"In search for a hidden group: Where are the awlād al-nās?" (original) (raw)
A Supplementary Source for the Study of Mamluk Social History
The taqārīẓ were part of an established system of academic recognition and the ʿulamāʾ patronage networks and at times, they could also be a powerful satirical weapon used by the learned elite members to denigrate and exclude a colleague. The large collection of the satire taqārīẓ written for the panegyric Biography composed in 819/1416 by Šams al-Dīn Muḥ ammad b. Nāhiḍ for the Mamluk sultan al-Muʾayyad Šayḫ is explored in this article as a supplementary source to the historical narratives for the study of the ʿulamāʾ milieu during the strained period of the transition from Turkish to Circassian sultanate (784/1382). Placing these taqārīẓ in the context of the increasing social insecurity entailed by the political reshuffles, reveals the growing anxiety of the incumbent learned elites over their positions and status in the administration of justice, the academe (madāris) and the waqf institution-the spheres where they exercised their hegemony of knowledge and religious power-and the strategies they adopted for their social survival.
A Supplementary Source for the Study of Mamluk Social History: The Taqārīẓ*
Arabica, 2013
The taqārīẓ were part of an established system of academic recognition and the ʿulamāʾ patronage networks and at times, they could also be a powerful satirical weapon used by the learned elite members to denigrate and exclude a colleague. The large collection of the satire taqārīẓ written for the panegyric Biography composed in 819/1416 by Šams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Nāhiḍ for the Mamluk sultan al-Muʾayyad Šayḫ is explored in this article as a supplementary source to the historical narratives for the study of the ʿulamāʾ milieu during the strained period of the transition from Turkish to Circassian sultanate (784/1382). Placing these taqārīẓ in the context of the increasing social insecurity entailed by the political reshuffles, reveals the growing anxiety of the incumbent learned elites over their positions and status in the administration of justice, the academe (madāris) and the waqf institution—the spheres where they exercised their hegemony of knowledge and religious power—and the strategies they adopted for their social survival.
Introduction: A Singular Mamluk Historian
Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and his Historical Project, 2022
Recounts the life of Egypt’s greatest historian, contextualises his work and assesses its impact then and now Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of premodern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap, providing a full personal and intellectual biography of this most intriguing and controversial of Mamluk historians. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, analyses his oeuvre in the second and considers the afterlife of his work in the third. Considering al-Maqrizi’s work in light of his beliefs, ethics, feelings, education, social standing, world views, politics and personal circumstances, the book offers insights into his theorising, his conception of history and the influence of his teacher Ibn Khaldun. It goes on to reconstruct the afterlife of his oeuvre as it made its way into the Ottoman historical tradition and was later mined by Arabists and Orientalists. This book opens a window onto the man who has been reclaimed in the modern Egyptian consciousness as one of the most original voices of Egypt, demonstrating how he was woven into the fabric of the modern Egyptian sense of self as a model, moral guide and true citizen of Egypt avant la lettre. Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of pre-modern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, weaves it with historiographical, textual and methodological analysis of his oeuvre in the second, and reconstructs the afterlife of the author and his work down to the present in the third part. Introduction: (pp. 1-8) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.7 Sometime in late 1413, Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), a pious Egyptian scholar who had recently returned to Cairo from a long stay in Damascus, suffered what would appear to us today as a severe mid-life crisis. He had spent the previous twenty-six years of his life trying to navigate the treacherous waters of clientage in the pursuit of employment in the state administration or the religious establishment. This quest had left him both disillusioned and disgusted with the whole process of cultivating benefactors and overcoming rivals in the utterly corrupt and shifty Mamluk backstage politics. He... Save Cite Part 1 The Life of al-Maqrizi CHAPTER 1 The Formative Years (pp. 11-59) CHAPTER 1 The Formative Years (pp. 11-59) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.8 Today, it is all too common to view any author’s oeuvre in the light of their circumstances and psychological, emotional, and intellectual conditions and proclivities. Background, upbringing, successes and failures, and all the other experiences are seen as fundamental building blocks in shaping, understanding, and explaining an author’s oeuvre. So established has this mode of