Download PDF | ( The Muslim World In The Age Of The Crusades) Alex Mallett, Medieval Muslim Historians And The Franks In The Levant Brill Academic Pub ( 2014)
220 Pages
Introduction
Alex Mallett Writing the history of the Crusades and of the Latin states of the Levant in the period of Frankish settlement in that region requires the utilisation of source material written in a variety of languages and a multitude of social and religious milieux, including Greek texts written in the Byzantine Empire, Syriac works written under Muslim rule, and Armenian histories written in Armenian Christian lands, among others. Yet the main languages in which evidence for the history of the crusading period is written are Latin, Old French and Arabic.1
Modern historians of the Crusades and the Latin East, for reasons which extend far back into the cultural and educational history of Europe and North America, almost exclusively come from a background of, and have been trained in, one or both of the first two of these languages and the cultures of western Europe which nurtured them. Although very recently some studies have attempted to employ Arabic sources to the same extent as the Latin ones, Arabic texts have, traditionally and regrettably, been used almost exclusively only in as far as they back-up what the western ones say, and ignored if they disagree.2
Although the Arabic sources for the history of the crusading period are of the highest importance for scholars studying the subject, there has been little attempt to analyse them, or even to provide translations for some of this material. For example with regard to the former, the translations provided in the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Documents Orientaux3 are of some use, but are marred by poor editing and translating of the texts in question, and the selective nature of many of the passages chosen means the medieval historians’ overall agendas are unseen, while there is also no attempt to place the works into their wider context. Another oft-employed selection of translations is Francesco Gabrieli’s Arab Historians of the Crusades4 and, while the translations provided by this work are extremely useful, there are also significant deficiencies with them, particularly that the English version was translated from Italian rather than directly from Arabic, and again there is no attempt to contextualise them.
There have also been a number of brief studies devoted to the rather inaccurate idea of the ‘Arabic Historiography of the Crusades’, although these are now generally rather dated.5 Despite these problems, there are some scholarly outputs which remain useful; these include translations into English such as Broadhurst’s rendering of al-Maqrīzī’s Kitāb al-sulūk,6 and the selected translations into French by Eddé and Micheau.7 Other studies remaining important include Cahen’s old yet still informative analytical passages at the beginning of his La Syrie du nord 8 and Richards’ studies of Ibn al-Athīr and ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī.9 There has also, in the last decade or so, been a renewed attempt to provide translations of significant Arabic texts from the crusading period into English, although rather disappointingly these have, in general, simply re-translated works which have already been available in western translation for some time, leaving numerous other extremely important works un-translated in full, or even lacking a decent edition.10
The last ten years has also seen a number of quality studies of historical writings relevant to the crusading period, but their conclusions have not generally been placed within the field of crusader studies.11 Given this overall state of research it is hoped that the studies within this volume will act as both an introduction for students and scholars studying the crusading period to some of the main Arabic historical texts and a spur to further investigation in this area by Arabists. This study does not aim to bring any new source material to the overall corpus of Arabic works available in translation. Such a contribution is certainly valuable, and it is a future aim to bring Arabic sources into the field of crusader studies by providing new translations and highlighting the relevance of material already well-known in other fields of Islamic Studies, such as religious texts.
However, it seems that it would be rather imprudent to bring new source material to bear without first providing some information on the social, cultural and religious atmospheres in which those texts already available in translation were written, or on the authors’ historiographical approach. This volume contains seven studies, each of which focusses on one Muslim historian and the work or works they wrote containing information relevant to the crusading period, and each of the seven follows a broad template. Approximately the first third of each study is devoted to a summary of the author’s life and influences, as far as they are known, in order to allow for an understanding of the milieu in which he lived and worked.
This will, in turn, allow for a greater appreciation of why the Franks and the events of the crusading period are presented as they are. Following this, there is a short assessment of the author’s total written outputs, in order both for his overall agenda in writing to be understood and for his specific historical works relevant to the crusading period to be placed within that agenda. Following this, the work(s) relevant for the history of the Crusades and the Latin East are examined in detail. While each of the modern contributors has been given the freedom to explore the text in the way they regard as being most effective, each textual study aims to: describe the history of modern studies, editions and translations of the text; highlight the reason for writing the text, its agenda and overall narrative framework; and demonstrate how the Franks of the Levant and the various Muslim rulers from the crusading period are presented and why.
