Download PDF | Christian Mauder - In the Sultan's Salon_ Learning, Religion and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516). 1 & 2-Brill Academi.pdf

Download PDF | Christian Mauder - In the Sultan's Salon_ Learning, Religion and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516). 1 & 2-Brill Academi.pdf

1328 Pages

Acknowledgments

The present book is a revised version of my dissertation in Arabic and Islamic studies submitted to the University of Göttingen in 2017. Over the course of the more than seven years that I have been working on al-Ghawrī’s court, I have been extremely privileged to receive the support of many people and institutions, and it is with great pleasure and gratitude that I acknowledge their respective roles here. First and foremost, I wish to thank my Doktorvater Sebastian Günther who has been an inspiring teacher, honest critic, resourceful guide, and scholarly role model over the past years. Based on his broad vision of Islamicate intellectual history and his genuinely sympathetic approach to the field, Sebastian Günther has steadily supported this project from its very beginnings up to the final steps of the publication process and I am deeply grateful for his tireless and personal guidance, encouragement, and help that went far beyond what is usually be expected from a doctoral adviser. I could not have hoped for a better mentor in preparing me for an academic career. The three other members of my doctoral committee, Jens Scheiner, Stephan Conermann, and Andreas Grünschloß have supported this project in manifold ways for which I am sincerely grateful.

 Jens Scheiner has been a steady and tireless source of helpful advice, candid criticism, and succinct feedback from which the present book has greatly benefited in numerous ways. Furthermore, he has taught me to fully appreciate the value of historical and philological details in research. Moreover, the regular research colloquia at the University of Göttingen headed by Jens Scheiner have played a profound role in the shaping of many of the ideas expressed in the present work. In addition to his encouragement, support, and advice, I owe thanks to Stephan Conermann for making me aware of the great value that theoretical insights from disciplines such as sociology, European history, and literary studies can have for my work on Mamluk history. Moreover, his farsighted leadership has been most helpful for me when making my first steps in the international field of Mamluk studies and I have been highly privileged to have had the opportunity to spend a year at the University of Bonn, at the Annemarie Schimmel Center for Advanced Studies headed by Stephan Conermann. Andreas Grünschloß has been instrumental in forming and nurturing my interest in the academic study of religion from an early point in my studies onwards, when he was one of my very first professors. I have greatly benefitted from the foundations laid in those days and am grateful that Andreas Grünschloß directed not only some of my first steps as a student at the University of  Göttingen, but kindly guided me also during the very last part of my academic journey at this institution. 

Frank Griffel, although not a member of my doctoral committee, has shaped my research in so many ways that I want to thank him here. As my host professor during my first stay at Yale University, he has not only allowed me to benefit from his broad and deep knowledge of the Islamic philosophical and theological traditions, but also took the time to discuss my project with me in detail and offer advice on the interpretation and contextualization of its sources. I am greatly obliged to Frank Griffel for his sincere interest in my research and his kind support, both during my time as a visiting graduate student at Yale and then again as a postdoctoral fellow at the same institution. Several institutions have financially contributed to this project and it is my pleasant duty to thankfully acknowledge here the support of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), the Graduate School of Humanities Göttingen (Graduiertenschule für Geisteswissenschaften Göttingen), the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), the New York University Abu Dhabi Humanities Fellowship Program, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Balzan Foundation, the ahkr Department of the University of Bergen, and the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I am moreover grateful to the 2018 committees of the Christian-Gottlob-Heyne Prize of the University of Göttingen and the Malcom H. Kerr Dissertation Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America for choosing my work for these awards.

 The present study would not have been possible without access to numerous manuscripts. For granting me access to their holdings and supporting my research, I would like to thank the directorates, authorities and staff members of the Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, the Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, the Archives of the Wizārat al-Awqāf, Cairo, the King Saud University Library, Ryadh, the Firestone Library, Princeton, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto, the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, the Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome. I am especially obliged to three persons for their invaluable assistance in gaining access to manuscripts that have been of particular importance for my work. Akram Bishr and Mahmoud Haggag have been instrumental in obtaining material from the Archives of the Wizārat al-Awqāf in Cairo in addition to their continued generous support and encouragement over the past years for which I would like to express here my sincere thanks.

 In Istanbul, I would have been lost without the help of Christopher Markiewicz and without his kind assistance, the present study would not have been possible in its present form. In addition to opening doors in Istanbul, Christopher Markiewicz has generously provided me with information about relevant manuscripts and databases, confirmed the relevance of al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya for my research before I had a chance to access it, and allowed me to read his unpublished work. My fellow PhD students at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies of the University of Göttingen have been an important source of support, feedback and counsel. In particular, I would like to thank Enrico Boccaccini, Tarek Elkot, Yassir El Jamouhi, Yoones Deghani Farsani, Jana Newiger, Ali Rida Rizek, Undine Ott, Muhammad Shehata, and Adam Walker. Moreover, I am grateful to the staff of the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies. In addition to those named elsewhere, I would like to thank here especially Petra Kemmling and Dorothee Lauer. Thanks go also to the fellows and staff members of the Annemarie Schimmel Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Bonn who have not only contributed to making my time at this institution in 2016–2017 productive and enjoyable, but also allowed me to profit from their knowledge and scholarly creativity.

 In particular, I would like to mention here Abdelkader Al Ghouz, Julie Bonnéric, Chiara Corbino, Claudia El Hawary, Shireen El Kassem, Hend Elsayed, Mathieu Eychenne, Adriana Gaspar, Carine Juvin, Boris Liebrenz, Robert Moore, Bogdan Smarandache, Warren Schultz, Aleksandar Shopov, and last but by far not least the Kolleg’s co-director BethanyWalker. During my time at Bonn and beyond, I have moreover benefited from conversations with Evrim Ilker Binbaş,Mohammad Gharaibeh, Anna Kollatz, Eva Orthmann,Judith Pfeiffer, Hedda Reindl-Kiel, Gül Şen, and Tilmann Trausch. In the spring of 2018, a humanities research fellowship at New York University Abu Dhabi provided me with the much needed tranquility to begin in earnest the process of turning my dissertation into the present book. I sincerely thank the team behind the fellowship program and especially its leaders Reindert Falkenburg, Martin Klimke, and Alexandra Sandu for their highly professional and kind support. For productive discussions, scholarly advice, and helpful feedback during my time in Abu Dhabi, I am grateful to Nora Barakat, Hadia Mubarak, Maurice Pomerantz, Laila Prager, Dwight Reynolds, Walid Saleh, Justin Stearns, David Wrisley, and William Zimmerle. In the academic year 2018–19, I have been extremely privileged to join the School of Historical Studied of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton,  as its Gerda Henkel Member. During my time at Princeton, Sabine Schmidtke has been a generous, critical, dedicated, and resourceful mentor and I am most grateful for her kind guidance and support.

 Among the numerous scholars at the Institute who shared valuable insights, feedback and advice with me, I am especially indebted to Hassan Farhang Ansari, Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Ralf Bockmann, Marilyn Booth, Glen W. Bowersock, Cristina Carusi, Julian Casanova, Angelos Chaniotis, Martino Diez, Patrick J. Geary, Sabine Go, Hans Hummer, CarinaJohnson, Thomas Kruse, Scott Lucas, NathanMartin,Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Johannes Pahlitzsch, Tommaso Tesei, Francesca Trivellato, and Nükhet Varlık. I also wish to thank María Mercedes Tuya, Marian Zelazny, the administrative team of the School of Historical Studies, the donors and caretakers of the Institute Woods, and the team of the ias Historical Studies— Social Science Library. A special place in these acknowledgements is reserved for the faculty and participants of the Holberg Seminar on Islamic History at Princeton University. Michael Cook’s outstanding generosity in convening this series of events is surpassed only by the unique kindness, rigor, acumen, resourcefulness, and dedication with which he supported the members of the Seminar in becoming better scholars. In addition to Michael Cook and his wife Kim who warmly welcomed us into their home, I wish to express here my heartfelt gratitude to the other faculty and members of the Seminar, who included Lale Behzadi, Antoine Borrut, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Marina Rustow, Sabine Schmidtke, Jack B. Tannous, Theo Beers, Sébastian Garnier, Lidia Gocheva, Matthew Keegan, Pamela Klasova, Daisy Livingston, Najah Nadi, Eugénie Rébillard, Naseem Surhio, and Edward Zychowicz-Coghill. During what were the intellectually most stimulating weeks of my life, the participants in this unique scholarly majlis offered their open and candid feedback, inspiring insights, and sincere companionship. While writing this book, I have often come to imagine this highly diverse group with its different scholarly traditions, approaches, and interests as my intended readership.

 Frequently enough, this implied that I had to rethink an argument or rewrite a section if I wanted it to measure up to the high standards of scholarship that the Holberg Seminar represents to me. It is my sincere hope that the final product in hand is worthy of the support I have received as a Holberg member. In addition to the persons named above, many other people in the field of Arabic and Islamic studies and beyond have offered valuable feedback, useful input, helpful advice, and friendly encouragement. Among others, I would like to thank here especially Adel Allouche, Reuven Amitai, Christopher D. Bahl, Mustafa Banister, Frédéric Bauden, Thomas Bauer, Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Jonathan Berkey, Joel Blecher, Jonathan Brack, Ryan Brizendine, Korkut Buğ day, Malika Dekkiche, Kristof D’hulster, Anver Emon, Maribel Fierro, Yehoshua Frenkel, Albrecht Fuess, Dimitri Gutas, Lara Harb, Angelika Hartmann, Jane Hathaway, Konrad Hirschler, Martin Jagonak, Marion Katz, Judith Kindinger, Wakako Kumakura, Verena Klemm, B. Todd Lawson, Stefan Leder, Paulina Lewicka, Linda Northrup, Jürgen Paul, Carl Petry, Kristina Richardson, Elias G. Saba, Marlis J. Saleh, Tilman Seidensticker, Florian Sobieroj, Martin Tamcke, Jan Thiele, Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Eric van Lit, Josephine van den Bent, Gowaart van den Bossche, Jo van Steenbergen, Syrinx von Hees, Monika Winet, Jan Just Witkam, Thomas Würtz, and Stefan Zinsmeister. Thanks are furthermore due to Stéphane Pradines for allowing me to republish his map of the Cairo Citadel. Special thanks go to Khaled El Rouayheb, Jo van Steenbergen, and Konrad Hirschberg for providing feedback on the manuscript shortly before publication. I am indebted to the staff at Brill and especially Teddi Dols for the kindness and professionality with which they managed the publication of this book. Valerie Joy Turner’s careful copyediting of the book is much appreciated. 

I moreover thank the two anonymous readers who through their helpful comments saved me from several embarrassing mistakes and made the book more accessible to international readerships. Needless to say, all remaining errors are my own. Furthermore, I am grateful to Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Sebastian Günther for accepting this book in the Islamic History and Civilization series. Friends and family have contributed to this book in more ways than I am probably aware of. They have borne with me when I found myself unbearable and offered their continued support and care when it was needed the most. Among my friends, I would like to extend special thanks to Jesko and Varvara Lange, Stephan and Kathrin Benkert, Sven Grebenstein, Robert Heurung, Markus Läger, Maham and Obaid Naseer, and FranziskaWeiß. My siblings Markus and Stefanie and their partners and children Ben, Kilian, Lioba, Tim, Ursi, andWerner have played a major role in letting me recognize that there are far more important things in life than a book and I thank them for their kind encouragement over the past years. My parents Heidrun and Rudolf Mauder have supported my quest for knowledge from my earliest days onward and I wholeheartedly thank them for their help, encouragement, and loving care. 

Moreover, I am deeply grateful that they are here to see this project having reached its conclusion. My wife Katrin Killinger has been with me the entire time of this project and has contributed in more ways to its fruition than I can express. Katrin, you have been a sharp-minded and candid critic, an intellectual and scholarly inspiration, a sincere and wise friend, a bright and guiding light in dark hours, and most of all a loving partner in all things. There is no way I will be ever able to thank you for all you have done. Yet, I want you to know that I am deeply grateful and that I wish all of us could see the world through your eyes. This book is dedicated to you. 

Bergen, September 2020

Note on Transliteration, Style, and Periodization Throughout this book, Arabic is transliterated according to the system of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān and Ottoman Turkish according to that of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Names of persons appearing in Arabic sources are treated as Arabic, regardless of their linguistic origin. Exceptions are made for the names of prominent figures which are transliterated in the way they appear most frequently in secondary literature. Thus, the names of the Ottoman sultans whose reigns were contemporaneous to that of al-Ghawrī are given as Selīm and Bāyezīd, not Salīm and Abū Yazīd. Toponyms are used in their established English form wherever possible. Terms such as “Syria” or “Egypt” denote historical regions and not the territories of present-day nationstates unless indicated otherwise. 

Following Donald S. Richards, the adjective “Mamluk” is used to refer to the “totality of the state, society and culture etc.” which dominated Egypt and Syria in the late middle period, whereas “mamlūk” denotes “an individual who has that legal and social status,” that is, someone who was at one point in his life a (military) slave.1 The design of the footnotes and the bibliography follows the guidelines of Brill’s Islamic History and Civilization series. Unpublished PhD dissertations and master theses are treated as monographs. All quotations from manuscripts reproduce their orthographic and linguistic peculiarities faithfully. Page numbers are given for manuscripts that feature pagination but no foliation. If manuscripts include both pagination and foliation, the reference system more consistently used in them is employed.In case of manuscripts that have neither pagination nor foliation, folio numbers are given. English renditions of Quranic passages quote the translation of M.A.S. Abdel Haleem unless otherwise specified. All other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Dates are given in the form ah/ce unless otherwise indicated. Two systems of periodization of Islamicate Middle Eastern history are used. Terms based on dynasties and comparable social bodies such as “the Umayyad period” or “the Mamluk period” are employed especially in contexts of political history.2

 The Mamluk period is subdivided into an early period ending in the last decades of the eighth/fourteenth century and a late period. In addition, the present study builds on Marshall Hodgson’s work in using the categories “early Islamicate” (ca. first/seventh to mid-fifth/eleventh century), “middle Islamicate” (ca. midfifth/eleventh to the second quarter of the tenth/sixteenth century), and “modern Islamicate” (ca. second quarter of the tenth/sixteenth century onward). The middle and the modern period are subdivided into earlier and later periods with the middle of the seventh/thirteenth century and the end of the twelfth/eighteenth century representing the times of transition, respectively

Introduction

 1.1 Topics and Research Questions In curia sum, et de curia loquor, et nescio, Deus scit, quid sit curia. I live in the court and speak about the court but do not know—as God knows—what the court is.1 The writer of this sentence, theWelsh nobleman, author, and clericWalter Map (ca. 1130–1209 or 1210ce) spent about twenty years of his life at the court of the English King Henry ii (r. 1154–1189ce). Belonging to Henry’s inner circle and serving as one of his trusted diplomats, Walter Map had firsthand knowledge not only of the English court, but also of those of the king of France, the Pope, and other European lords. His manifold experiences with the world of courtly life found expression in his often satirical De nugis curialium (On the trifles of courtiers), from which the above sentence is quoted.2 Although Walter Map’s statement about his own ignorance should be taken with a grain of salt given the overall character of his work, it points to a question faced by many scholars of premodern societies:3What is a“court,” and how can it be conceptualized? Whereas historians working on Europe and other regions of the world have repeatedly addressed this terminological and theoretical issue over the past decades, scholars working on Islamicate societies have hitherto only rarely reflected on it.