inquiry become that it has spread from its original application to creative pursuits to permeate the study of all literary and scholarly forms, even those social sciences that have traditionally claimed to be governed by rules of objectivity, empiricism, and scholarly detachment immune to the... Save Cite CHAPTER 2 Career, Moral Crisis, and Withdrawal (pp. 60-114) CHAPTER 2 Career, Moral Crisis, and Withdrawal (pp. 60-114) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.9 When the Mamluks came to power in 1250, Cairo was still a city struggling to define its territorial boundaries and reassert its supremacy in the region after a chaotic century in which Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, and other smaller cities rose to competitive positions under rival amirs of the Ayyubid clan or crusading princes. In less than a century, the Mamluks managed to transform the city not only into the undisputed capital of their formidable military empire, but also into the foremost Islamic metropolis of its time. In a building fury, sultans and amirs sponsored splendid mosques, madrasas, ribats, khanqahs, and... Save Cite Part 2 The Writings of al-Maqrizi CHAPTER 3 Harvest of a Lifetime (pp. 117-153) CHAPTER 3 Harvest of a Lifetime (pp. 117-153) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.10 Al-Maqrizi was “hands-down the shaykh (chief or dean) of the historians of his generation,” if not of the entire fifteenth-century Mamluk history writing, which was one of the richest and most elaborate Islamic historical traditions.¹ This is not so only because of the volume of his historical writing or the variety of topics he covered. It is also because his was an exhaustive, structured, and principled historical project with clear ethical messages pursued in an intellectual milieu replete with history writing that seems by and large to have accepted a non-committal chronicling function.² In contrast, al-Maqrizi consciously and unabashedly wrote... Save Cite CHAPTER 4 The Khitat: (pp. 154-202) CHAPTER 4 The Khitat: (pp. 154-202) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.11 Al-Maqrizi’s considerable historical oeuvre on Islamic Egypt appears to us today to have been systematically structured to cover every aspect of its history from the perspective of a medieval Muslim scholar: its annals, important and remarkable people, tribes, cities, countryside, the Nile, and deserts, wonders and religious merits, glorious days and gloomy ones, and its changing relationships to its larger Islamic and world context. This large set of topics, each treated under its specific title or titles written over more than thirty-five years, was nonetheless intertwined with the writing of the Khitat, which was al-Maqrizi’s first true introduction to history... Save Cite Part 3 The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Writing CHAPTER 5 Al-Maqrizi and the Orientalists (pp. 205-233) CHAPTER 5 Al-Maqrizi and the Orientalists (pp. 205-233) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.12 When considered within his own intellectual tradition, al-Maqrizi appears almost as an anachronistic figure, both for his dedicated focus on the history of Islamic Egypt as a lifelong project (the Prophet Muhammad’s life story being the second one) and for the critical stance displayed in most of his texts, especially the Ighathat, Khitat, and Suluk.¹ Certainly, no other Mamluk historian seems to have absorbed the Khaldunian perspective into his subject matter as al-Maqrizi did. Nor did any of his contemporaries capture the intensity of feelings displayed in his description of his country and city, his predictions of their ruination, or... Save Cite CHAPTER 6 Reading al-Maqrizi in Modern Egypt (pp. 234-283) CHAPTER 6 Reading al-Maqrizi in Modern Egypt (pp. 234-283) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.13 As a premier source for the urban history of Egypt, al-Maqrizi’s Khitat stood unrivaled for well over 400 years, a scholarly feat that would not be contested until the beginning of the nineteenth century with the appearance of the monumental Description de l’Égypte, ordered by Napoléon Bonaparte immediately after his army took Cairo in 1798. Only the Description was no real sequel to the literary Khitat tradition of medieval Egypt, although al-Maqrizi’s Khitat constituted one of its principal sources.¹ It was instead an imposing herald of another intellectual tradition that will dominate the modern study of history: the empirical method... Save Cite In the Guise of a Conclusion: (pp. 284-287) In the Guise of a Conclusion: (pp. 284-287) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.14 In a review of a biography of Susan Sontag in The New Yorker entitled “The Unholy Practice of Biography,” Janet Malcolm wrote: Biographers often get fed up with their subjects, with whom they have become grotesquely overfamiliar. We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. It is an unholy practice, the telling of a life story that isn’t one’s own on the basis of oppressively massive quantities of random, not necessarily reliable information. The demands this makes on the practitioner’s powers of discrimination, as well as on his capacity for sympathy, may be impossible to fulfill.¹...
