A Grammarian’s Life in his own Voice: Autobiographical Fragments in Arabic Biographical Literature (original) (raw)
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While the historiography of late medieval Egypt and Syria is exceptionally well documented and many, if not most, of its major sources have by now been edited and studied, manuscript repositories still contain several historical texts that have received little to no attention from scholars. This essay will present one such unpublished and mostly unstudied excerpt of a historical biography devoted to Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (r. 693-4/1293-4, 698-708/1299-1309, 709-41/1309-41) preserved in the manuscript Arabe 1705, held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. It will be argued that its author can be identified as Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī (d. 730/1330), who also wrote two well-known historical biographies of the sultans Baybars (r. 658-76/1260-77) and Qalāwūn (r. 678-89/1281-90). Using this particular text as a case study, I will discuss how the concept of "Literarisierung," first applied to Mamluk historiography by Ulrich Haarmann almost half a century ago, may still be used fruitfully to think about how historiography and literary modes of expression interacted. In a famous article published in 1971, Ulrich Haarmann argued that historiography in late medieval Egypt and Syria underwent a particular innovation, which he defined as a "Literarisierung der inneren Form," or "literarization of the inner form." According to Haarmann, the chronicles and biographical dictionaries produced between the 7th/13th and early 10th/16th centuries should not be considered as innovative in their formal, outer form, as they generally adhered to characteristics set by earlier precedents. There was, however, something distinctive about their inner form (i.e., on the level of individual segments within the larger works). At this level, one would come across a much higher attestation of literary elements, that is, anecdotes, topoi, colloquialisms, and especially miraculous stories, ʿajāʾib wa-gharāʾib pervading the annalistic historical narratives.1 This argument and related observations from Haarmann's dissertation, Quellenstudien zur frühen Mamlukenzeit, sparked a