It is hoped that this will help modern scholars of the crusading period to cut through the rhetoric within these texts and so utilise them in a more effective manner. As far as possible, this has been carried out using examples from within the texts which are already available in western language translation in order to allow scholars without Arabic to locate them; sometimes, however, this has not proved possible, particularly with texts only partially translated, and so previously non-translated sections have had to be employed. The texts and their authors examined in this volume have been chosen for two main reasons. Firstly, it is intended that the studies should primarily examine chronographical historical writings rather than biographical, autobiographical, or any other genre which may contain evidence for the crusading period, as chronography is the genre which is most often employed by modern historians to write the history of the time. Furthermore, an attempt to include multiple genres across the volume could cause confusion on the part of the non-expert reader.12 Secondly, as this volume is aimed primarily at scholars and students reading these texts in translation it is only natural that it should focus on works which have been translated into a western language, and in this context this primarily means English or French. It is felt that the seven authors and their works which are examined in these studies best fit these aims. At this point, it may be useful to highlight some of the authors who have been excluded from this volume, and the reasons why.
There are a number of writers whose works cover the events of the Crusades and have been translated into western languages, and which can contribute greatly to modern understanding of the period in question. These include Ibn Jubayr’s Riḥla (‘Travels’),13 Usāma b. Munqidh’s Kitāb al-iʿtibār (‘The Book of Instructions’),14 Abū Shāma’s Kitāb al-rawḍatayn fī akhbār al-dawlatayn (‘The Book of the Two Gardens on the Reports of the Two States’),15 and Bahāʾ al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād’s al-Nawāḍir al-sulṭāniyya wa’l-maḥāsin al-yūsufiyya (‘The Sultan-ly Rarities and the Joseph-ly Merits’);16 these have been omitted because they are not chronicles but are instead, respectively, a travel narrative, a series of ‘memoirs’, two biographies and one biography. A number of other important chronicles, some of which are mentioned in passing in this volume, have been excluded because they have not been translated into a western language.
These include al-Nuwayrī’s Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (‘The Ultimate Goal in the Field of Culture’),17 and al-Birzālī’s al-Muqtafī ʿalā kitāb al-rawḍatayn (‘The Continuation of the Kitāb al-rawḍatayn’).18 Other Arabic writers have been excluded because it is the aim of this volume to focus on Muslim historians, and so Christians who wrote relevant material in Arabic are not included; one such example is Ibn al-ʿAmīd and his al-Majmūʿ al-mubārak (‘The Blessed Collection’).19 The writing of history in the medieval Islamic world followed a rather different path to that of history writing in contemporaneous western Europe. There had been no tradition of writing history among the pre-Islamic Arabs, and during the first centuries of Islam it held little respect amongst the majority of the Muslim ʿulamāʾ, the religious classes, as it was believed to add nothing to the understanding of religion (i.e. Islam), being at best frivolous and at worst dangerous. The only history which was, in general, believed to be permissible to write was the history of the life of Muḥammad and the early ‘Rightly-Guided’ caliphs (the Rāshidūn), as their almost-perfect examples of rule could be of use to later generations through attempts to emulate them. There was also no such thing as a ‘professional’ historian in the medieval Islamic period. All historians were instead primarily employed in some other respect—usually in a religious or bureaucratic position of some sort—and for them the writing of history was a hobby, albeit a serious one.20 With the exception of al-Athāribī, who wrote a now-lost account of the crusading movement, no Muslim history of the Crusades and the Latin presence in the Levant was written.
Thus, the historians on whom we rely for information were not the equivalent of Latin historians such as William of Tyre, Walter the Chancellor or the author of the anonymous Gesta Francorum. Instead, they followed a historiographical approach more related to writers such as Orderic Vitalis or Matthew Paris—including accounts of the events of the crusading period but in a wider context, presenting those occurrences in a manner which fits with the broader message and agenda of their chronicle. It is these messages and agendas which these studies will attempt to highlight. One question which has exercised modern historians of medieval Islamic historiography concerns the extent to which the source material can be trusted in terms of the ‘facts’ contained within it.
As Meisami has commented in the context of medieval Persian historical writing, ‘the medieval historian’s primary interest lay less in recording the “facts” of history than in the construction of meaningful narratives’.21 One of the most extreme examples of this can be found in a study by El-Hibri, whose argument surrounding accounts of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in the second/eighth-third/ninth centuries is that almost all the information contained within the chronicles was, in essence, invented by the authors in order to make a political point.22
While most modern scholars consider this to be too extreme a position, the extent to which historical writing was moulded to suit political circumstances in the late fifth/eleventh and early sixth/twelfth centuries has been amply demonstrated by Safi in his important deconstruction of the mechanisms created by the Seljūqs to legitimise their rule.23 With these ideas in mind, it is hoped that not only will this volume prove useful to crusade scholars, but, through a deconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the composition of these works, that it will also enable those working in Islamic history and Arabic/Islamic historiography to further knowledge in their respective fields as well.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق