and Mamluks were mostly interested in diplomatic and economic relationships between the two pre-modern Islamic powers. In tandem with historical trends in the twentieth century, especially the French historical revolution, namely Annales School showed its impact in the historiographies of Ottomans and Mamluks through their approach in social and economic history. In spite of these developments, scholars have barely concentrated on commonalities of intellectual currents, architectural patronage and codes of literary expression within the cultural sphere of these two empires. In this regard, an interconnected cultural history of the whole eastern Mediterranean stretching from the Balkans to Egypt is still a desideratum.
Therefore, the aim of this panel is to draw attention to, inter alia, shared intellectual spaces and the people, ideas and artistic elements in motion within the Ottoman and Mamluk context. It brings together fresh researches from different disciplines, including history of architecture, literature and intellectual history. By harmonizing diverse approaches of the fields, the panel also hopes to elicit more interest in a scrupulous understanding of Ottoman and Mamluk connections within the Eastern Mediterranean context. Moving beyond the spurious concept of cultural influence, the panel hopes to contextualize multivalent commonalities cultivated in the region.
All in all, as distinct from a series of papers that possess some diverse points of intersection, all three presentations will be in dialogue by having the idea of a shared cultural zone which stretches across imagined boundaries of the modern world and goes beyond the established paradigms.
Samet Budak: Towards an intellectual oecumene: how to conceptualize the intellectual history of the
late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean
The Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian, that the whole sea shared a common destiny, a heavy one indeed, with identical problems and general trends if not identical consequences. —Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean His theoretical concern aside, Braudel’s conceptualization of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was based on geography, economy and society in a path breaking way. Taking a cue from Braudel, this study proposes a cultural and intellectual oecumene within the Eastern Mediterranean basin in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although it seemed politically more divided, the Eastern Mediterranean’s idiosyncratic commonalities within the intellectual context transcended all boundaries that were imagined in political spheres including those between Mamluks and Ottomans.
This paper will investigate scholars of the day, their activities and oeuvre and scholarly networks between Mamluk and Ottoman centersfocus on two scholars, Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami (d. 1455), and Badr al-Din of Simavna (d. 1420) who were exemplaries of complex and multivalent networks of their days and members of a clandestine scholarly organization called Brethren of Purity (Ihwan al-Safa). By drawing the map of their scholarly network and laying stress on the imprints in Mamluk and Ottoman intellectual circles, this paper aims to offer fresh insights into the study of intellectual history beyond limitations which are imposed by nationalist methodologies, established genres, and recognized literary and linguistic traditions.
Therefore, this paper suggests a map of an intellectual world by connecting Mamluk and Ottoman domains where scholars were fostered to develop their long distance communication and communal sense without having any borders, and shows that before the domination of Spanish and Turkish Empires, the Mediterranean witnessed a time when thoughts and thinkers breathed in the same rhythms.
Tuğrul Acar: Architectural patronage of the Mamluks in late medieval Anatolia
Mamluk presence in Anatolia dates to Baybars’s (r. 1260-1277) occupation of southeastern Anatolia. He not only proclaimed himself as the Sultan of Rūm but also left imprints of sovereignty by putting his pars blazon on certain walls. This shows that the Mamluks conceived Anatolia within their political orbit. Yet, past scholarship by and large overlooked the interconnection of medieval Anatolia and Mamluks in Syria and Egypt, only a handful of scholars studied artistic interactions and practices of gift exchange, and those who did have summarized such interactions under the loose concept of “Mamluk influences” for which the impulse was political relations and cultural interactions. In that regard, students of Mamluk history have never investigated the architectural patronage of Mamluks in Anatolia. Therefore, this presentation hopes to stimulate discussion instead of offering clear answers and calls us to reflect on such issues.