 While passing references to “courts,” “courtiers,” and “courtly culture” are legion in works on the premodern Islamicate world, the meanings of these terms are hardly ever explained, let alone precisely conceptualized.4 One reason for this situation lies in the relatively limited number of studies that focus primarily on Islamicate courts, especially in the premodern Arabic speaking world.5 Those works that do study premodern Islamicate courts typically address a few select cases from the so-called “Golden Age”6 of Islam, most notably the courts of ʿAbbasid and Buyid Iraq and Iran, Fatimid Egypt, and Muslim-ruled Iberia.7 Nevertheless, even these studies often lack an explicit terminological and theoretical framework in their analysis of courts.8 Our knowledge of the courts of the Mamluk sultans (648–923/1250–1517) and their culture is even more limited, despite the importance of these rulers for Islamicate history, the growing scholarly interest in their sultanate, and the fact that scholars using approaches from historical anthropology, which recently attracted considerable attention in Mamluk studies, often examine courts in other cultural contexts.9 Until now, no one has produced a booklength study of Mamluk court life, and the often short available articles that address specific aspects of Mamluk court culture are typically limited in scope, thus underlining the need for further studies.10 Ulrich Haarmann’s 1989 characterization of Mamluk court culture as a “neglected subject”11 remains true. The reasons for this situation lie not in a dearth of sources, but rather, primarily, in the narrative of a cultural, social, and economic decline of the Islamicate world during the late middle period, a narrative that has dominated its study for decades, if not centuries. More recent scholarship has thoroughly deconstructed and refuted this earlier paradigm of decline, although remnants of this paradigm still haunt both academic and non-academic discourses.12 

However, even otherwise highly valuable current scholarship critical of the decline narrative upholds one of its central building blocks, namely the notion that the courts of the late middle period ceased to play a central role in the cultural, intellectual, or literary life of their time.13 It seems that this idea of an assumed “irrelevance”14 of courts reflects, as least in part, the biases and vested interests of Arabic-speaking authors critical of contemporaneous, often nonArab political elites. As Haarmann noted: “[T]he rich and variegated religious and literary culture at the Mamluk court […], was simply ignored by local Arab chroniclers. […] [They] seem to have followed the strategy of passing over in silence what in their view was not to be.”15 Present-day scholars who maintain the notion of an assumed cultural insignificance of courts of the middle period do so in a context that lacks specialized studies on these elite formations. They thereby risk not only reproducing the biases of Mamluk historiographical literature, but also steering scholarly attention further from the understudied topic of court culture, thus rendering specialists in the Islamicate world unable to contribute to current interdisciplinary debates about court life as a central aspect of the functioning of pre and early modern societies on a global scale. Moreover, the assumption that Islamicate courts of the late middle period no longer offered relevant cultural stimuli can serve, like many other surviving fragments of the decline narrative, to justify politically-charged discourses about cultural, social, intellectual, and religious hierarchies among contemporary societies, and may even be adduced as a reason for an alleged“cultural backwardness” of theIslamicate world today.

 The monograph at hand seeks to remedy this gap in research by presenting the first comprehensive and detailed study of multiple core aspects of Mamluk court life. To this end, it develops as a necessary precondition a reasoned theoretical conceptualization of the term “court” that is applicable to premodern Islamicate societies, and thus opens the way for future comparative and interdisciplinary studies.16 Applying this conceptualization to the reign of the penultimate Mamluk sultan, Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906–22/1501–16), the study argues that late Mamluk court culture reached a level of richness and sophistication irreconcilable with the generalized notion that courts of the late middle period no longer functioned as prime centers of cultural production. In contrast to earlier studies that viewed al-Ghawrī’s tenure as a time when “the decline of the cultural level […] was manifest,”17 the following chapters demonstrate that in a period of economic transformations, political instability, and external threats which not only put the legitimacy and security of al-Ghawrī’s rule, but indeed the very survival of the Mamluk Sultanate at stake, the Mamluk court functioned as an innovative and transregional center of intellectual, religious, and political culture.

 The local Egyptians and migrants from across the Islamicate world who shaped its courtly culture relied on the centuryold Islamicate literary, scholarly, religious, and political heritage and on new and innovative approaches to tackle the challenges that the Mamluk Sultanate faced during the early decades of the tenth/sixteenth century. To this end, they turned the Cairo Citadel into a cosmopolitan venue of intellectual debate where learned men from across the Islamicate ecumene sought answers to highly contested scholarly questions. Moreover, they enacted a rich religious life marked by novel theological formulas and practices that could support the view that al-Ghawrī was a God-sent centennial renewer (mujaddid). Furthermore, the members of the court staged a program of splendid events and patronage activities to buttress the claim that al-Ghawrī was not only a legitimate Mamluk sultan, but indeed a divinely chosen universal ruler of noble origin and the rightful caliph of the Muslim community. Such an in-depth analysis of court life under al-Ghawrī is possible thanks to a unique corpus of sources that have, in part, remained undiscovered until very recently and are brought here to full use for the first time. 

The three most important of these sources claim to be eyewitness accounts of the majālis or salons18 al-Ghawrī convened at the Cairo Citadel to discuss scholarly, religious, and political issues with members of his court and foreign guests. Two of these works, Nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya fī ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-Qurʾāniyya ([sic], The jewels of the sultanic salons on the truths of Quranic mysteries) and al-Kawkab al-durrī fī masāʾil al-Ghawrī (The brilliant star on al-Ghawrī’s questions) were first edited in 1941. However, an examination of the surviving manuscripts showed that the available editions leave out about half of the former text and three-quarters of the latter work without properly indicating these omissions. The present study is the first to analyze these works as completely as possible based on both the edited text and the available manuscript material. The third source on al-Ghawrī’s salons, a recently identified two-volume work entitled al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya fī l-nawādir al-Ghawriyya (The jeweled necklaces on alGhawrī’s anecdotes), remains entirely in manuscript form and has hitherto all but escaped scholarly attention. When seen together with other contemporaneous and later sources, these texts allow us to pose new questions about al-Ghawrī’s court, questions that can seldom be answered for other periods of Mamluk history. In particular, the present study addresses the following points: i. How can we conceptualize the court in the context of late Mamluk history? ii. In what ways was the Mamluk court involved in learned activities and the transmission of knowledge during al-Ghawrī’s reign? iii. What roles did the Mamluk court play with regard to religious thought and practice? iv. What concepts of rulership existed at al-Ghawrī’s court and how did they inform the courtly representation and legitimation of rule in the late Mamluk period? On the one hand, these questions reflect the focus of the main sources of the present study, which contain ample information on the scholarly, religious, and political culture of the Mamluk court.

 The fact that these texts provide comprehensive information on these topics underscores their importance for their main intended readership, that is, Sultan al-Ghawrī’s contemporaries in general and the members of his court in particular. On the other hand, by posing the questions outlined here, the present study addresses several desiderata in our knowledge of premodern courts, Islamicate and non-Islamicate alike. As current overviews of the state of research emphasize, until very recently scholarship has all but neglected the role of courts as centers of the transmission of knowledge and religious life, even as it relates to better-known European courts.19 Moreover, despite the growing interest in Islamicate political culture and the obvious importance of courts in this field,20 scholars have only rarely focused on the role of courts in the representation and legitimation of rule. Given our present state of knowledge about Islamicate courts, it is necessary to address these kinds of questions through case studies of individual courts based on primary sources written by members of these courts.21 The separation between learning, religious life, and political culture expressed in the questions listed above is purely heuristic. Many learned activities at the Mamluk court had religious elements, while most aspects of religious life were unthinkable without a certain level of scholarly knowledge. Both religious and learned life, in turn, were important for how political rule was conceptualized, performed, and expressed in a courtly context. 

Finally, concepts and practices of political rule strongly influenced the ways in which knowledge was transmitted and religious beliefs enacted by and among those who surrounded the ruler. Yet, it is only by studying these topics, one after the other, that their interrelations become clearly discernible; this is especially true since present-day students of Islamicate history are used to thinking in these intellectual categories.22 

The structure of the present monograph reflects its research questions. The remainder of the introductory chapter is an in-depth engagement with the question of what constitutes a court. It reviews prominent definitions and conceptualizations from neighboring disciplines, such as historical sociology and European history, to develop an understanding of “court” as an analytical category that can be fruitfully applied to Islamicate and especially Mamluk contexts. This approach reflects the conviction that insights derived from the study of other cultural spheres can be helpful in the investigation of Islamicate court culture, provided these insights reach a sufficient level of abstraction.23 In particular, the chapter shows that while premodern Arabic did not feature a term that could be readily translated as “court,” a conceptualization of “court” as a series of performative and spatially manifested occasions bearing communicative significance (such as receptions, festivities, or majālis) and as a social “entity” constituted by those participating in these occasions offers a particularly robust analytical framework for studying premodern Islamicate societies. The final section examines majlis as a key term for these performative and social dimensions of late Mamluk court culture. The second chapter offers a concise historical narrative of Sultan al-Ghawrī’s fifteen-year reign, based on Ibn Iyās’ (d. after 928/1522) chronicle, hitherto, the most widely quoted source on the period. The subsequent critical review of the state of research provides readers with an introduction to the current knowledge about al-Ghawrī’s reign that is, first, necessary for a proper contextualization of the findings of the present monograph; and second, will alert readers to current challenges and problems in the study of this period. Among other things, the chapter demonstrates that the heavy and often unbalanced reliance on Ibn Iyās as the main informant about late Mamluk history is highly problematic, given the chronicler’s direct involvement in the events he narrates and his conflict-ridden relationship with al-Ghawrī in particular. As a consequence of this over-reliance on Ibn Iyās, many modern researchers have accepted his characterization of al-Ghawrī as a greedy and unjust tyrant without critically examining this source. Moreover, the review of the state of the field underlines the need for new approaches to the study of late Mamluk history, approaches that integrate perspectives from political, religious, economic, cultural, and intellectual history. Chapter 3 introduces the foundations of such novel approaches by examining sources, other than Ibn Iyās, on the last decades of Mamluk rule, including texts in Arabic, Turkic, and European languages alongside material evidence. Representing such diverse genres as chronicles, biographical dictionaries, literary offerings, mirrors-for-princes, chancery manuals, documentary sources, religious poetry, travelogues, and inscriptions, these sources reveal their full potential when viewed together with the three accounts of al-Ghawrī’s majālis (Nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya, al-Kawkab al-durrī, and al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya) mentioned above. 

The chapter discusses these in part unedited accounts for the first time in detail. It demonstrates that these texts constitute specimens of the time-honored genre of Arabic courtly majālis works and belong to two textually independent but substantially overlapping traditions of writing about al-Ghawrī’s majālis. This finding underlines the historical source value of these texts,which claim to constitute eyewitness accounts of the events they describe in detail, including aspects such as their participants, duration, place, and topics of discussion—and even the food that was served to the sultan and his guests. The fourth chapter examines the intellectual life of al-Ghawrī’s court and asks whether the processes of learning and the transmission of knowledge in his majālis and related social contexts exhibited specifically courtly features. It analyzes spatial, chronological, and performative characteristics of the majālis and demonstrates the diversity of their participants, which included, in addition to the sultan, local and itinerant scholars, prominent political functionaries, and such seemingly marginal figures as military recruits and a court jester with an ambiguous gender identity. The chapter thereafter examines, in detail, debates from the various fields of learning that shaped the intellectual climate of the majālis and explores their interconnectedness with contemporaneous scholarly currents and political challenges. After broadening the analytical scope by scrutinizing other courtly activities of learning, such as ḥadīth recitations and manuscript production at the Cairo Citadel, the chapter concludes that al-Ghawrī’s court was deeply integrated into the broader context of late Mamluk intellectual culture with its distinctive features of professionalization, cosmopolitanism, the amalgamation of religious learning and literary activities, and an abundance of available information. 

Fulfilling primarily intellectual, but also political and entertainment functions, the intellectual activities of the court emphasized its role as a center of scholarly patronage and state-ofthe-art learned debates that brought together participants from various social, cultural, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. Chapter 5 sheds light on the various performative, social, and intellectual dimensions of the religious life of the court. It demonstrates the central role of the court in religious events, such as the celebration of the Prophet Muḥammad’s birthday, and its openness toward Sufi and pro-ʿAlid currents. Special attention is paid to the ingenuity with which members of the court approached contested religious issues and developed formulas of theological compromise intended to maintain the peace among the various Sunni groups within the sultanate, groups such as Shāfiʿī-Ashʿarīs and Ḥanafī-Māturīdīs. Moreover, the chapter examines the efforts of al-Ghawrī and those around him to endow the sultan’s rule with religious meaning by casting him in the role of the protector of religion and morals, the patron of religious activities, an active contributor to religious scholarship, and the God-sent centennial renewer (mujaddid). Many of the religious undertakings of the court served to corroborate al-Ghawrī’s entitlement to these prominent statuses, which in the case of the mujaddid in particular, implied one of highest humanly attainable ranks in Sunni cosmology. The concluding section highlights the significance of religious communication for the social cohesion of the Mamluk court and its interactions with its local, regional, and transregional interlocutors. It shows that members of the court employed highly charged symbols alongside other methods of communication to affirm their shared religious identity and make innovative statements about the meaning of Mamluk sultanic rule. 