This book offers an analysis of the Syro-Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate's political culture, focusing on the period between 1341 and 1382 CE, when twelve descendants of the regime's most successful sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn reigned and the military were more deeply involved in the political process than ever. The book consists of three chapters, each of which discusses one major component of this period's political culture: political institutions, political relationships engendering households and networks, and the dynamics of the period's many socio-political conflicts. This book marks an important breakthrough in Mamluk studies, offering both insights into the history of a long-neglected period and new models of analysis that call for wider application in the field of Mamluk socio-political history. 'The main strength of Van Steenbergen's book lies in the combination of a traditional approach to the sources, command of the literature, the application of prosopography and inslghts derived from political SOciology and, in this respect, is similar to Frenkel's use of prosopography and sociology. The book succeeds in living up to its title: it makes sense of the chaos, explains the order that emerged out of it and sheds light on MamlUk socio-political culture.' Yaacov Lev, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 34(2008), 560-562 'A masterful and very valuable evaluation ... offers, for the first time in many years, a refreshing sociological perspective on Mamluk ''decline'... a 'must-read'' Bethany J. Walker, Bulletin d'Études Orientales, LVIII (2008-2009) 412-415
Mamluk Descendants: In Search for the Awlād al-Nās, ed. Anna Kollatz (Bonn: Bonn University Press) , 2022
scendantsc ould only fill low-rankingp ositions in them ilitarya nd politics,a nd except for "quiteasmallnumberofexceptions, attained no higher rank than that of Amī rofT en andAmī rofF orty" (itw ould seem,but it is notentirelyclear,that Ayalon thought that mamlū k s ' descendantsnormally became amirsinthe ḣ alqa). Nevertheless,some mamlū k s ' descendantsreached thehighest rank of amir of one hundred, especially in Syria, andt oamuchl esser extent in Egypt, wherei na n exceptional manner duringt he second reigno ft he Qalā w ū nida l-Nā s˙ir Ḣ asan (755-762/1354-1361) mamlū k s ' descendantse njoyed ap rivilegedp osition. The "privileged position of the awlā da l-nā s underS ultan Ḣ asan was, however, exceptionaland contrasted sharplywiththeir status underother rulers". 6 Ayalon,itshouldberemembered, used mainly Circassian-periodsources that were at hisdisposal, whichmustreflect better thesituation in that period (784-923/ 1382-1517). Subsequentstudies have offeredamore nuancedand differentiated view of them ilitary/politicala nd economic status of the mamlū k s ' descendants andf ocused on correcting Ayalon'sv iewr egardingt he status of mamlū k s ' descendantsduringthe Tu rkishperiodofthe Sultanate(648-784/1250-1382). Afirst significanta nd groundbreaking corrective waso ffered by Ulrich Haarmann in 1984.B ased on informationf romI bn al-Jī ʿ ā n ' s(d. 885/1480) Kitā ba l-Tuḣ fa al-Saniyyabi-Asmā ʾ al-Bilā dal-Miṡ riyya andIbn Duqmā q ' s(d. 809/1407) al-Intiṡ ā r li-Wā siṫatʿIqdal-Amṡ ā r on thelegalstatusoflandunits (milk/waqf/rizqa/iqṫā ʿ), its taxyield (ʿibra)expressed in dī n ā rjayshī (henceforth, DJ), 7 andonthe land holders foundi ne xcerptsoft he register (jarī da iqṫā ʿ iyya)oft he army office (dī w ā naljaysh)ofE gypt in threedifferent dates(circa777/1376, 8 circa800/1397, 9 andcirca