In doing so, architectural patronage and confluence of Mamluk forms in Anatolia will be situated in political context of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Firstly, the presentation will look at the architectural patronage of Mamluk sultans and statesmen in Anatolia concentrating on three exemplary architectural projects. I will look at two mosques which were built by Mamluk emirs within the borders of the Karamanid Emirate (1270-1487) and Great Mosque of Adana which was built by the Ramazanid Emirate (1352-1516), a vassal of the Mamluks, arguing that Mamluk building activities took place in contact zones and at specific political moments.
Ahmet Barış Ekiz: Is Aşık Çelebi’s Tazkirah an adab encyclopedia? The Arabic-Mamluk sources of the
Ottoman Tazkirah writing
There is a widespread agreement in Ottoman literary historiography that the genre of biographical dictionaries of poets in Ottoman literature was a continuation of Persian and, to some extent, Chagatai tazkirah traditions. Apart from underlining the references to Timurid literary legacy in the well-known works in the classical examples of Ottoman tazkirahs, scholars in the field have not yet discussed the role of the other literary traditions and genres in motivating the formation of Ottoman tazkirahs. By especially focusing on Aşık Çelebi’s (d. 1572) Meşairü’ş-Şuara, one of the canonical tazkirahs in the Ottoman literary tradition which denotes a major turning point in the Ottoman literary tradition, this study aims to propose another framework for the intellectual influences behind Ottoman tazkirah genre, arguing that it creates a textual dialogue with the classical Arabic literary tradition, particularly with works belonging to Mamluk literary sphere.
In Meşairü’ş-Şuara, two works Aşık frequently referred to, which were hitherto unknown to the specialists, are crucial for our purpose in that they show a strict intertextuality between our text and adab encyclopedias and, interestingly, Mamluk literary commentaries: These are Ebu Ishak al-Husri’s (d.1022) Zahr al-Adab and Abu al-Safa Safadi’s (d.1363) al-Gays al-Musajjam fi Sharh Lamiyyat al-‘Ajam. Aşık especially makes use of these two works in the prolegomena (muqaddimah) of Meşairü’ş-Şuara, in which he conventionally “legitimizes” his choice to write a biography of poets, suggesting that the references to Husri’s and Safadi’s works have something to do with the textual strategy of Meşairü’ş-Şuara; therefore, this study aims to answer in which ways Meşairü’ş-Şuara can be regarded as an adab encyclopedia in particular, and how Arabic-Mamluk adab works provided a model for Ottoman tazkirah writers in general.
Panel 7 Jo Van Steenbergen: 15th-century Arabic history writing: a contextualist approach
The later Middle Period in Syro-Egyptian history is well known as a time in which an unprecedented number of texts about Islamic history were produced. It is also a very complex era of political and cultural transformation, which we mainly know about today from these texts. The collaborative research project MMS-II (ERC, UGent, 2017-21), in which context this panel is organized, asks what happens to current understandings if we consider these texts not merely as sources and observers of that transformation, but also as historical actors who helped to make it come about. The MMS-II project is therefore pursuing the first comprehensive survey and collective historical interpretation of the impressive body of Arabic historiographical texts that was produced in the timeframe 1410-1470 CE. It asserts that this will substantially change current ideas about those texts and transformations, as well as about what many are claiming to know about the histories these texts engage with more in general.
In this panel, the first, preliminary results will be presented of in-depth case studies of discrete sets of Arabic historical works produced by two generations of Syro-Egyptian historians from the period 1410-1470 CE. Aiming to push understandings of these texts beyond mere positivist assumptions and thus to enable a new and genuine assessment of the historical value of their inter-subjectivities, these case studies all take inspiration from so-called New Historicism’s textual research practices, including its call for a Geertzian “thick description” approach to texts, connecting the analysis of signification to that of social contexts. These case studies have therefore begun by reconstructing some of the 15th-century’s socio-economic, cultural and/or political dynamics, and the respective authors’ positioning within them, their engagement with them through social practices such as competition and patronage, and/or the studied texts’ relations with these practices.
Tarek Sabraa: Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba (1377-1448): his life and work
The paper intends to sketch the life and work of Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba (1377-1448), one of the most important historians of his time. Among his contemporaries, he was the only one specialized in the history of Damascus. As most of the scholars at that time he was also a jurist and qāḍī as well as shafi’i qāḍī al-quḍāt (chief justice) of Damascus.
Besides Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba’s biography and background, I will outline his fiqh-treatises and focus on his historical works.
His historiographic books comprise three topics: a) political history and history of scholars in general, b) the history of scholars of the Shāfi‘i school of law and scholars of Arabic language, c) the history of Damascene architecture and its social environment.
The main part of the talk will deal with how Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba actually composed these historiographic books. We are in the fortunate situation that notes written in Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba’s own handwriting can still be consulted in several archives until today. By studying these preliminary notes (and at a later stage comparing them with the final products, i.e. the proper histories) it is possible to track the author’s work in progress and his method of writing (or in many cases perhaps better: compiling) these texts. On the basis of my study of his notes, I will show by a couple of examples from where Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba took his information, which preceding authors he drew on, which information he considered important at a later stage, so that he added them at the margin, as well as which aspects he paid special attention to.
Zacharie Mochtarie de Pierrepont: Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s texts and contexts: The Sufi environment of the Cairo
Sultanate
This presentation aims to deal with historiographical discourses about scholars and ascetics specifically identified as “Sufis” by shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Alī al-ʿAsqalānī, known as Ibn Ḥajar (773-852/1372-1449). Although Ibn Ḥajar – famous for being one of the great Shāfiʿī jurists and traditionists of the Cairo Sultanate (648-922/1250-1517) – was not particularly remembered for being associated with the path of taṣawwuf, no study so far has focused on the historiographical presentation he dedicated to members of mystical movements in the Syro-Egyptian and Red Sea areas of the IXth/XVthcentury. Yet, several of his masters were renowned Sufis shuyūkhand for more than thirty years (818-849/1415-1445), he himself was continuously at the head of the khānqāhal-Baybarsīya in Cairo, one of the most prestigious establishment of the Cairo Sultanate associated with institutional Sufism. Thus, in one way or another, Ibn Ḥajar had to deal most of his life with many recognized Sufis masters and murīdīn. By contextualizing the life of Ibn Ḥajar and outlining the relationship between his historiographical discourse on Sufism, his position as a historical actor, a historiographical thinker and a revered jurist involved in a very competitive environment, I will draw attention to the different discursive stratumhe elaborated to create a particular view on contemporary Sufis characters. Recreating the Sufi networks in which Ibn Ḥajar was personally embedded,I will show that his historiographical discourses on Sufism, part of a reflective and complex narrative construction, may be seen both as a memorial tribute, a self-serving promotion of his own networks and legacy, and a spiritual and intellectual statement endorsing and shaping the role of taṣawwufin the service of the dawla. I will mostly focus on data compiled in the Inbāʾ al-ghumr bi-abnāʾ al-ʿumr and the Dhayl al-durar al-kāmina, two works dealing with Ibn Ḥajar’s contemporaries.
Kenneth Goudie: Al-Biqāʿī’s self-reflection: a preliminary study of the autobiographical in his ʿUnwān
al-Zamān
When discussing the life of Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (809/1406–885/1480), a fifteenth-century Qurʾān exegete and historian, modern scholarship has primarily focused on the three controversies in which he became embroiled (on the use of the Bible in tafsīr, the poetry of Ibn al-Farīḍ, and the theodicy of al-Ghazālī) and which defined the downward trajectory of his later career from 868/1464 until his death. The sole exception to this is the work of Li Guo, who has discussed the role which the autobiographical played in al-Biqāʿī’s Iẓhār al-ʿaṣr li-asrār ahl al-ʿaṣr. By analysing al-Biqāʿī’s treatment of three episodes in his life–his infamous divorce case, the harem politics of his concubines, and the premature deaths of his children–Guo provides ample insight into how al-Biqāʿī integrated elements from his own life into his salvation history project. Nevertheless, all three of these episodes date from after al-Biqāʿī’s establishment in Cairo; there is therefore an overall tendency to focus primarily on al-Biqāʿī as a more mature member of the Cairene intellectual elite.
In the case of al-Biqāʿī, however, we are in the fortunate position of having an earlier autobiographical notice, which is contained within his ʿUnwān al-zamān bi-tarājim al-shuyūkh wa‑l‑aqrān. Al-Biqāʿī states that he began the notice in 841/1437: that is, the year before he received his first appointments as Sultan Jaqmaq’s ḥadīth teacher and as the Qurʾān exegete at the Ẓāhir Mosque. As it provides us with a snapshot of how al-Biqāʿī perceived the progress of his formative years, this notice is a useful corrective to the later perspective which has thus far dominated discussion of al-Biqāʿī’s life. This paper will discuss al-Biqāʿī’s self‑reflection on his journey from his peasant origins to student and protégée of Ibn Ḥajar al‑ʿAsqalānī. It will focus in particular on what the ʿUnwān al-zamān reveals about how he went about establishing the social network which launched his career in Cairo, and which subsequently crumbled under the weight of his later controversies.
Panel 8: Anthony Quickel: New views on waqf during the Mamlūk sultanate
The study of pious endowments (awqāf) has been critical in a variety of methodological approaches to Mamlūk studies for several decades. This ubiquitous institution reached its developmental maturity during this period in which most aspects of the sultanate’s socio-economic, religious, and political affairs became intertwined with the numerous foundations established since the inception of the Mamlūk Sultanate. Although this rich field of study has been employed by historians to gain a more nuanced understanding of the era since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of this complex institution is still developing. This panel proposes to offer several ways in which different approaches to the waqf system can yield new insights into the Mamlūk period. The panel will include a discussion on the waqfization of the late Mamlūk economy and explore the scholarly debate surrounding the unsettled issue of causality. It will also examine an unpublished early cadastral survey, using digital mapping and quantitative analysis, to examine the origins of waqfization prior to the fifteenth century. Finally, the panel will also illustrate how waqf studies can be employed to gain new insights into an understudied subgroup of the population, orphans, who were the beneficiaries of many endowments, as well as the essential element pious endowments with agricultural properties played in the food economy of Cairo. In doing so, the panel will show that new avenues of inquiry into different aspects of the Mamlūk period are made possible by employing new approaches towards the waqf institution
Anthony Quickel: Waqf as a linchpin in the organization and distribution of food from Mamlūk Cairo’s
suburban orchards and plantations
Described in both chronicles and travelogues, Mamlūk Cairo’s urban conglomeration and its environs were surrounded by various forms of verdant, cultivated land, ranging from pleasure gardens and vistas to citrus orchards and vegetable gardens. These properties have been generally left out of scholarship regarding the Mamlūk food economy, which has instead focused on the bulk, staple goods of the agricultural system, namely wheat and other cereals. However, the local plantations and orchards around the city were essential to supplying Cairo with fresh and perishable green groceries, especially fruits and vegetables, in addition to livestock.
Despite their importance, how these foods were grown and brought to market remains understudied. In contrast to the sizable body of literature regarding the cereal economy and the land-tenure system supporting it, corresponding scholarship concerned with the nature of local and small-scale food production outside of the larger direction of the sultanate remains lacking. Key to understanding this level of the economy is the role of the urban waqf institutions in organizing and guiding the production, distribution, and sale of foodstuffs from local lands to market destinations in the city. These pious endowments were the linchpin connecting suburban food cultivation with local urban consumers. In as much, this paper will examine the endownment deeds of various urban institutions to better understand how local, suburban food production was organized and how the victuals eventually reached the city’s markets. In so doing, it will show that pious endowments were the essential element guiding this important, but understudied, element of the Mamlūk agricultural and food economy.
Albrecht Fuess: The waqfization in the late Mamlūk empire: sign of decline or an economic success
story?
The so-called waqfization of the Egyptian economy – especially concerning land tenure practices in the fifteenth century – has been noticed by several scholars in recent decades. This term is used to identify the process of the marked increase in waqf-held land (religious endowments) founded by Mamlūk authorities to members of the military and urban elite to the detriment of the traditional iqṭāʿ system. Since the work of ʿImād Badr al-Dīn Abū Ghāzī, we have known that almost half of the cultivable land was transformed into waqf land at the beginning of the sixteenth century. However, we still are fumbling in the dark about the actual reasons which triggered this process and as to its origins. Furthermore, it is left to an open scientific discussion as to whether these processes were responsible for the Mamlūk downfall, especially since this argumentation may draw too much of a conclusion from the fact that the Mamlūk Sultanate actually ended at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In contrast, it may also be possible to regard the waqfization as a measure of transformation deliberately taken on the part of Mamlūk officials as a factor of stabilization, which may have postponed the end of their empire. The proposed contribution will, therefore – using actual scientific contributions like Daisuke Igarashi’s, Land Tenure, Fiscal Policy, and Imperial Power in Medieval Syro-Egypt – discuss the question of whether the waqfization of the Mamlūk Empire was a curse or blessing.
Muhammad Shaaban: Mapping Mamluk Egypt: Digital analysis and privatization trends in the late
fourteenth century
A quantitative analysis of the data from the earliest manuscript of Ibn al-Jīʿān’s cadastral survey for Mamlūk Egypt reveals a period of privatization and “waqfization” of state lands in the latter half of the fourteenth century. The first digitally georeferenced database of Mamlūk Egypt’s iqṭāʿ system, used in tandem with contemporary narrative sources, shows that this period of change in the land tenure system coincided with the devastating effects of the plague and during the early days of the first reign of Sultan al-Nāṣir Ḥasan (r. 748-752/1347-1351). The initial drivers of this change were members of the council of amirs (umarāʾ al-mashūra) who had taken on the powers usually held by a sultan. The growing power and wealth of these prominent amirs created a hurdle for Qalāwūnid sultans wishing to assert their legitimate prerogatives, triggering a new privatization of state lands strategy by al-Ashraf Shaʿbān (r. 764-778/1363-1377).
This paper focuses on this new database, constructed from the various manuscripts of Ibn al-Jīʿān’s survey, in order to solve the issue of causality and periodization. The growing wealth of amirs in the mid-fourteenth century, shown in the cadastral data and the narrative sources, should be seen as one of the various mechanisms that amirs used to maintain and increase power. The large fiefs of Sultan al-Ashraf Shaʿbān’s family can then be viewed as a counter balance to this growing power of prominent amirs. This requires a reconsideration of our understanding of the development of the land tenure system of the Mamlūk Sultanate, which has often been studied from a fifteenth century vantage point.
Evan Metzger: The waqf and the Yatīm: Orphans and the representation of justice
Weber once claimed that all “ethically rationalized religions” produce a fundamental imperative to aid, among others, “orphans in distress.” Indeed, orphans were common beneficiaries of religious trusts (awqāf) in the Mamlūk period. However, while orphans received charity, in Islamic law and discourse, an orphan (yatīm) is not necessarily a poor individual. Regardless of their wealth or standard of living, orphans are all minors who do not have a living father. Why, then, are orphans distinct recipients of elite sponsored charity? Why are there not restrictions on the wealth of orphans who can benefit from a waqf?
It is suggested in this paper that these questions can be answered by placing the establishment of orphan-related waqfs in the context of ‘ulamā’ supervision over the property of orphans. Although the supervision of orphans’ wealth was a duty of the qāḍī by the 8th century, the rule of Sultan Lajin witnessed the establishment of an official – the amīn al-hukm – responsible for monitoring and overseeing the use of orphan property. Nevertheless, the protection of orphans by the qāḍī – and not by the military elite – was fundamental to the representation of justice. This paper argues that the commitment to caring for orphans, without restrictions on the wealth of the orphans, was modeled on a similar, absolute commitment of shar‘ī qāḍīs to the protection of orphans and was reinforced by recent historical developments in the administration of justice.