Al-Mahdī li-Dīn Allāh Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn (original) (raw)

Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir

Arabic Textual Sources for the Crusades, 2024

Gowaart Van Den Bossche Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbdallāh b. Rashīd al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 692/1293) was a chancery scribe (kātib), poet, prose stylist, and historian of the early Mamlūk period. During his lifetime and in later centuries he was regarded as one of the most gifted chancery writers of his time, but he is now mostly remembered for having composed biographies (sīra, pl. siyar) of three early Mamlūk sultans: al-Ẓāhir Baybars (r. 658-76/1260-77), al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (r. 678-89/1279-90), and al-Ashraf Khalīl (r. 689-92/1290-3). Due to the author's close links with the authorities in Egypt and Syria in the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century, these texts have traditionally been viewed as important contemporary sources for the early period of the Mamlūk sultanate. In this contribution, I evaluate the perspectives these three biographies provide for the study of the waning Frankish presence in the Levant over the course of the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century and reconsider their general textual Sitz im Leben as products of chancery practices rather than of sultanic legitimisation policies. Biographical sketch 2 1 The author wishes to thank Alexander Mallett for his invitation to contribute this chapter to the present volume, and one of the anonymous peer reviewers for providing many helpful suggestions and comments to improve the text. 2 Several modern scholars have provided fairly extensive biographies of the author. Of these, the most up to date is F. Bauden, 'Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir', EI3. The most detailed account of the author's activities as attested in various chronicles and prescriptive works is given by E. Strauß (Ashtor), 'Muḥyî'ddîn b. ʿAbdaẓẓâhir',

Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān al-Abharī: A Master of Ibn al-ʿArabī

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society, 2020

In early Muḥarram 632 / October 1234, Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) wrote a letter in Damascus to an Ayyubid sovereign, giving him a general authorization (ijāza ʿāmma) for transmitting his teachings embodied in his corpus. Known as the Authorization to the Ruler al-Muẓaffar (Ijāza li-l-Malik al-Muẓaffar), the letter listed the names of around 290 of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, and 71 of his teachers. Some of those teachers are well known, while the identities of the majority, especially those who trained Ibn al-ʿArabī in the East, are still vague. This study introduces the life and teachings of one of these foggy figures: Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān al-Abharī al-Shāfiʿī (fl. 602/1206). The paper argues that al-Abharī is a significant yet neglected pietist, who met Ibn al-ʿArabī in Jerusalem. He was an ascetic traditionist authorized in Damascus by a leading Shāfiʿī expert of prophetic sayings (ḥadīth), and the author of a Sufi treatise that came to be popular with its attribution to the prominent scholars Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 618/1221), ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191), Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 663/1265), and Aḥmad Zarrūq (d. 899/1494). There are also good reasons to identify this teacher of Ibn al-ʿArabī with the vizier of the last two Great Saljuqī sultans, who chose an ascetic interpretation of the Sufi path after abandoning his political career, although this study does not reveal conclusive evidence for this identification.