The topic of rulership, representation, and legitimation of rule at al-Ghawrī’s court stands at the center of chapter 6. Based on the work of Max Weber, the chapter argues that in the early tenth/sixteenth century, late Mamluk sultanic rule underwent a pronounced crisis of legitimacy caused by both domestic and transregional factors, including the rise of powerful rivals such as the Ottomans and the Safawids. In reaction, the sultan and members of his court engaged in mainfold and, in part, highly innovative strategies of representation and legitimation of rule. They sought to situate the former military slave al-Ghawrī in time-honored traditions of exemplary rulership and used elaborate communicative means to prove that their sultan satisfied four central requirements for legitimate rule in the Islamicate middle period, namely his noble origin (in al-Ghawrī’s case either from the Prophet Jacob or from a Ghassanid ruler), his divine appointment, his justice, and his military prowess. Special attention is paid to the unparalleled efforts of members of the court to establish that alGhawrī not only de facto wielded the powers Sunni political theory accords to the imamate, but indeed, was also the rightful caliph of the Muslim community. Thereafter, the chapter switches the focus to the mainly performative strategies of representation and legitimation. It shows that by convening his majālis, commissioning, in part, distinctively novel architectural projects, issuing new varieties of copper coinage bearing images of his buildings, staging lavish court events, and sponsoring literary and artistic productions, al-Ghawrī and his court were not engaging in fruitless spending and unreasonably squan dering the wealth of the sultanate, as earlier scholarship suggested. Rather, these activities formed an integral part of an innovative strategy to dramatically reaffirm the legitimacy of late Mamluk rulership in general and that of al-Ghawrī in particular, vis-à-vis both local audiences and interlocutors across the Islamicate and especially Persianate ecumene.

 The chapter concludes that, in contrast to earlier assumptions, the political culture of al-Ghawrī’s court was not irrational, or conservative, or parochial, but rather closely entangled with other Islamicate regions, often remarkably inventive, and largely driven by rational motives. In light of the extent and complexity of the topics the present monograph covers, the final chapter begins with a detailed chapter-by-chapter summary before the second part explores the importance of these key findings for current debates about the historical development of the Islamicate world of the late middle period and the postulated cultural “irrelevance” of courts in Mamluk times. It emphasizes the importance of the concept of “court” as an analytical category for Islamicate history and reviews our conclusions about the central role of al-Ghawrī’s court as an innovative, cosmopolitan, and culturally open center in the intellectual, religious, and political life of its time, both locally and transregionally. These results stand in clear contrast to the highly problematic paradigm of a general decline of the Islamicate world during the late middle period, a paradigm that has strongly influenced the present state of research on later Islamicate intellectual, religious, literary, and cultural history. 

The present monograph therefore agrees with numerous recent studies that call for the complete abandonment of this at least partially colonial concept. In particular, the study at hand demonstrates the urgent need to revise the notion that Mamluk courts were culturally, intellectually, religiously, and literarily “irrelevant,” a notion that constitutes one of the last building blocks of the decline paradigm that have hitherto remained unchallenged. This notion, developed against the background of an almost complete lack of detailed studies of Mamluk court culture and reflecting the vested interests of the authors of biased sources, is in fact irreconcilable with the findings of the present monograph. Mamluk courts could and did serve as centers of political, intellectual, religious, and literary life, and it seems oversimplistic to explain the literary and intellectual florescence of non-courtly Mamluk milieus through an alleged absence of courts on the cultural scene. Rather, future research must analyze the complex interactions that took place between courtly and non-courtly actors in the domains of Mamluk scholarship, literature, religion, and politics. Similarly, further studies should examine whether and to what degree the findings about Mamluk court culture under al-Ghawrī also apply to other periods of Mamluk history. Furthermore, long term studies that relate the findings about late Mamluk court culture to those of earlier and later periods of Islamic history appear to be just as promising as synchronic transregional approaches focusing on entanglements and interconnections. The outlined structure of the monograph caters to the needs of a readership that, while interested in Islamicate history, might not be thoroughly familiar with the details of late Mamluk history and current debates in Mamluk studies. Readers well-acquainted with the latter two topics might wish to move directly to chapter 3 after completing the present chapter. Specialists in comparative court studies are invited to carefully examine the discussion of the concept of “court” in the remainder of the present chapter and the conclusion and then explore its application from chapter 4 onward before returning to chapters 2 and 3. Experts in Islamicate intellectual, religious, or political history will find it helpful to first go through the discussion of the main sources in the first section of chapter 3, then continue their journey through the monograph with the chapters and sections closest to their areas of specialization. 

Readers seeking an overview of the themes addressed in this monograph before they begin an in-depth perusal are invited to start with the chapter-by-chapter summary in chapter 7. Two further preliminary remarks are in order here. First, there is a noteworthy variety in the spelling in the secondary literature of the ism (personal name) and the nisba (relational surname) of the sultan whose court is under study here. The reason for this lies in the ambiguity of their rendering in Arabic script: قانصوه الغوري . The wāws in both parts of the name can be read as denoting either long vowels or diphthongs. Moreover, it is not immediately clear whether the nūn of the ism carries a vowel, and if so, which one. Without additional information, the name could equally well be transliterated as “Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī,” “Qānṣūh al-Ghawrī,” “Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī,” “Qānṣūh al-Ghūrī,” “Qānṣawh al-Ghūrī,” or “Qaniṣawh al-Ghūrī,” to name just the more probable possibilities, many of which appear in the secondary literature. The present study advocates the transliteration “Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī” on paleographic, linguistic, and metrical grounds. Already in 1922, E. Denison Ross referred to a copy of the Quran dedicated to the sultan in which his ism and his nisba were written with fatḥas preceding the wāws, thus leaving only the transliterations “Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī” and “Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī” possible.24

 The manuscript sources used in the present study show that those who were in personal contact with the sultan, and produced literary works in his lifetime, considered the latter alternative correct. In several places, the sultan’s name features in these sources with vowel marks. In two cases, a kasra is written below the nūn of hisism.25 Furthermore, two manuscripts written for the sultan during his lifetime feature hisism with a kasra below the nūn and a fatḥa above the ṣād.26 As for the sultan’s nisba, numerous contemporaneous manuscripts have a fatḥa above the letter preceding the wāw.27 The Arabic poems attributed to the sultan also corroborate this reading. Several of these texts known to us inter alia through two fully voweled manuscripts use the pen-name of “alGhawrī”28 or, in one case, “Qāniṣawh.”29 This pronunciation fits neatly with what we know about the etymological origin of the name. Ananiasz Zaja̧czkowski and Annemarie Schimmel demonstrated (independently from each other) that “Qāniṣawh” is the Arabic rendering of the Turkic30 qanı ṣav meaning “His blood is healthy.”31 The nisba, “al-Ghawrī” refers to the barracks (ṭabaqa) in which the sultan was trained as a mamlūk recruit; they were known as those of “al-Ghawr.”32 The Ottoman Turkish translation of the Persian epic Shāhnāme made on the sultan’s behalf yields further arguments for the reading “Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī.” Building on the fact that the entire text is composed in the meter of hazaj, Kristof D’hulster showed that the sultan’s ism that appears repeatedly in the text must be pronounced “Qāniṣawh,” as the meter requires that the nūn be followed by short a vowel.33 In addition, the fully voweled manuscript of the Ottoman Turkish Şāhnāme offers additional proof of the reading “Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī.”34 Taken together, this evidence establishes beyond doubt that the sultan’s contemporaries pronounced his name “Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī.” The other parts of the sultan’s name are less controversial. His contemporary ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ al-Malaṭī (d. 920/1514) calls him “Qāniṣawh min Baybardī, al-Ashrafī, al-Jarkasī, al-Malik al-Ashraf, Sayf al-Dīn, Abū l-Naṣr, known as alGhawrī.”35 The element “min Baybardī” indicates the slave trader that had brought him to Egypt as a young mamlūk.36 The nisbas “al-Ashrafī” and “alJarkasī” show that al-Ghawrī belonged to the manumitted mamlūks of sultan al-Ashraf Qāytbāy (r. 872–901/1468–96) and that he was considered to be of Circassian ethnicity.37 By adopting the titular name “al-Malik al-Ashraf” alGhawrī followed the example of several previous Mamluk sultans, including his highly esteemed indirect predecessor Qāytbāy. With the latter, he also shared the kunya (patronymic) “Abū l-Naṣr.” Finally, the laqab (cognomen or honorifc title) “Sayf al-Dīn” was very common among members of the late Mamluk military.38 As a second preliminary remark, it is helpful to state clearly that the present study is not a biography of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī during his time in office, nor is it an analytical narrative of the political and economic history of his reign. Labib Y. Suhbi, Maḥmūd Rizq Salīm, Carl F. Petry, and others have studied these topics in detail.39 

Moreover, the previously unused sources on which the present study builds offer only limited new insights into these themes. Likewise, the present study does not constitute an institutional analysis of Mamluk court offices or the administrative structure of the Mamluk ruling apparatus.While it seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of how Mamluk sultans in general and Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī in particular ruled over their realm at large and the people around them, the present study sees the court— as discussed below—as an administrative institution consisting of a hierarchy of posts and offices.40 It does, however, make use of earlier studies on the functioning of the Mamluk political system and sheds new light on their findings.41 For reasons of space, the present study also does not provide an exhaustive survey of all texts produced during al-Ghawrī’s reign, by members of his court, or for his library. It rather seeks to answer its four research questions through an in-depth analysis of its three main sources and the examination of further selected material. 1.2 What Is a Court? Theoretical and Terminological Considerations Any attempt to apply the analytical category of “court” to premodern Islamicate societies must take into account how members of these societies referred to phenomena that modern-day English speakers understand as “courtly.” As the following section demonstrates, Arabic-speakers in ʿAbbasid and Mamluk times had at their disposal a broad, highly developed, and sophisticated terminology to refer to the various social, spatial, and performative elements that defined a ruler’s court, but they did not employ an umbrella term to encompass all these elements that we would readily translate as“court.” Consequently, scholars wishing to employ the analytical category of “court” in the study of premodern Islamicate history must pay special attention to its proper conceptualization. The subsequent sections address this need and rely on the work of Norbert Elias and on more recent work in historical sociology, communication studies, and European history to develop a definition of what constitutes a court. This definition is intended to be sufficiently abstract to apply to different cultural contexts and at the same time precise enough to serve as a useful analytical category. On the one hand, this definition understands courts as performatively constituted through sequences of spatially manifested communicative events performed by, in the presence of, or on behalf of rulers, and on the other hand, as social groups made up by those who usually participate in these events and thus enjoy regular access to their rulers. The final section addresses the term majlis (pl. majālis) as a particularly important aspect of Islamicate court life and argues that provided certain conditions are met, its translation as “salon” is justified. 1.2.1 Arabic Terminology and the Concept of the Court Students of Islamicate history face a challenge: premodern Arabic sources do not have a word that we can readily translate into English as the “court” of a ruler.42 As shown by Nadia Maria El Cheikh, premodern Arabic-speakers such as those of the ʿAbbasid period “did not isolate the court as a social and cultural phenomenon worthy of literal attention […]. Thus, they did not have a word for ‘court’.”43

 The word balāṭ, which is often used in Modern Standard Arabic as a translation of the English word “court” is, in this specific meaning, a rather recent creation that according to El Cheikh is not attested in premodern texts, where the word typically means “pavement,” rather than “palace” or even “court.”44 Premodern Arabic is certainly not the only language that does not have a word for“court.” Byzantine Greek is similar in this.45 Nevertheless, both the premodern Arabic-speaking world and Byzantium exhibited many features that can prima facie be considered “courtly” in one way or another.46 In both areas, we even find works such as Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ (r. 300– 48/913–59) De Ceremoniis (On ceremonies) and Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ’s (d. 468/1075) Rusūm dār al-khilāfa (Regulations of the caliphal palace) that describe these features in rich detail.47

Given that some of the lexical units of courtly terminology that Rusūm dār al-khilāfa and other premodern Arabic texts contain have been mistranslated in the scholarly literature and understood to represent the court in toto, a review of pertinent terms is necessary here to show that there is indeed no premodern Arabic word that combines all aspects of the meaning of the English word “court.” At the same time, such a review also familiarizes readers with Arabic key terms that are important in subsequent chapters of the present study. The Arabic terms reviewed here refer to one of three spheres or dimensions of what is commonly understood in English as a ruler’s “court”:48 (1) spaces associated with the ruler, (2) a social group attached to the ruler whose members hold various functions and offices, and (3) events and occasions performed by, in the presence of, or for the ruler, as in the phrase “to hold court.” The examples for the usage of the relevant words discussed here come mainly from the ʿAbbasid realm of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries and the late Mamluk Sultanate. ʿAbbasid terminology is particularly important as many later Islamicate dynasties emulated ʿAbbasid cultural life.49 Moreover, we are fortunate to have several particularly rich sources on ʿAbbasid court terminology, including works such as the aforementioned al-Ṣābiʾ’s Rusūm dār al-khilāfa and his Tuḥfat al-umarāʾ fī tārīkh al-wuzarāʾ (The gem of amīrs on the history of the viziers) and al-Ṣūlī’s (d. 335/946) Kitāb al-Awrāq (The book of leaves) that already received considerable scholarly attention.50 In particular, Nadia Maria El Cheikh’s recent series of valuable articles on ʿAbbasid court terminology constitutes the main basis of the following remarks on the ʿAbbasid period.51 In contrast, relevant late Mamluk terminology, which is of primary interest in the present study, has until now received only very limited attention. Hence, our discussion of Mamluk terminology must rely largely on primary sources.52 The most important term pertaining to the spatial dimension of the ʿAbbasid court is dār al-khilāfa, which can be literally translated as “abode of the caliphate,” or, more idiomatically “caliphal palace.”53 

While our information about the physical makeup of the vast structures collectively known as dār al-khilāfa is quite limited, we know that they“functioned simultaneously as a stage for the representation of caliphal power, as the administrative centre of a vast empire and as a residence for the caliphal family.”54 Still, the word dār al-khilāfa delineated only the spatial setting of the court, denoting a specific set of buildings that constituted a minor city of their own.55 ʿAbbasid authors writing in Arabic used various terms to refer to other dimensions of what we call, in English, the ʿAbbasid court. Thus, translating the term dār al-khilāfa as “court” is an oversimplification that does not properly reflect ʿAbbasid usage.56 In the Mamluk Sultanate, the two terms that most clearly designated the spatial dimension of the court were qalʿa (citadel) and qalʿat al-jabal (citadel of the mountain), both of which referred to the originally Ayyubid fortified complex on top of a spur of the Muqaṭṭam Hill towering over the city of Cairo.57 Similar to the ʿAbbasid dār al-khilāfa, this citadel served as the stage of Mamluk ceremonial, as the center of Mamluk administration, and as the home of the sultan. Moreover, it also housed the barracks of the sultan’s corps of slave soldiers. Like the dār al-khilāfa, it comprised so many structures that it could be seen as a small independent city. Its palaces were the primary locus of Mamluk rule. Still, the citadel and similar buildings were built for the court, they did not constitute the court itself.58 Ḥaḍra, a noun derived from a root with the basic meaning “to be or become present,”59 is another spatial term associated with the court that appears in Mamluk and other sources.60 

Thus, the term is usually translated as “presence” or “place of presence.”61 Recently, however, Erez Naaman suggested that “ḥaḍra should be translated as ‘court’.” It is correct that the term ḥaḍrawas used in premodern Arabic sources not only as a spatial term, but also as a designation or title for a high-ranking person, who was thus “an object of resort.” In Naaman’s view, this figurative meaning allows for the translation of ḥaḍra as“court,” since the Arabic word, like the English “court,” can refer to both a spatial and a social entity and hence unites “these strands of meanings.”62 Yet in my view, while Naaman’s observations are correct, they do not justify the translation of ḥaḍra as“court” in the full sense of this English word.Without doubt, when applied to a ruler, ḥaḍra can denote the first of the three dimensions of what is commonly understood as a court, that is, a particular space associated with someone who wields power. Ḥaḍra fails, however, to convey any sense of the two other dimensions noted above, which are discussed in more detail shortly, that is, a group of persons close to the ruler and events performed by or for the ruler. As Naaman does not claim that ḥaḍra is used in his sources to refer to events or occasions, we can safely state that the Arabic word does not denote this important meaning of “court.” Although Naaman asserts that ḥaḍra and the word “court,” which, as he points out, can mean “the body of courtiers collectively; the retinue […] of a sovereign or high dignitary,”63 share the same “strands of meanings,”64 he does not provide any evidence that ḥaḍra is ever used to refer to a collective body of persons around a ruler or, indeed, any multitude of persons at all. Rather, ḥaḍra refers to just one person, the ruler. Thus it can fulfill the function of a title structurally comparable to “Majesty” or “Excellency” in European contexts.65 If it is not employed as a title, ḥaḍra should be translated according to its basic meaning as “presence”66 and not as “court,” as it fails to convey the performative and the social meaning of the latter term. A final Arabic spatial term that deserves attention here is bāb (pl. abwāb). This term, which is usually rendered into English as “door,” “gate,” or “porte” sometimes appears in Arabic sources in contexts that might suggest its translation as“court.” Note, for example, the following occurrences in al-Qalqashandī’s (d. 821/1418) chancery manual Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī ṣināʿat al-inshāʾ (The dawn of the night-blind on the chancery craft), where it is written that letters from provincial governors to the sultan’s seat should be addressed “to the sultanic gates” (ilā l-abwāb al-sulṭāniyya),67 whereas letters coming from the sultan’s seat are referred to as “documents [coming] from the sultanic gates (ʿan al-abwāb alsulṭāniyya).”68 Similarly, al-Qalqashandī quotes a text which mentions that a report about the condition of fortifications is to be dispatched “to the noble gate” (ilā l-bāb al-sharīf ).69 Without doubt, the Mamluk chancery was central in receiving and sending such documents, but according to al-Qalqashandī, the sultanic bāb or abwāb were considered the spaces that were of pivotal importance for the exchange of messages. This understanding is in line with other Mamluk texts. For example, one of our main sources, Nafāʾis majālis alsulṭāniyya, includes a passage in which a ruler refers to a messenger as having come “to our noble gates,”70 while the chronicler Ibn Iyās (d. after 928/1522) speaks repeatedly about foreign envoys arriving at the sultan’s “noble gates.”71

On a first glance, it seems possible to translate the phrases “sultanic gates,” “noble gate,” and “noble gates” in these examples as “court.” Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes evident that these terms do not refer to the place in which the ruler resides, but the threshold to this space. There is not a single instance, in al-Qalqashandī’s work or elsewhere, in which it is said that a ruler resides in his bāb or abwāb, as one would expect if the word actually meant “court.” Rather, bāb and abwāb stand for the controlled liminal space through which a message or a person enters the presence of a ruler. Texts mentioning a ruler’s bāb “do not depict the space of the ruler’s seat, but rather take it for granted. What [they] discuss, on the contrary, is the door (bāb) that marks the border offering controlled access to the ruler.”72 Indeed, the fact that liminal spaces used to control access to rulers receive such prominent attention in premodern Arabic texts is an important observation in itself, and this attention should not be obscured by translating the terms that denote these spaces incorrectly as “court.”73 Taken together, we thus see that while premodern Arabic comprises a rich vocabulary of spatial terms associated with what is referred to as a ruler’s “court,” none of these terms constitutes a near semantic equivalent of this English word. ʿAbbasid terminology with regard to the social dimension of the court is multifaceted and—apart from terms denoting holders of specific offices—often difficult to understand and translate. One of the most important words in this context is ḥāshiya, which appears usually in the status determinativus or the status constructus and is inter alia translated as “servants,” “retainers,” “attendants,” “court-attendants,” and “court.”74 The ḥāshiyas of rulers could include their mothers, among other persons, but were considered groups distinct from soldiers, palace eunuchs (khadam), clerks (kuttāb), and employees (mutaṣarrifūn). In fact, from the material collected by El Cheikh, we get the impression that ḥāshiya designates those members of a ruler’s court who did not fulfill an official military or administrative function, but were nevertheless part of the group of people who mainly worked and resided inside the dār al-khilāfa.75 At least in some sources, a ruler’s ḥāshiya is seen as an entity different from his khawāṣṣ or khāṣṣa. These words, which are derived from a root with the basic meaning “to be or become special or confined,” are used by ʿAbbasid authors to denote people attached to the caliph in a personal way. They could include his soldiers and secretaries, but also his children, relatives, and slaves.76 Ḥasham is a third term that further complicates the picture of ʿAbbasid terminology. It is most often used to describe a subcategory of a caliph’s ḥāshiya, those who receive salaries from him and are not his kin.77 El Cheikh’s comprehensive discussions of these and related, less common terms78 clarify two aspects: First, in ʿAbbasid terminology, there is apparently no one word that can be adequately rendered into English as “courtier”;79 and second, there is no term that denotes the social dimension of the ʿAbbasid court as a whole.80 The words khawāṣṣ and the closely related akhiṣṣāʾ also figure prominently in sources from the late Mamluk period. Here, they usually appear together with the names of specific rulers and are used for individuals who stand in a close personal relation with these rulers and enjoy their favor. As they were, it seems, typically of the same gender as the rulers they served, khawāṣṣ and akhiṣṣāʾ had the privilege of direct access to their rulers and the option of accompanying them on their travels. They also joined their rulers in leisure activities such as banquets and sociable gatherings. Many of these men were civilians and served in capacities such as chief judge, private secretary, inspector of the market (muḥtasib), muezzin, or imām. Others, however, belonged to the personal armed retinue of the sultan or other army units. Their special status required a high level of loyalty. Thus, sources are particularly attentive to any sign of treachery or disfavor among them.81

A related Mamluk term is muqarrab (pl. muqarrabūn), which is attested to in the Quran (56:11) and which can have, in Modern Standard Arabic, the meanings of “close companion, favorite, protégé, intimate.”82 As the passive participle of the second form of the root q-r-b, its basic meaning is “someone or something brought near.”83 In late Mamluk sources, it is usually employed for a group of persons who had a relationship with a ruler that was even closer than that of his khawāṣṣ and akhiṣṣāʾ. However, there can be a certain overlap between the two groups, as some people are called both muqarrabūn and khawāṣṣ of a given ruler, at times in one and the same passage. Like the sultan’s akhiṣṣāʾ and khawāṣṣ, his muqarrabūn could serve in official capacities such as that of imām, tutor of the sultan’s sons, or gatekeeper (bawwāb) of his palaces. They sometimes also held military posts. As officeholders, muqarrabūn yielded considerable influence, thanks to their close relationship with the ruler and were sought after by people who needed intercession or sought a position or an office. The particular intimacy between a sultan and his muqarrabūn is also attested by the fact that we have several reports of rulers decrying and mourning the death of one of their intimates.84 In the context of the social dimension of the Mamluk court, another word, khāṣṣakiyya, appears frequently in our sources. Unlike some terms discussed here, this word, which is of mixed Turkic-Arabic origin, is clearly defined. In Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Saḥmāwī’s (d. 868/1464) chancery manual alThaghr al-bāsim fī ṣināʿat al-kātib wa-l-kātim (The smiling mouth on the craft of the scribe and the secretary), we read: The sultan’s mamlūks […] are divided into six ranks (marātib): The first of them [is called] khāṣṣakiyya. This designation is given to them because they are present with the ruler when he is alone and in retreat, and they are thus granted [a privilege] that is not even granted to the highest amīrs of 1,000 soldiers (akābir al-muqaddamīn). They are present at the beginning and the end of every day during the audience (khidma) of the palace and that of the stable, and they ride in the ruler’s mounted processions (rukūb) night and day. They do not fail to be present [with the ruler] near and far, and they are distinguished from others during the khidma by the fact that they carry their swords and wear bands of brocade on their uniforms. They may call on the ruler when he is alone without permission. They travel on the sultan’s important matters and have elegant clothes and riding animals. In the past, there used to be no more than 24, in accordance with the number of amīrs of 1,000 soldiers, but now, there are more than 400. They [receive] ample livelihood and abundant gifts from the rulers.85 Al-Saḥmāwī’s description of the khāṣṣakiyya underlines the privileged position of the members of this group. In accordance with the military character of Mamluk rule,86 the khāṣṣakiyya mamlūks appear to be a group very close to the ruler—they were his personal armed retinue. Fulfilling the function of a bodyguard, they also discharged ceremonial functions, governed minor administrative areas, and served their lord as envoys in important missions, such as arresting rebellious officials and governors. Becoming a khāṣṣakī was an important stepping stone in a mamlūk’s career, as most amīrs or officers were recruited from among their ranks.87 Taken together, it is typical for late Mamluk sources to describe the social context of a given sultan by using terms such as khawāṣṣ, muqarrabūn, and khāṣṣakiyya, though none of these terms denotes the ruler’s court in its entirety as a social group. With regard to the events and occasions associated with or related to the court, we note that authors of the ʿAbbasid period had at their disposal numerous terms to write about these topics. Most general was marāsim, a plural word with the basic meanings of “marks” and “signs,” that could also mean “prescripts” or “assignments” and thus came to denote all kinds of ceremonies and rituals associated with the court.88 In contrast to the social and the spatial dimension, for which we do not find a specific word, there is thus a premodern Arabic umbrella term that encapsulates most, if not all, events of a courtly character. This finding might be seen as underlining the importance of the performative dimension of premodern Islamicate court culture. One of the most important types of ceremonies subsumed under marāsim was the caliphal audience or khidma (also julūs or majlis). Caliphs held audiences regularly in their palaces. A strict protocol regulated aspects such as the respective spatial positions of those present, appropriate clothing, the proper way to greet the caliph, the way to kiss the ground in front of the ruler, and the correct way of speaking and moving in his presence. The ruler himself was hidden behind a curtain (sitr) till the beginning of the audience. Then, during the ceremony, he sat on a throne (kursī) covered with silk, wore a black ceremonial robe, and was furnished with the symbols of rule, including the sword (sayf ) of the Prophet, his staff (qaḍīb), and the copy of the Quran said to be written by the caliph ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān (d. 47/656).89 Other ʿAbbasid ceremonies and rituals that were regulated by a similar level of protocol included the arrivals (sg. ḥuḍūr) of foreign dignitaries and ambassadors,90 caliphal investitures (sg. taqlīd),91 and banquets (sg. simāṭ).92 The so-called nawba ceremony was another regular event at the ʿAbbasid court. In the course of this ceremony, large drums (sg. ṭabl) were beaten at the times of prayer. During the ʿAbbasid period, this ceremony constituted one of the most important symbols of rulership. Thus, as time passed, other rulers eagerly emulated and adopted it as their own.93 Many ʿAbbasid ceremonial events lived on, albeit often in altered form, during the Mamluk period. A ceremony equivalent to the ʿAbbasid nawba was regularly performed by the sultan’s military band or ṭablkhāna, although the ruler now shared the privilege of having such an ensemble with his military commanders from the ranks of amīr of 40 mamlūks upward.94 The khidma was another ceremony that survived into the Mamluk period, though it was transformed over the course of time. While this term is usually translated as “service”95 and in Mamluk sources is also attested in this sense in the context of patronage relations, it also denotes events staged by Mamluk sultans that combined audiences and troop reviews. During Mamluk khidmas that usually took place in various localities in and around the Cairo Citadel, mamlūks of the sultan and selected amīrs paid homage to the ruler and affirmed their loyalty. The ruler attended to administrative business, followed by a meal. In al-Saḥmāwī’s time, khidma ceremonies were held regularly at the ceremonial hall of the citadel known as the qaṣr and at the sultan’s stables.96 One of the most important events at the Mamluk court was the mawkib (pl. mawākib), a term originally meaning “cortege,” that was later used more generally, to denote all kinds of processions.97 Whereas the ʿAbbasids only rarely performed such events, among Mamluk court ceremonies, these mounted processions that included the ruler and other high-ranking dignitaries figured prominently. Following the accession of a new sultan at the citadel, during the early Mamluk period the ruler rode through Cairo, carrying with him the symbols of his office.98 Later, this inauguration procession through the streets of Cairo was often suspended and new sultans would take a short ride within the citadel. Regular processions also took place at the sultan’s attendance of the prayer on Fridays, on the occasions of religious holidays, polo games, inspection trips, and other outings.99 While the mawākib were an element that clearly distinguished Mamluk from ʿAbbasid ceremonial, other events, such as banquets (sg.simāṭ), were also known under ʿAbbasid rule and indeed constitute a shared feature of ceremonial life in the Islamicate world. The same is true for the regular so-called maẓālim (lit. “injustices”) sessions in which rulers dispensed justice and were available to anyone who wanted to complain about wrongs or submit petitions.100 Yet, even given the richness of the terminology we have examined from the Mamluk and ʿAbbasid periods, we do not find a single umbrella term, similar to the English “court,” that comprises the spatial, social, and performative dimensions of court life. Depending on the context, a ruler’s marāsim, such as his khidma, mawkib, or simāṭ took place in the dār al-khilāfa or the qalʿa and were conducted and attended by his khawāṣṣ, his ḥāshiya, or his khāṣṣakiyya, yet in premodern Arabic there existed no single hypernym that expressed the broader context to which all of these terms belonged. Thus, we must agree with Maria Subtenly when she speaks about “the absence of an abstract notion of the court”101 in premodern Islamicate sources. One could argue that given the absence of an indigenous term for “court,” scholars of Islamicate history should avoid this concept completely and instead exclusively use the premodern terminology they find in their sources. However, such a plea to drop the term “court” altogether is not only unrealistic, but indeed counterproductive. First, the term is already so widely used in the scholarly literature on Islamicate history that no attempt to avoid it could ever be entirely successful in this growing field.102 Second, numerous Europeans who spent time in the Near East in the pre- and early modern periods used the term “court”—or its equivalent in other European languages—when writing about their experiences. While we should not naively follow these travelers in their interpretations of societies that were alien and often incomprehensible to them, their usage of the term “court” shows that, in their subjective understanding, they encountered phenomena in Islamicate societies that were structurally similar to the courts of Europe.103 Third, and most importantly, avoiding the term “court” would mean unnecessarily abandoning an analytical meta-category that can be extremely helpful for our understanding of the history of the premodern Islamicate world in general and its political, religious, cultural, literary, intellectual, and social life in particular.104 Moreover, arguing that courts existed only in those societies that had a word for this concept, that is, primarily those of the Latin West, essentially endorses claims of Western exceptionalism and thus supports Eurocentric interpretations of premodern global history. Finally, denying the existence of courts in the premodern Islamicate world would severely curtail our ability to study topics such as political culture and the representation of rule from an intercultural and comparative perspective. Thus, instead of simply avoiding the term “court,” students of Islamicate history should develop a clear theoretical understanding of this concept that can be usefully applied to premodern Arabic-speaking societies without naively imposing alien cultural categories on them.105 To this end, it can be helpful to see how neighboring disciplines such as historical sociology and European history have come to understand the concept of “court” and then modify their results as necessary to suit the Islamicate context. 1.2.2 Norbert Elias and the Court in Historical Sociology and European History In stark contrast to the situation in Islamicate history, for decades historians and sociologists working on pre- and early modern European societies have dedicated themselves to the close study of numerous individual courts and to the analysis of the historical phenomenon of the court in general. The author who stands as a towering figure at the beginning of this ongoing boom of European court studies is the German sociologist Norbert Elias (1897–1990). Since the first publication of his Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie (1969), Elias’ work has remained one, if not the most important, point of reference for scholars working on courts both within and beyond the borders of Europe.106 

Elias’ interest in courts is an aspect of his greater project of a sociological analysis that seeks to understand how modern Western societies came into being. He studies prominent steps of this “civilizing process” (Prozeß der Zivilisation) in a comprehensive two-volume work published in 1939 under this title.107 Elias’ other major work, Die höfische Gesellschaft, which is based on his Habilitationsschrift finished in 1933 (but published more than thirty years later because of the political situation in Germany) focuses on one of the most important steps of this process, namely the development and formation of court societies.108 Taking the French royal court of the eleventh/seventeenth to early twelfth/eighteenth century as an example, in this work Elias seeks to understand why and how at a particular point in history, a largely stable social position emerged and provided individuals with extraordinary opportunities to exercise power (Machtchancen), that is, the position of the king as found inter alia in early modern European courts.109 Elias understands the term “court” as denoting a specific social “figuration,”110 that is, a social phenomenon stabilized by numerous interconnected and interdependent individuals that often exists longer than the individuals that originally created it, as the latter can be replaced by others who fill their social positions. Within such a figuration, human beings have specific possibilities to maneuver (Handlungsspielraum), but are also constrained by their dependency on other individuals. However, a figuration comes into being only through and by the individuals that construct it and thus has no independent existence. Without human beings, there can be no figuration.111 

The court was a figuration in which hundreds or thousands of individuals served, advised, and accompanied the ruler and were interconnected through means of a hierarchy of ranks and a particular etiquette. They shared a specific, that is, courtly, character.112 Yet, at least in the case of the early modern French royal court, a more precise definition is possible: “What we refer to as the ‘court’ of the ancien régime is, to begin with, nothing other than the vastly extended house and household of the French kings and their dependents, with all the people belonging to them in a broader or narrower sense.”113 Here, “house” and “household” refer, as Elias makes clear, primarily to social and not to spatial entities.114 The court was highly important to the king and his rule: Whatever came to the king or passed from him had to go through the social “filter” of the court, which was, therefore, the prime intermediary between the king and his country.115 The French noblemen and noblewomen who belonged to the king’s court— the“court society”116 as Elias calls them—were not only in ongoing competition with one another, but also had to secure their position against those who stood below them in rank. To this end, they were forced to cultivate a particular, representative, and often very expensive way of life that distinguished them from other social groups. For them, luxury and pomp were not just a source of pleasure or the result of deficient self-control, but an inevitable necessity to preserve their social status and defend it against upstarts and competing social peers. Using Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption,”117 Elias argues that the French nobility had to consume exquisite and costly goods and services to maintain a level of representation befitting their social status. Their high expenditures for food, wine, clothes, or housing thus did not constitute acts of waste, but were dictated by social obligation and were required in order to retain their ranks.118 

The relation between the nobility and the king is another topic that Elias studies in detail. According to Elias, it was in the king’s interest to keep the members of the nobility in a state of constant competition, lest they join forces and threaten his position. The king, therefore, used the court to keep the nobility in a state of dependency and ongoing rivalry, which in turn shaped their values, beliefs, and convictions. Bereft of other opportunities to make a living, the members of the nobility needed the ruler’s favor (and the court offices, donations, and titles that it could entail) to secure their social position.119 The king, well aware of the nobility’s dependency, employed courtly etiquette and ceremonial to create a large array of meticulously differentiated and dynamic ranks and positions in order to fuel the competition among his court society. Its members, clustered around the king in a physical sense as well, sought to outpace each other in gaining the king’s favor and thus, indirectly, in obtaining the necessary resources to keep or improve their often unstable social position. Etiquette became an instrument of rule that allowed the king to promote, reward, or punish members of his court society as he saw fit, and to play them against each other—the well-known mechanism of “divide and rule.” No individual member of the court was able to change the etiquette—and thus the web of interdependencies that characterized this figuration—without threatening their own position. The “apparatus of competition”120 that characterized the court and was governed by the courtly etiquette went on unceasingly, like a social “perpetuum mobile.”121 The establishment of the French court society gave rise to a particular elite culture associated with this social group, that is, a “court culture”122 that governed the ways members of the court spoke, moved, loved, and evaluated the world around them.123 In order to succeed as members of court society, individuals had to develop a specific kind of rationality, which Elias calls “courtly rationality.”124 They had to control their affects and emotions and develop the ability to think and plan long-term, in order to improve their chances for prestige and high status. For them, acting rationally meant investing their financial and other resources to maximize their social position. While this is different from the rationality of untitled entrepreneurs who sought to get the most from their resources by calculating economic profit and loss, the behavior of those at court should not be seen as irrational or governed by whims and affects.125 The king himself used courtly etiquette to ensure that others were able to perceive and experience his exalted position: “This, then, is the meaning of etiquette […]. It is not mere ceremony, but an instrument of rule over the subjects. The people do not believe in power that may exist but is not visible in the appearance of the ruler. They must see in order to believe.”126 By means of the words and actions that were regulated by courtly etiquette as “symbols of power,”127 the king made sure that his position was recognized by everyone around him.128 But he also used etiquette to support and protect those members of his court society who, unlike the higher levels of the nobility, had no independent basis for their status and were essentially upstarts, totally dependent on the king’s goodwill. In promoting the rise of such men and women, including high administrative officials and mistresses, the king established a counter-weight against the noble members of his court society and added an additional variable to the courtly competition.129 Despite its tremendous impact on other disciplines and its status as a “groundbreaking”130 study, specialists in Islamicate history have paid only very limited attention to the theoretical framework laid out in Die höfische Gesellschaft. If these scholars engage with it at all, they often limit themselves to superficial references or motto-like quotations of key passages;131 indeed, there is not a single example of a comprehensive and well-thought out attempt to apply the theoretical insights of Elias’Die höfische Gesellschaft to the history of Middle Eastern societies.132 While it is rare for scholars to state explicitly why they do not employ a particular theoretical framework,133 we can name several reasons Die höfische Gesellschaft had only a very limited influence on research about Islamicate courts. First and foremost, Elias’ work has been severely criticized by subsequent generations of scholars working on European courts, both with regard to its content and its methodology.134 Among other points, several authors have shown that Elias’ understanding of the French absolutist monarchy—and the position of the nobility within it—was based on concepts originating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ce. Many of these concepts have since been refuted, a fact that shakes much of Elias’ work to its very foundations.135 Moreover, Jeroen Duindam demonstrated that Elias’ understanding of the role of the king in relation to the nobility and the competition within specific social groups, as well as the role played in this context by courtly etiquette, is only partially consistent and does not match what we now know of the historical situation.In particular, it is an oversimplification to see courtly etiquette in its entirety as an instrument developed and used by the king to discipline his court society.136 Furthermore, Elias’ selective approach to his sources and his methods of analysis fall short of modern scholarly standards.137

Apart from these points pertaining to the question of whether or not Elias’ work remains useful for the analysis of early modern European courts, we may also ask under what circumstances—if at all—it can be used as an analytical tool for the study of non-European societies. In the introduction of Die höfische Gesellschaft, Elias argued that the court of early modern France was structurally similar to those of China, India, and the empires of antiquity.138 However, in the course of his study, he focuses exclusively on the French example, to such an extent that the applicability of his results even to other parts of premodern Europe has been called into question, with several studies pointing to the significant problems that arise from attempts to use Elias’ theories in relation to European courts outside France. In light of these results, it is extremely doubtful whether Elias’ results can be applied to courts in non-European societies.139 In the case of Islamicate societies, in which ideas and concepts of rulership are often expressed, performed, and legitimated with reference to the religion of Islam, another element of Elias’ sociology is particularly noteworthy. Unlike numerous founding fathers of this discipline, Elias paid almost no attention to the sociology of religion.140 Probably for this reason, he did not discuss religious symbols and discourses in courtly contexts in any detail. While this fact does not rule out the possibility that his results might still be relevant for the study of Islamicate courts, it suggests, at least, a need for considerable modification and adaption. Furthermore, Elias’ basic understanding of the court as the ruler’s expanded household appears problematic in the context of Islamicate courts, given that numerous studies on Islamicate courts suggest that we must understand a ruler’s household as an entity distinct from his court.141 On the surface, these observations seem to suggest that a naïve application of Elias’ theories to Islamicate courts would have limited analytical value and might even lead to misinterpretations and conceptual confusion. Nevertheless, Elias’ work includes several valuable insights that are still relevant and can continue to be an important point of reference for those studying pre- and early modern courts, as is attested by the ongoing interest in his writings.142 Among other elements of Elias’ theory, his understanding of the court as a social entity that is characterized by the elite status of its members and a high level of competition among them deserves special attention. Moreover, his insight that rulers were willing to support particularly those members of the court without alternative sources of power is still valid, as is the fact that direct access to the ruler could be a most important and sought-after resource for the members of the court. Furthermore, Elias’ observations that power must be made visible and experienced in order to be recognized and that ceremonies and courtly etiquette are a central means to this end are in line with recent findings. In this context, it is also noteworthy that the behavior of members of court society who spend their resources on representational objects and activities should not be conceived as irrational, but indeed as engaging in a rational strategy given their social position. Finally, Elias’ concept of a particular elite culture associated with court society, that is, a court culture, continues to be useful, not as part of a clear-cut dichotomy between “mass culture” and “elite culture,” but rather as an indication that members of courts could develop distinct cultural practices.143 In the wake of the boom of European court studies triggered by the publication of Die höfische Gesellschaft, numerous historians and social scientists presented alternative theoretical approaches to the study of courts and came forth with a broad variety of definitions of this concept. The present study makes no claim to review all of these approaches and definitions. Their multitude, more than anything, demonstrates the complexity—or indeed impossibility—of developing a unified understanding of the term “court” that could claim universal applicability and theoretical validity.144 Rather, the study at hand focuses on two recently developed and interrelated theoretical perspectives that promise to be of particular value for the study of the late Mamluk court in particular and premodern Islamicate courts in general. These perspectives integrate many of the results of Elias’ work that remain relevant and important, but at the same time offer clearly distinct alternatives to the more problematic aspects of his thought. The first of these perspectives sees the court as a series of events with communicative significance, whereas the second focuses on the court as a social entity. 1.2.3 The Court as a Series of Occasions and Acts of Communication One of the most creative recent approaches to developing a theoretical understanding of the concept of “court” begins with the observation that happenings such as audiences, receptions, investitures, banquets, festivities, processions, hunts, and religious services are constitutive of every court. Indeed, as Ronald G. Asch has argued, the court as a social reality comes into existence only when rulers convene and stage such events, that is, when they “hold court.” Thereby, rulers allow persons who do not belong to their households to take part in events they stage, to benefit from their largesse, and to acquire monetary or other benefits.145 In contrast to Elias’ work discussed above, Asch writes: “In this sense, the court was less an institution—as the royal household—, but rather an event that took place when the ruler held court. Where such an event was sufficiently rare, one can say that no court in the proper sense existed.”146 Elsewhere, Asch observed that “a court only exists when a prince ‘holds court’.”147 Based on this fundamental insight, Asch saw the court as constituted by a “series of occasions.”148 Among the studies that have subsequently taken up this catchphrase, Felix Konrad’s work on Egyptian courts of the thirteenth/nineteenth century figures prominently.149 Konrad subscribes to Asch’s view that “the court is a phenomenon that is established only through the recurrent event of holding court.”150 The innovative character of Konrad’s writings lies, inter alia, in the fact that he combines Asch’s understanding of the court as a series of occasions or events with insights from the field of communication studies that, over the last few decades, have attracted particular attention from authors working on European and other courts.151 Following this line of research, Konrad argues that the events that make up the court have a “communicational character.”152 He thereby takes up three arguments first presented by Ute Daniel: (1) A court is a means of communication employed by rulers to reach out to other courts and their populace. Given their limited abilities to exercise direct control over their territories, pre- and early modern rulers used— and had to use—their court, which they could influence directly and personally, to express, represent, and legitimate their position. Their target audiences were other courts and their rulers, as well as their own subjects.153 (2) Communication is constitutive for the court, as communicational processes define its social borders and its internal structure. In order to maintain and demonstrate their supreme status, rulers actively shaped the makeup of their courts, for example, by deciding who was allowed to attend certain events, occupy offices, or fulfill specific functions.154 (3) Over time, courts developed specific ways to communicate that constitute what is understood as “courtly.”155 Taking up this line of reasoning, Konrad emphasizes that courtly occasions constitute acts of communication.156 He thereby builds on the work of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, one of the most prominent advocates of a communicationcentered approach in historical research157 who argues that in principle, almost all human actions that address other people can be understood as acts of communication. They only need tofulfill three conditions: (1) a piece of information is present, it is (2) transmitted as a message by the sending agent, and (3) it is understood as a message by the receiving agent.158 To differentiate between information and message, Stollberg-Rilinger uses the example of a fire: Smoke coming from a fire is just an indication or information that something is burning. It only becomes a message if it is used by a person as a smoke signal to communicate with another party. In Stollberg-Rilinger’s words: “A [piece of] information is perceived, a message is understood.”159 This concept of communication applies to verbal and non-verbal methods of communication. Verbal communication allows for the communication of messages with higher levels of complexity and abstraction; these messages are concomitantly less prone to misunderstandings.160 Understanding, however, is an important aspect of acts of communication, which can be considered successful when leading to one or more subsequent acts of communication.161 In Stollberg-Rilinger’s words: Communication is always a reciprocal occurrence between two or more agents that relate to each other […]. The presence of an act of communication, however, does indeed not mean that the receiving agent ascribes to the message exactly the meaning that the sending agent had intended, or even that he accepts and adheres to what the message says. It merely means that he takes it as a message and reacts to it by way of communication, even if negatively.162 Yet, communication is not only reciprocal, it is also collective, in the sense that certain conventions and rules of communication—and thus behavior—are negotiated and shared within social groups.163 By communicating according to the rules, people performatively164 contribute to and stabilize the collective character of their respective group of reference: “[S]ocial reality is [thus] (re-)produced by agents through acts of communication. With these acts, they produce meaning through speech, behavior or performance. Seen from this perspective, acts of communication are constitutive elements of the self-conception of a social group or even the group itself.”165 The fundamental relevance of these insights for students of bygone societies lies in the fact that through the study of acts of communication, we can understand the social conventions that defined these societies and thereby grasp the values, rules, and categories that were typical for them, and indeed the history of these acts themselves, given that “all historical phenomena can be treated as communication processes.”166 To this end, we can study sources that bear witness to and were parts of past acts and practices of communication.167 Practices are thereby understood as “actions or deeds that are repeated over time; they are learned, reproduced, and subjected to risk through social interaction. […] They tend to be intelligible to others in context-depending ways.”168 Practices allow those who perform them not only to signify meanings, but also play a role in constituting their “selves” as social beings.169 Symbolic communication is of prime importance for the study of premodern societies in general and their courts in particular. “Symbolic” is understood here not in a broad sense as referring to all kinds of verbal or non-verbal signs.170 Rather, symbolic communication constitutes a specific type of communication that differs from both instrumental actions and the conceptual-discursive type of communication. Whereas instrumental actions aim at a specific goal, symbolic actions—such as acts of symbolic communication—point beyond such goals by creating meaning of a higher order (Sinnstiftung) and by evoking or alluding to shared cultural concepts. Needless to say, a specific action can have both an instrumental and a symbolic character, depending on how it is viewed by a given observer.171

As for the differences between symbolic and the conceptual-discursive communication, Stollberg-Rilinger notes: Whereas conceptual, discursive communication [1] takes place in sequences of statements that follow chronologically one after another […], [2] allows for highly complex and abstract statements due to syntactic rules of combination, and [3] inherently aims at unambiguity, symbolic communication is concentrated in a single moment, manifest, ambiguous, and indistinct, and thus leaves more room for various connotations and ascriptions of meaning. Thus, here symbolic communication means communication by way of symbols in the narrower sense; symbols are understood as a specific kind of verbal, visual, objective, or gestural signs such as […] metaphors, images, artifacts, gestures, complex sequences of actions such as rituals and ceremonies, but also symbolic narratives such as myths, etc.172 Various correlating symbols can be combined to communicate complex sets of cultural concepts, evoke emotions, and confirm shared values and norms.173 The multifaceted series of actions generally known as rituals and ceremonies are of special significance for the study of Islamicate and other premodern societies.174 Rituals and ceremonies have been the subject of debate in various academic disciplines and seem to elude all efforts to arrive at generally accepted definitions.175 Authors often use them more or less interchangeably, thus partially forsaking their analytical potential.176 In the context of studies of premodern societies and their courts, however, a differentiation first introduced by Karl Leyser has gained a certain level of general recognition. According to Leyser’s understanding, rituals consist of a standardized sequence of symbolic actions and cause a change of social, religious, or other status.177

Rituals have performative character: They not only say something, but do something; they cause what they signify and place their participants under an obligation to act accordingly in the future. […]. Rituals cannot be carried out by accident; they are staged as [rituals] and are usually performed publicly, demonstratively, and solemnly.178 By participating in a ritual, individuals affirm their consent to the induced change—or changes, as many rituals are polyvalent.179 This, however, does not mean that all participants ascribe exactly the same meaning and significance to a given ritual. As acts of symbolic communication, the meaning of rituals is, to a certain degree, ambiguous. While this fact might appear to be a deficiency, ultimately, it adds to the potential of rituals, which can act as stabilizing factors in societies and allow different groups with divergent convictions to take part in one and the same act of symbolic communication.180 A person’s deliberate absence from a ritual can thus serve as a particularly strong expression of opposition and disagreement. Moreover, if a critical number of potential participants do not attend, it can endanger the successful performance of a ritual as a whole.181 Agents can also change an existing ritual to modify its meaning and adopt it to new circumstances.182 By contrast, while ceremonies are also standardized sequences of symbolic actions, they do not cause changes in status, but merely represent and express an existing order.183 Acts of symbolic communication such as rituals and ceremonies are usually not performed spontaneously, but are the product of rational processes of reasoning by specific agents.184 Why did premodern agents resort to symbolic communication? What were the possible functions of symbolic acts of communication in premodern societies, which were characterized by a generally high level of symbolic communication?185 As Stollberg-Rilinger notes, symbolic communication plays a decisive role in the continuous confirmation and stabilization of collective norms,186 values, and the social order: Every society continually assures itself that its values are still valid and that its norms have been stable in the past, are presently stable, and will be stable in the future; [it does this] by means of symbolic actions, which manifest [these] norms and values in a punctually condensed form that can be perceived by the senses. In the practice of symbolic [actions], the categories [constituting] the social order are both perceived empirically and experienced as normatively valid. The power of the symbolic […] creates affective bonds as well as a belief in values that precedes all rational and discursive justifications.187 Symbolic communication thus makes the social order and the cultural values that characterize it appear as meaningful, factual, and indisputable. This insight not only helps to explain the stability of religious systems in premodern societies, but also elucidates how differences in rank, social status, and gender roles were upheld.188 In the context of court life, this stabilizing function of symbolic communication serves as a backbone by which to legitimate the difference in social status between the ruler and the ruled.189 In this context, the significance of symbols can be summed up as follows: Since hierarchy is a precondition of rule, symbolic visualisation of that hierarchy is an integral part of the technique of rulership. It cannot be denied that physical force and material resources such as, for example, the administrational and military apparatus, are effective instruments with which to impose rule. However, the potential of such forces to secure rule can last only for a short time unless they are backed up by a consensus between rulers and ruled concerning the normative basis of the socio-political system in which both live. This consensus has to be proved in everyday communication, as well as in particular demonstrations confirming their mutual relationship.190 In light of the limited ability of premodern rulers to force their will onto others, they strove to legitimate their authority by means of a general consensus that recognizes the current hierarchical order as in line with generally shared norms and values.191 Moreover, rulers have an interest in explicating, manifesting, and thus (re-)creating the differences of status among the members of the ruling group.192 The social hierarchy established in this process can be understood as having no “objective reality”;193 instead it consists of a mutually recognized system of claims for and ascriptions of status, a system that is stabilized and enacted through acts of symbolic communication,194 that thus forms a “symbolic order.”195 According to this understanding, performing acts of symbolic communication—the “symbolics of power,”196 as Clifford Geertz called it—is very much at the center of premodern social and political life.197 Yet, rulers must be aware that in addition to its stabilizing and legitimating function, acts of symbolic communication can also be employed in conflicts about social prerogatives in a given social order and about the general validity of that order.198 Thus, on one hand, agents can use acts of symbolic communication, such as coronation rituals or anointing rites, to show that only they (and no other agents) are justified in their claims to rulership in the extant social order. On the other hand, symbolic communication can also be used to argue that an entire social order should be replaced by another one, as for example, during the French Revolution when the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille— a prison for political prisoners that had become a particularly detested symbol of the monarchical regime.199 The concept of courtly representation allows for a clearer understanding of the specific features of symbolic communication in courtly contexts. Werner Paravicini defines “representation” in the context of court studies as follows: Representation is the manifestation (Vergegenwärtigung) of something absent or invisible in the realm of social relations by means of media of various kinds (bodies, clothing, language, texts, coats of arms, inscriptions, pictures, portraits, thrones, letters, presents) or [by means of] symbolic interaction […] or communication (architecture, spatial structure, entries, processions, feasts, and celebrations).200 Paravicini’s definition of the multifaceted term representation201 has the advantages of being particularly clear and compatible with the concept of symbolic communication. With regard to the particular case of courtly representation, we can supplement Paravicini’s definition and describe courtly representation as a specific type of dramatization by means of symbolic communication that serves to manifest and (re-)produce the elevated status of the ruling elite and the conceptual framework that supports it. Courtly representation thereby creates and reaffirms the common identity of the ruling elite and sets it apart from other social groups.202 Moreover, it embodies and commemorates norms and values that define the self-conception of the ruling elite and thus helps to legitimate its social position.203 Hence, rulers whose position is not fully legitimated or those who have to compensate for a loss of influence are often particularly ambitious in staging representative events that support and affirm their status.204 Courtly representation is of key significance for the stability of hierarchically stratified premodern societies:205 It makes the exalted position of the ruling elite perceivable, observable, and even something that can be experienced, and thus also real for those who do not have a share in it.206 To quote Norbert Elias’ key argument: “The people do not believe in power that may exist but is not visible in the appearance of the ruler. They must see in order to believe.”207 But courtly communication is not only directed at a ruler’s subjects. It is also—and often primarily—oriented toward other rulers and ruling elites who raise competing claims to supreme status. Therefore, to gain a deeper understanding of the culture of representation at a given court, we should pay attention to both domestic and foreign addressees.208 This last observation is also relevant when rulers engage in activities that can be interpreted as displays of luxury, pomp, and conspicuous consumption. While earlier generations of scholars understood such activities as manifestations of the moral deficiencies of rulers, more recent work on premodern political culture underscores the rational social functions behind these activities and even the way they constitute a necessary strategy in some instances.209 By surrounding themselves with expensive objects and luxury items and by consuming valuable goods and services, rulers and members of the ruling elite followed a specific communicative strategy that manifested their social position and set them apart from others while integrating them in their peer group to reaffirm the extant system of social relations.210 Moreover, by spending large amounts of material resources on their subjects, rulers signaled that they were able and willing to fulfill some of the most important social obligations connected to their position, such as behaving with generosity and rewarding loyalty and those who served them well.211 This understanding of luxury as a rational strategy of communication is not exclusively a product of modern theoretical reflections. It has a noteworthy early forerunner in Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 808/1406) analysis of the “emblems of the ruler” (shārāt al-malik) included as the third chapter of his famous Muqaddima (Prolegomena). Ibn Khaldūn, who spent the last years of his life in the Mamluk Sultanate,212 writes about the characteristics that set rulers apart from their subjects: It should be known that the ruler has emblems [shārāt] and arrangements [aḥwāl] that are the necessary result of pomp and ostentation. They are restricted to him, and by their use he is distinguished from his subjects, his intimates, and all other leaders in his dynasty. […] The various rulers and dynasties differ in their use of such emblems. Some of them use a great many, others few, according to the extent and importance of the given dynasty. […] [The Muslim rulers of the past] used [such emblems] and permitted their officials to use [them], to increase the prestige of royal authority and its representatives.213 In this passage, Ibn Khaldūn considers certain material objects and modes of behavior the prerogatives of rulers who use them to boost their prestige as sovereigns. Moreover, the degree to which a ruler can employ such “emblems and arrangements” is proportional to his authority and that of his dynasty. However, Ibn Khaldūn does not end his analysis here. In his discussion about the elaborate inscriptions embroidered with gold or silver thread (known as ṭirāz) that decorated clothes worn or given away as presents by rulers,214 he continues his reflections: Royal garments are embroidered with such a ṭirāz, in order to increase the prestige of the ruler or the person of lower rank who wears such a garment, or in order to increase the prestige of those whom the ruler distinguishes by bestowing upon them his own garment when he wants to honor them or appoint them to one of the offices of the dynasty.215 In Ibn Khaldūn’s view, luxurious clothes thus fulfill a clear social function: They affirm and augment the prestige of rulers and their beneficiaries and appointees. Thus, courtly luxury appears not as a waste of resources, but as a strategy employed by rational agents with specific goals. Moreover, according to Ibn Khaldūn, being able to produce and give away embroidered clothes is a direct indication of the authority of a given dynasty. He continues: “When luxury and cultural diversity receded with the receding power of the (great) dynasties, and when the number of (small) dynasties grew, the office [of the supervisor of the ṭirāz production] and its administration completely ceased to exist in most dynasties.”216 Thus, luxurious clothes with ṭirāz decorations are, according to Ibn Khaldūn, something peculiar to great dynasties, while most small ones are not able to produce them. Only important rulers such as the Mamluk sultans keep up the ṭirāz production “in accordance with the importance of the realm (of that dynasty) and the civilization of its country.”217 Here we could also refer to other expensive and splendid items that Ibn Khaldūn considers “emblems of royal authority,”218 such as thrones, large tents, or prayer enclosures (sg. maqṣūra).219 It is noteworthy that Ibn Khaldūn’s perspective on the subject of luxury items is very similar to that of modern historians; both view them not as signs of squander per se, but as instruments used by rulers to manifest their claims to sovereignty.220 Later Muslim political thinkers, such as al-Ghawrī’s contemporary Faḍl Allāh b. Rūzbihān Khunjī (d. 927/1521) went one step further and even argued that luxury was necessary for rulers: “When a ruler does not furnish himself with items of extravagance (takallofāt) in his palace and, amid the people, with chattels, horses, and retainers […], then the people will not obey him, and the affairs of the Muslims will be neglected.”221 Khunjī’s reference to the ruler’s palace leads us to the question of space in the context of courtly communicative events. Although the approach outlined here (and with it the present study) does not understand courts as identical with topographical entities such as palaces or encampments,222 it nevertheless recognizes the importance of space as a category in the analysis of court occasions.223 The present study argues, however, that no space is courtly per se; it only becomes so when courtly events are staged in it. Thus, there is no space that can be identified as the “court” in and of itself. Spaces derive their courtly qualities only from what takes place there, in the presence of and on behalf of rulers. Hence, the approach followed here sees space as a second-order aspect of what defines a court. With its focus on the defining role of courtly events for what can be referred to as courtly spaces, the present study builds on earlier publications arguing that the “ ‘court’ […] could be found wherever […] [the ruler] happened to be.”224 This insight is particularly important given the fact that premodern rulers were often highly mobile and staged courtly events in various localities throughout their realm in order to make their status known to their subjects at large, reaffirm their exalted position, and maintain control over their territory even when technological conditions made direct domination from afar difficult at best, to name just the most obvious motivations.225 While itinerant rulership has received ample attention in studies on European history,226 its significance for various premodern Islamicate dynasties, including the Umayyads,227 Ghaznawids,228 Seljuqs,229 Almohads,230 Marinids,231 Ilkhanids,232 Timurids,233 and various other dynasties in the Maghrib234 remains incompletely understood.235 Nevertheless, the growing body of research on Islamicate practices of itinerant rulership underlines the need to identify the court not with a single space, but to focus on the performative means and courtly events through which spaces acquire courtly qualities.236 On a more local level, the issue of where a given courtly event takes place is of great significance for its communicative meaning, as is the spatial arrangement of the people and material objects involved in it. During court events, space served as a symbolic indicator of the status and the relative position of those involved, that is, the social order.237 Courtly space was never neutral, but “hierarchical and politically charged”238 and thus ideally suited for use in symbolic communicative acts.239 For example, where a courtly event is staged,240

within the inner part of a ruler’s residence (behind thresholds)241 or within its outer and more easily accessible areas, is critically significant, as this location influences not only the audience of the event, but it also reflects and illustrates the meaning of the event in the mind of those who enact it. Moreover, it is important to note that space “is not really a fixed material feature, but is constructed by the way it is occupied. Our mental maps of physical structures stem from our understanding not only of the material elements of those spaces but of how their occupants functioned within them.”242 This constructedness of spaces is clear, for example, in cases in which the same physical space is used for different courtly occasions, after it is “reconstructed” and endowed with a new meaning through conscious processes of symbolic re-configuration. To this end, the symbolic messages associated with physical spaces are modified through the manipulation of their aesthetic qualities so that they fit the needs of specific events and those involved.243 These insights about the constructedness and symbolic reconfigurability of spaces also help us to understand in more depth how spaces can acquire courtly qualities. The specific form of “occupation” that courtly events constitute reconfigures the “mental maps” of those participating in or learning about them. In this process, the spaces in question acquire new meanings that are linked to the events staged by and for rulers and are thus endowed with mediated courtly qualities that allow us to think of them as “courtly spaces.” Hence, we can conclude that spaces are important not only for the messages communicated by courtly events, but, in return, are also modified and shaped by these events. Taken together, courts are understood according to the theoretical perspective outlined here as constituted by series of occasions which are acts of—often symbolic—communication performed by, in the presence of, or on behalf of rulers244 within certain spaces and, inter alia, serve to represent their status. Following this approach, events with communicative and representative character, such as parades and processions,245 entries,246 recessionals, travels,247 religious rituals and ceremonies,248 festivities,249 banquets,250 performative displays of special clothing,251 investitures,252 receptions, audiences, and salons253 gain center stage in the study of premodern courts.254 Moreover, this perspective draws attention to texts,255 buildings, and other material objects that played a role in or bear witness to these occasions.When interpreting these courtly events, historians can use the same questions we would employ in the analysis of any act of communication, such as: Who initiates the act of communication?256Who is the intended audience?257Who is the de facto audience and how does it react?258 Is the attempt to communicate successful?259 What is communicated?260 Why is it communicated?261 How is the respected message transmitted?262 What is the context of the message?263 While it is often impossible to clearly answer all of these questions when approaching past acts of communication through the lens of often highly selective sources,264 they can nevertheless serve as valuable guidelines in the study of specific events.265 1.2.4 The Court as a Social Entity As both Asch’s and Konrad’s work makes clear, we can further enhance the analytical potential of the theoretical understanding of the court as a series of occasions by combining it with a related approach that focuses on the social dimension of the court and is primarily interested in people, rather than events. By taking up his earlier reflections on the court as a series of events, Asch develops the following understanding of the court as a social entity: In accordance with the interpretation of the court as a phenomenon that becomes visible only in a series of occasions, that is, in fact, constituted by [these occasions], one must count among [the members of] the court in general those persons who participate in these events. This participation could of course happen in very different forms—the spectrum ranges from the role of a mere observer […] to the active shaping [of the events]. At the court, it was primarily the ruler himself who shaped [events] and took action, and in this sense, those who belonged to the court were primarily those who were close to the ruler and were involved in his actions.266 Building on Asch’s work, Konrad neatly defines the court in a social sense as “the social group that usually participates in the occasions wherein the ruler holds court and thus […] gain[s] access to the ruler.”267 Konrad uses Elias’ term “court society” to refer to the court in this social sense.268 The present study also uses this term whenever it is necessary to referexplicitly to the court as a social group.269 “Court,” in contrast, is employed as an umbrella term that combines the various dimensions of this concept as outlined here and allows us to speak of the court metaphorically as “a social and cultural space.”270 “Court culture,” in turn, is defined as a set of specific communicative “codes or symbolic forms”271 that are shared and understood among the members of court society who engage in practices of “exchange and adoption”272 to create it.273 Asch and Konrad point out that a ruler’s court society is not identical with the household. The latter is a social institution that includes the ruler’s family members and servants. These persons usually have living quarters in the ruler’s residence and form a relatively stable institution that exists regardless of whether the ruler is present. The men and women who make up this institution, however, do not necessarily have to be members of the ruler’s court society, although there may be an overlap between the two entities.274 The heirs apparent usually take part in courtly events and normally have direct access to rulers and are thus clearly members of their court societies. At the same time, they are typically also part of the inner family of rulers and hence part of their household. But, for example, while a scullion in the ruler’s kitchen is certainly part of the institution of the household, he may never attend a courtly event or have access to the ruler, and thus stands outside the latter’s court society. In contrast, a high-ranking religious figure, such as a bishop or Sufi shaykh, might regularly partake in courtly events, but is nevertheless not part of the ruler’s household—unless he concomitantly fulfills functions analogous to those of a court chaplain.275 The conceptualization of “court society” proposed here is interrelated with the communication-focused approach to the court outlined earlier. This approach sees court societies as shaped by communicative processes and relationships, both with regard to their internal structure and their differentiation from other social groups,276 given that, as Ute Daniel states, “communication itself […] caused integration and exclusion, rise and fall.”277 For any member of a court society, their chances to communicate with the ruler are of pivotal importance, as the latter usually occupies the central position in the communicative events and occasions that are determinative for court society membership. In her study of ʿAbbasid and Byzantine courts, El Cheikh uses a theater metaphor to express this situation: “There was a large number of ‘courtiers’ […] who were simultaneously performers, extras, and the first row of [the audience]. The emperor and caliph, respectively, were the stars of the show.”278 The fact that the court, as a social entity, usually disintegrates upon the death or dismissal of the rulers further underscores their central role.279 Being able to communicate directly with the ruler defines not only whether a given person is a member of court society, but also offers tangible advantages, as the ruler is generally able to decide about the allocation of benefits such as political influence, offices, and material goods.280 Hence, those who control access to the ruler—such as, for example, doormen and chamberlains—are often very influential in a given court society.281 But at the same time, direct communication with the ruler can also pose risks, as conflict with the ruler— and a subsequent “fall from grace”—can result in dismissal from court society, in addition to other, possibly more severe, consequences.282 Instead of conceptualizing court society as consisting of just two clearly differentiated groups—an “inner” and an “outer” court—as is sometimes done in studies of European courts,283 it may be more suitable to imagine it as a number of fluid concentric circles arranged around the ruler, with members moving from one circle to the other depending on their current relationship with the ruler. Its outermost circle does not constitute an impermeable boundary, but allows a steady exchange of people entering and leaving court society.284 As Elias indicated, a high level of rivalry usually characterizes social relations in court society. While this does not rule out the formation of factions, members usually struggle primarily for themselves in the “existential situation of competition”285 typical for this social formation, as they are in a steady contest to acquire limited resources, such as material goods and offices, but also political influence, status, rank, and the ruler’s favor. Once gained, these resources must be defended against contenders and invested for profit.286 Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of types of capital is helpful to gain a deeper understanding of what members of court societies compete for.287 Defining “capital” as “accumulated work, either in material form or in internalized, incorporated form,”288 Bourdieu distinguishes between three types of capital: economic, cultural, and social. Economic capital can be easily converted into money; its typical form of institutionalization is property rights.289 Cultural capital appears, according to Bourdieu, in three forms: Incorporated cultural capital has the structure of “permanent dispositions of an organism.”290 It is acquired through a process of internalization that requires personally invested time and can be referred to as “learning.” Persons own incorporated cultural capital in such a way that it becomes a permanent element of them, a habitus. Unlike economic capital, one cannot exchange incorporated cultural capital on a short term basis, as it is impossible to donate, sell, or bequeath. Its transmission requires time and necessarily stops when its owners die or can no longer remember significant information. Objectified cultural capital, in contrast, is more easily transferable, as it is located in material carriers such as books or machines. Its use, however, is usually tied to incorporated cultural capital: One can buy a library, but one needs the ability to read—or the means to hire someone who has this ability—to benefit from it. Finally, institutionalized cultural capital appears in modern societies usually in the form of educational or academic titles that confirm cultural competences and make them comparable.291 Bourdieu provides the following definition of “social capital”: “Social capital is the sum of effective and potential resources that are connected to the possession of a permanent network of more or less institutionalized relations of mutual acquaintance and recognition; or, to put it in another way, it concerns resources that depend on membership in a group.”292 Relations of social capital, which ultimately rest on relations of mutual exchange, can be institutionalized, for example, by way of names signifying one’s belonging to a certain family, tribe, or party. A person’s social capital depends on the number of their relations and on the amount of cultural, economic, and social capital held by those in the person’s network of relations. For this reason, people invest work, time, and economic capital to establish or retain relations and memberships in groups.293

All three types of capital can be accumulated over time and are, in any given point in time, distributed in a specific pattern across the members of a given society.294 Under certain circumstances and limitations, capital can be transmitted and one type of capital can be transformed into another.295 Such a transformation, however, requires a certain investment, which is best measured in the working time expended on it.296 Patronage is one of the most important mechanisms through which the allocation and exchange of different forms of capital takes place in courtly contexts. Building on Asch’s work, patronage can be defined, on one hand, as relations of exchange between influential persons (patrons) and less influential parties (clients), in which patrons protect and support their clients using the various forms of capital at their disposal, while clients assist patrons especially, but not only, in times of conflict. Such relations, which usually develop and exist over long periods of time, can be called “protective patronage” (Protektionspatronage). On the other hand, one can also understand patronage as isolated, possibly non-recurring acts through which an influential person (patron) transfers a capital asset to another, usually less influential person (client). Asch calls this second kind of patronage “benefit patronage” (Benefizialpatronage). In practice, both forms of patronage are often closely connected, with recurring acts of benefit patronage establishing and stabilizing relations of protective patronage.297 Usually, relations of patronage are informal; they are not based on contracts or other legal instruments.298 They are particularly useful for patrons who command large amounts of capital—such as rulers—, but need the help of clients to legitimate their position, or those who lay claim to a high social position and rely on the assistance of clients to enforce it.299 In complex social configurations—for example, major court societies,which can develop into full-fledged “patronage markets”300—patronage often takes place indirectly through the assistance of persons who act as mediators between patrons and their (indirect) clients. Such patronage brokers can appear as patrons in their own right, from the perspective of clients who are dependent on them for access to capital assets only the highest-raking patrons can bestow. Typically, a member of court society might, for example, rely on a higher-ranking patronage broker to present a request to the ruler.301 Thus, indirect patronage and brokerage can contribute significantly to the development of complicated networks and hierarchies that connect members of a given court society to the ruler and each other.302 Still, we should not underestimate the influence of a ruler’s personality on the shape of the court, as patronage is only one, albeit an important way, for the ruler to exert influence on those around him.303 Arabic speakers of the middle period had at their disposal a refined terminology to describe different forms and aspects of patronage,304 which often played an important role in their respective societies.305 A client, called, inter alia, mawlā (associate), tābiʿ (follower), ṣāniʿ (protégé), or ṣāḥib (companion),306 usually offered a khidma (service) to patrons.307 Khidma was exchanged for what is typically called a niʿma (favor) of the patron,308 whom the authors of our sources referred to as mawlā (master) or muṣṭaniʿ (commissioner).309 Patronage brokers who could practice effective intercession (shafāʿa) were known—at least in the Mamluk period—as having maqbūl alkalima, a term van Steenbergen translates as “a guaranteed say.”310 The verb often denoting the practice of patronage was iṣṭanaʿ (to commission, to patronize).311 Favoritism is a phenomenon closely related to the patronage found in many court societies. Building on Asch’s work, we can define a favorite as a person who enjoys, in the eyes of the ruler, a high level of personal favor, one that goes beyond the trust usually accorded to members of court society and is often the result of bonds of friendship. Favorites often have prerogatives in the courtly context that are not related to a clearly defined office. They are, for example, often the most important patronage brokers and sometimes establish patronage networks of their own. Typically, favorites have constant and direct access to rulers and can often control or curtail other people’s rights of access.312 Favoritism is not specific to a particular period or region.313 Rather, the favorite “can almost appear as a figure necessary for the system”314 in any autocratic regime. Often, rulers elevate persons who had been outsiders or at least lowranking members of court society to the position of favorites. Such people are almost totally dependent on the ruler to maintain their position and are thus particularly willing to fulfill their functions—including that of mediator between the ruler and the latter’s court society—in ways that suite their benefactors’ needs.315 Favorites can be particularly useful in clandestine policies, especially when they perform actions that rulers cannot be directly involved in, if they want to maintain their dignity.316 The downside to this system of favorites is its uncertainty; the same people who might profit from elevation to a status far beyond their usual position are also especially prone to lose the favor of rulers at one point or the other, especially if they become threats to their benefactors. In this case, their fall from grace can be particularly deep, dramatic, and often enough, deadly.317 The conceptualization of the court outlined in the present and the preceding sections is definitely not the only one possible. Yet, in combining multiple perspectives on what constitutes a court, it does have several distinct advantages: With its focus on persons and events, together with the spaces in which they take place, this conceptualization can serve as a powerful tool in our analysis of the main sources of the present study. These sources abound with references to social groups such as a ruler’s khāṣṣakiyya, muqarrabūn, and khawāṣṣ. They also feature numerous accounts of khidmas, mawkibs, or simāṭs that these persons staged, or in which they participated, in the sultan’s qalʿa. Yet, as noted, the sources do not include an umbrella term denoting what these terms have in common. The conceptualization of the court outlined here can offer interpretative instruments with which we can study precisely the interconnections and underlying dynamics that exist between the persons, spaces, and social phenomena these Arabic terms point to. It thus promises to shed light on aspects that would go unnoticed in studies lacking appropriate theoretical frameworks and to enhance the analytical potential of the philological and historical-critical approach pursued in the study at hand.318 Moreover, the conceptualization used here is abstract and versatile enough to be applied to many pre- and early modern societies, irrespective of cultural background.319 Basically, the only elements necessary are the presence of a ruler in a given space, a group of persons socially connected to the ruler, and the performance of events centered on the ruler. Whether these elements are found in a European, Near Eastern, East Asian, American, or any other society is, in principle, irrelevant and does not diminish the analytical value of the conceptualization.320 The period is also not relevant; the respective subject of the study may date to premodern or early modern times.321 Thus, far from being Eurocentric, the conceptualization of the court outlined here can be a helpful instrument with which to compare societies across cultural, historical, religious, and linguistic borders.322 With regard to Islamicate courts, the present study builds on several current trajectories of research on rulership and political culture in Arabic-, Turkic-, and Persian-speaking societies. Aspects of symbolic communication in preand early modern courtly contexts have begun to receive increased attention in recent years, especially in the case of ʿAbbasid,323 Fatimid,324 Seljuq,325 Ottoman,326 and Islamicate Indian327 courts. Scholars build on insights and research results developed mainly in European contexts and modify them as necessary to use as analytical tools for the study of non-European societies.328 Relying on theories of symbolic communication seems particularly promising in this context, as “it is more or less self-evident that eastern elites […] resorted to ritual and symbolic forms of communication just as much as their western peers did,”329 as Alexander Beihammer points out. The same author acknowledges that much work remains to be done in this field, particularly with regard to the sub-topic of political rituals: “[T]he investigation of rituals in Byzantine and Muslim political cultures is still a far cry from the level western medieval  studies have reached in their respective field. […] Research on political rituals in the areas in question […] is still in its infancy.”330 In Mamluk studies, more than twenty years ago Winslow W. Clifford called upon his fellow historians to apply “middle range theories of social interaction, culture, [and] ideology”331 to their subjects of study and focus, inter alia, on what he calls “gestural communication” and the “symbols”332 related to it. 

