"In search for a hidden group: Where are the awlād al-nās?" (original) (raw)
International Journal Middle East Studies, 2000
In recent years, the field of Mamluk studies has seen what may well be an amount of published scholarship unparalleled in any field of Middle East studies. Less than a decade ago, the study of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria could hardly have been called a distinct field, and it was only about four decades ago that the period was given any systematic attention at all through the pioneering efforts of David Ayalon. However, Mamluk specialists now have their own journal, the Mamluk Studies Review, with three annual volumes in print and more on the way, as well as an extensive and ever-growing Web-based bibliography, both of which are published by the University of Chicago's Middle East Documentation Center. Mamluk specialists around the world have been engaged in this work, but it was initiated by Thomas Philipp and the late Ulrich Haarmann. In December 1994, these two scholars organized a conference on Mamluk studies in Bad Homburg, Germany, and eighteen of the papers presen...
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.
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.
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
The MamlūkSultanate negotiated with distant forces and commercial partners and exchanged dispatches and embassiesw ith competitorsa nd rivals. These research topics attracted historians' attention already during the nineteenth century. Their studies illuminated the visible position of Cairo'sCitadel in the world and the diplomatic histories of the 13 th-16 th centuries. 1 This article, based on literary evidence, is the first chapter in aresearchenterprise that deals with the diplomatic communications between the MamlūkS ultanate and Muslim and non-Muslimsg overnments. 2 Ap lanned second chapter will focus on an investigation of archivalmaterials. 3 How did the Mamlūkelite, both its civilian and military echelons, perceivethe world around it?Several directions can be chosen in search for answer(s). The careful scrutinyofdiverse literary genres, as well as the investigation of artefacts, certainly is apossible first one. 4 This article is based primarily on the inspection of 15 th-century literary sources. It will concentrate primarily on three genres: 1) legal writings; 2) slavet rade guides; and 3) geographical texts. These texts cast light on the juridical division employed by the religious establishment, on communications with foreign markets and on the image of these remote lands in the collectiveimagination of the texts' consumers. Certainly, the three literary genres mentioned abovea re not the only type of *Iwould like to thank Prof. Reuven Amitai and Dr Julia Rubanovich for their help and advice. 1F or earlier works of mine on this topic, see Y. Frenkel, "Animals and Otherness in Mamluk Egypt and Syria," in Francisco de Asís García García, Mónica Ann Wa lker Va dillo and María Victoria Chico Picazabar(eds.), Animals and Otherness in the Middle Ages: Perspectives across Disciplines (Oxford, 2013), 52-55; Y. Frenkel, "Embassies and Ambassadors in Mamluk Cairo," in Frédéric Bauden (convener), Mamluk Cairo: ACrossroad for Embassies (Université de Liège, September 2012) (in preparation for publication). 2T he historyoft he Mamlūks and the Italian merchant republics is excluded. 3O ne documentw as presented in Y. Frenkel, "MamlūkE mbassies and Diplomats in 15 thcentury Mediterranean-The MamlūkSultanate in the Days of Qā ʾ it-Bā yand the al-Ifranj," a talk at the Second Conference of the School of MamlūkStudies, Liége, June 2015 (Panel: The Mamlūks and Distant Realms). 4D oris Behrens-Abouseif, Practising Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material Cultureinthe Medieval Islamic Wo rld (London, 2014).
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2023
The field of Mamluk studies, the common name for the scholarship dedicated to understanding various aspects of the history of the Mamluk sultanate (648/1250-922/1517), has witnessed remarkable developments over the last few decades. There is now a community of enthusiastic "Mamlukists" who convene regularly in specialized colloquia and publish a substantial number of captivating and diverse studies in dedicated venues that appear in English, German, Arabic, Turkish, French, Hebrew, Japanese, and Italian, and reflect advances that span every discipline of history. Such developments are possible owing to the cultural legacy of the Mamluk period, which left us a treasure trove of historical sources (both literary and material) to examine as a result of prolific cultural production that was often driven by the charitable endowments of Mamluk military and civilian elites. Despite this legacy, Mamluk studies has had no grand narrative or overview, no History of the Mamluk Sultanate. For far too long Mamlukists have lacked a source akin to Jonathan Riley-Smith's concise and still influential one-volume survey, The Crusades: A History (1987). Finally this bewildering gap in historiography has been filled with the longawaited publication of Carl F. Petry's The Mamluk Sultanate: A History. An authority on the social and cultural history of the Burji/Circassian period, author of the influential The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (1981) and other vital works, and editor of the first volume of The Cambridge History of Egypt (1998), Petry is the ideal scholar to accomplish this much-needed contribution. Petry highlights the absence of such a work hitherto. The astonishing transformation of the Mamluk institution of military slavery into an autonomous state ruled from Cairo was an exceptional occurrence in world history and it was odd that it had not previously yielded a book on the Mamluk sultanate "beyond a summation of its political trajectory" (p. 3), he notes. He perceptively highlights the relevance of this sultanate that "presided over the central Islamic lands during their transition from the medieval to early modern periods" and, in addition, notes how its ongoing study by a generation of international scholars is "reshaping the field of Islamic History overall" (p. 203). Using a wealth of captivating detail, Petry brings to life this unique experience of a powerful empire ruled by militaryslaves, while scrutinizing the politics, processes, and characters behind its rise and highlighting its durability for over two and a half centuries. To complete his survey, Petry successfully integrates into his study recent developments not just in historiography but in "the disciplines of anthropology archaeology, art and architecture, gender and
Craftsmen, upstarts and sufis in the late Mamluk period copy
This article explores the careers of craftsmen and other commoners, who succeeded in joining the bureaucratic system and occupying high positions in the Mamluk administrative establishment, eventually acquiring great power and even political authority. At the same time Sufi shaykhs, also men of common origin and beneficiaries of Mamluk philanthropy, emerged as mighty and authoritative figures, venerated equally by the aristocracy and the populace. The newly privileged groups also figure as founders of Friday mosques following a flexible new attitude on the part of the authorities. This social fluidity, often criticized by historians of the period, was the result of the pious patronage of the Mamluk aristocracy, which brought academic education to the reach of a large part of the populace. Towards the end of the Mamluk period, the structure of religious institutions had itself been levelled: the Friday mosque with Sufi service replaced the earlier madrasas and khanqāhs. The article also discusses how the visual arts of the period mirror the social changes with new aspects of artistic patronage.
Craftsmen, upstarts and Sufis in the late Mamluk period
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2011
This article explores the careers of craftsmen and other commoners, who succeeded in joining the bureaucratic system and occupying high positions in the Mamluk administrative establishment, eventually acquiring great power and even political authority. At the same time Sufi shaykhs, also men of common origin and beneficiaries of Mamluk philanthropy, emerged as mighty and authoritative figures, venerated equally by the aristocracy and the populace. The newly privileged groups also figure as founders of Friday mosques following a flexible new attitude on the part of the authorities. This social fluidity, often criticized by historians of the period, was the result of the pious patronage of the Mamluk aristocracy, which brought academic education to the reach of a large part of the populace. Towards the end of the Mamluk period, the structure of religious institutions had itself been levelled: the Friday mosque with Sufi service replaced the earlier madrasas and khanqāhs. The article a...