He thereby reiterated Ira M. Lapidus’s even earlier demand that historians should study“the concepts and values that bear on the ordering of social relationships, [and] the […] symbols of social order.”333 More recently, Stephen R. Humphreys has followed these authors’ line of reasoning and drawn the attention of scholars working on Mamluk politics to “symbolic action, cultural representation, [and] the encoding of ideology in myth and ritual” and argued that one should “remember that symbols, myths, and rituals are not autonomous entities operating inside some separate universe; they reflect or embody real acts which have grave material consequences for real people.”334 Jo van Steenbergen’s recent work shares this perspective and underlines the need for a semiotic335 approach to Mamluk culture and literature that pays special attention to “discursive modes of elite communication [that are] semiotically linked to—even defined by issues of social identity, elite integration, and their performance.”336 Yet, despite these calls to take symbols, rituals, and representation seriously, historians of the Mamluk Sultanate have only very rarely engaged in theoretically well-grounded analyses of this dimension of Mamluk political life. As van Steenbergen recently noted: “[T]he ritual aspect of Mamluk political culture remains poorly understood.”337 By contrast, conceptualizing the court as a social group particularly close to the ruler is an approach utilized in several recent publications on premodern Islamicate societies. In her articles on the ʿAbbasid court, El Cheikh notes that “the real criterion for membership of the court was access to the caliph. […] The court was not an institution in any formal sense but rather a gathering of people, often fluid in composition and constantly changing.”338 Studies on other Islamicate courts take a similar view: Naaman defines the court as “an elite social configuration created by a potentate,”339 while Chejne notes that in the Islamicate middle period, “[t]he court of a ruler comprised—in addition to regular appointees such as viziers, secretaries, chamberlains, and others—a goodly number of people with diversified talents.”340 By combining such observations on the social structure of courts with perspectives focusing on their performative and spatial aspects, the present study thus takes up the findings of earlier publications and seeks to integrate them into a more holistic analytical framework. 1.2.5 The majlis as an Aspect of Islamicate Court Culture Before exploring the analytical potential of the conceptualization outlined above, we need to address the Arabic term majlis, given its importance for the performative, social, and spatial dimensions of al-Ghawrī’s court examined in the study at hand. Grammatically speaking, majlis (pl. majālis) is a noun of place of the root j-l-swith the basic meanings “to sit up” or “to sit up straight.”341 Hence, it can be readily translated as “a place where one sits.”342 In this spatial sense it is used, for example, in Islamicate palace architecture, where it denotes a room or hall in which a ruler or other person of influence sits while receiving guests.343 By extension, majlis can also refer to a “meeting place” in general as well as a “session” in the broadest sense of this English word.344 Moreover, it is also used in ceremonial language as a title for a high-ranking person, in which case, it can best be translated as “Excellency.”345 In general, majlis often appears as the first word of a genitive construction in which the second word defines it more closely.346 Depending on its context, the word majlis covers a very broad spectrum of meanings that can be clarified best through a systematic categorization of the contexts in which it is used. Such a categorization also helps us to determine its various context-dependent translations into English. The following discussion focuses on the usage of the term majlis in reference to social institutions. The categories outlined should be understood as ideal types in the Weberian sense and might not be entirely suitable to describe every characteristic of a given majlis.347 Moreover, a specific historical majlis may fall between two or more different categories.348 One of the spheres in which the term majlisfigures most prominently is that of education and the transmission of knowledge.349 Here, the breadth of its semantic field becomes clear again: As an educational term, majlis can denote a place where a class is taught, the class itself, a single session of a class, its participants, its contents, or even the published form of its contents.350 While the term majlis al-ʿilm (lit. “session of knowledge”) has been used to describe an educational or academic session in general,351 more specific terms reflect the topics of a particular majlis. Thus, majlis al-ḥadīth signifies, for example, that a majlis is dedicated to the study and transmission of prophetic traditions,352

whereas majlis al-naḥw points to a class focusing on grammar.353 Poets and other people interested in poetry meet in majālis al-shuʿarāʾ,354 

while majālis al-tadrīs are mostly classes on Islamic law.355 Educational majālis often took place in mosques, madrasas, or a scholar’s home.356 The majlis al-munāẓara (or mujādala) was an important type of educational majlis in which disputations could take place, either within a given religious group, or across confessional and religious borders.357 Their primary aim was not the transmission of knowledge, but the intellectual contest between two or more participants.358 Often, majālis al-munāẓara were organized by highranking persons, who often also served as arbiters.359 Such majālis were also convened by scholars or took place spontaneously.360 Early on, majālis almunāẓara were especially favored by theologians, but later also took root in other academic disciplines, such as jurisprudence and linguistics.361 Its competitive character often led to ethical problems which Muslim authors, including Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), addressed in detail.362 The sometimes morally questionable features of the majlis al-munāẓara contributed to the development of a distinct type of literature on the rules of correct behavior in a majlis al-munāẓara and its theoretical underpinnings.363 Moreover, the majlis al-munāẓara, with its typical sequence of questions and answers or statements and replies, had a profound influence on the dialectic organization of multiple fields of Islamicate learning.364 In the religious sphere, the word majlis likewise has a variety of meanings. In Sunni Islam, preaching sessions were known as majālis al-waʿẓ.365 Sessions in which Sufis transmitted and practiced their religious teachings, often with recourse to music, were also called majālis,366 as were the ritual mourning sessions of Indian Shiʿis.367 The majlis al-ḥikma (lit. “session of wisdom”) was a type of majlis specific to Ismaʿili communities. This kind of majālis blossomed during the reign of the Fatimids in Egypt. Prepared by the Fatimid chief propagandist (dāʿī l-duʿāt), these regular sessions educated their participants inIsmaʿili spiritual teachings. They were held separately for different groups of participants, and segregated by gender, social position, and level of religious knowledge. Records of their proceedings, also known by the name of majālis, are extant and rank among the most important sources for the reconstruction of premodern Ismaʿili religious doctrine.368 

Majlis al-ḥukm (lit. “session of judgment”) is a term common in sources describing legal procedures to refer to qāḍī tribunals, as well as the locations where they took place, thereby demonstrating the importance of the word majlis in the juridical sphere.369 The same applies to the term majlis almaẓālim.370 Formal legal opinions (sg. fatwā) were issued in majālis al-fatwā. The latter could also feature legal instruction and were then known as majālis al-fatwā wa-l-tadrīs.371 The use of the word majlis is also attested in the field of politics, where the council of leading notables of a tribe was known by this term already in pre-Islamic times. It later served to denote different types of councils and assemblies in the governmental system of variousIslamicate polities, including modern-day parliaments.372 In the Mamluk Sultanate, a majlis of the leading senior amīrs and other high-ranking officials, known as the majlis al-mashūra or mashūrat al-umarāʾ (lit. “council of amīrs”) held considerable influence over the ruler and often had a decisive say in the succession to the throne.373 The designation of amīr majlis, one of the highest offices of the late Mamluk governing apparatus, goes back to this council.374 Moreover, together with terms such as julūs or khidma, the word majlis could also denote an official audience in which a ruler received visitors or passed judgments.375 Another, notably different type of majālis had a social and intellectual character and served as an important venue of communication for court societies. Typically, these majālis can be called “courtly” in the sense outlined above, as they were among the social events that constituted courts, but cannot simply be equated with courts themselves. In premodern sources, they were often known as majālis al-uns (lit. “sessions of sociability”),376 a term that is explained by Reinhart Dozy as a “réunion de grandes seigneuries et d’hommes de lettres, où l’on s’entretient de littérature en buvant.”377 Organized by rulers and other high-ranking figures, these majālis often took place in the residences of those convening them378 and were, as Erez Naaman put it, “at the core of the court.”379 

In contrast to the closely related institution of the more informal mujālasa, whose participants were of roughly equal social standing,380 courtly majālisfollowed a certain protocol and etiquette,381 which governed, inter alia, the seating arrangement of their attendees, who typically varied considerably in rank.382 Courtly majālis of the Islamicate middle period were an important platform for amusing discussions about scholarly and literary topics and a place to present and consider panegyric texts.383 Moreover, their participants often enjoyed games, food, wine, and music.384 A ruler’s professional boon companions or nudamāʾ (sg. nadīm) played central roles during such majālis,385 as is underscored by the saying that five nudamāʾ make up a majlis, as quoted by the Mamluk author al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333).386 Often, the participants in such majālis were called julasāʾ (sg. jalīs), a word that literally means “one with whom one sits together” or “table companion.”387 As courtly events of great communicative significance, majālis al-uns gave rulers excellent opportunities to show themselves as refined, sophisticated, and generous patrons of learning and the arts vis-à-vis key members of their court societies, thus legitimating their elevated position. Hence, majālis al-uns were popular at courts across the Islamicate world.388

A series of particularly well known, entertaining and at the same time edifying majālis took place at the courts of the Buyid dynasty. Thanks to the works of writers such as Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. ca. 414/1023), we can reconstruct their most important features. Many of these majālis were organized by Buyid rulers interested in improving their reputation as patrons of the arts, or by viziers, who were often full-fledged scholars and men of letters in their own right. Among those convened at the palaces of these influential men, we find professional boon companions, poets, secretaries, and scholars, both Muslims and people of other creeds. Erudition and eloquence were the most important qualifications demanded from and appreciated by those taking part in this kind of majālis. The vast array of topics discussed at these sessions included questions of theology and philosophy, but also Arabic literature, amusing anecdotes, and current issues of social life.389 Although Buyid and ʿAbbasid390 courtly majālis have received the largest share of scholarly attention so far, we know that similar events also took place at the courts of later Muslim rulers, such as, for example, the Seljuqs of Rūm,391 the Ayyubids,392 the Özbeks,393 the Timurids,394 the Mamluks,395 the Ottomans,396 the Muslim dynasties of the Deccan,397 and the Mughals.398 In all of these cases, the question arises of how the term majlis should be translated into European languages. While the word is rendered into English in a variety of ways depending on the context, the two most common translations are “soiree”399 and “salon,”400 with the latter often more closely defined by the adjective “literary.”401 Obviously, all of these terms have their roots in European cultural history.

 Their use thus carries the risk of imposing European (that is, culturally alien) concepts on a social institution of the Islamicate world, thereby supporting a Eurocentric understanding of Islamicate history. Nevertheless, a translation of the Arabic term majlis seems necessary—not only for practical reasons, but also “to make the unknown familiar”402 and thus understandable. In translating such a multifaceted term as majlis, it is important to emphasize that, apparently, no English word communicates the broad array of its meanings and implications. Yet, the methodically controlled and selfreflexive development of a translation of this term is clearly preferable to the alternative of leaving it untranslated. Using only the Arabic word would open the door to conscious or unconscious ad hoc translations, at least in the minds of readers who are not native Arabic speakers. Furthermore, such ad hoc translations might fail to convey the meaning of such an ambiguous term or might lead to misunderstandings.403 The term “salon” is particularly well-suited to render both the explicit meaning and at least some of the connotations of the term majlis into English, according to Lale Behzadi. In European cultural history, mostly from the eighteenth to twentieth century ce, the word“salon” generally denoted regular semisecluded social gatherings that took place in the quarters of both aristocrats and commoners of high standing. These typically female-led meetings, which were informal but still required a certain etiquette, gave room to discussions about politics, literature, scholarship, and daily affairs, and were enjoyed with food, beverages, games, music, dramatic performances, self-presentation, and networking. Far from uniform, the attendees of European salons included persons from all walks of life and genders.404 In some way reflecting the diversity of these participants, the “ ‘salon’ [itself] seems to elude assignment to particular historical periods as well as a localization in terms of cultural geography.”405

 Indeed, the fact that the concept “salon” does not lend itself easily to any kind of geographical, historical, or social localization seems to be one of its fundamental characteristics.406 Although the salon was a product of the social and cultural history of early modern and modern Europe in general and early modern Italy in particular,407 the existence of “structurally similar and in their functions partially comparable formations from antiquity or from extra-European, e.g., Japanese, cultural spheres”408 has not been doubted. One of these structurally similar and functionally comparable social institutions was the Islamicate courtly majlis, as Behzadi showed. Both the Islamicate majlis and the European salon served the representational interests of rulers and high-standing patrons, and were also important events for members of the cultural and intellectual elite. Both offered room for erudite and entertaining discussions in which literature and poetry played a prominent role. Moreover, they provided people who did not belong to high society with an opportunity to join discussions with the elite, to profit from intellectual exchange, and to prove themselves eloquent and quick-witted dialogue partners. Characterized by a certain tension between differences in social status and equality in debate, they contributed to the development of a “semi-public” sphere of communication.409 

In addition to these points raised by Behzadi, we may add that, like the Arabic word majlis, the French “salon” was originally a spatial term that denoted a room or a hall in which receptions took place. It only later adopted a broader array of meanings in various European languages and was used to designate exhibitions, semisecluded sociable meetings, scholarly gatherings, and political assemblies, as well as specific types of literary writing.410 Thus, its semantic field not only (roughly) matches that of the term majlis in scope, but also considerably overlaps with it. In light of these similarities and parallels, “salon” is an adequate translation of the Arabic term majlis when the latter is used with reference to the courtly cultural sphere.411 As is discussed in fuller detail below, it is thus also an appropriate designation for those majālisthat took place during the very last years of the Mamluk period under the patronage of sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī.412

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