Download PDF | Fozia Bora - Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World_ The Value of Chronicles as Archives-I.B. Tauris (2019).
271 Pages
Introduction
Archival work turns archival materials into the building blocks of historical narratives. Th is process is by no means trivial. On the contrary, it is extraordinarily creative and constructive. M. Friedrich, Th e Birth of the Archive . A History of Knowledge (2018), 199
Ibn al-Fur ā t: A hidden figure of Mamluk historiography
In the seminary-rich city of Cairo in the late fourteenth century, two men studied historiographical texts together. Th ey knew this scholarly environment well, and had helped to create it, especially in the fi eld of historiography. In a well-attested ArabMuslim bibliophilic culture – both a trope and a truth, as recent studies indicate – Cairo and Damascus had developed into two of its most productive centres, where the love of books drew in scholars, readers and travellers from many walks of life. 1 Ibn Khald ū n (1332–1406), the older of the two men, was the author of what became by far the most widely acclaimed book of premodern Arabic historiography, while the younger historian, al-Maqr ī z ī (1364–1442), wrote over thirty books in the course of a prolifi c writing career, in which historiography was prominent. 2
The careers and literary output of the two historians have generated substantial scholarly interest, including editions of their main works and an ever-growing body of secondary literature. Behind them, however, stood a much lesser-known fi gure, a near-exact contemporary of Ibn Khald ū n’s based in Cairo-Fustat, a mu ḥ addith (scholar of Prophetic traditions), historian and notary witness, in descending order of social prestige, who was known within scholarly networks in both Cairo and Damascus, but remained, as the biographical literature of the period shows, a relatively obscure fi gure throughout his life. Yet he wrote a major book of history, one of the most infl uential and methodologically revealing works of Middle Period historiography, which survives only in part, in the author’s hand, as no subsequent copies were made, though his material was extensively utilized by later historians. Th is author was N ā ṣ ir al-D ī n Mu ḥ ammad ibn ʿ Abd al-Ra ḥ ī m ibn al-Fur ā t (1334–1405) and his book was Ta’r ī kh al-duwal wa ’l-mul ū k ( Th e History of Dynasties and Kings ). 3 It is this forensic, document-laden tour de force of historiography that illustrates the argument of this book.
Inscribing with a date: Historiography as documentation
The writing of history in the premodern Islamicate world was commonly denoted by the Arabic verb arrakha , to ‘inscribe with a date’, an activity central to archival practice in a wide range of premodern and modern contexts. 4 In this study, I argue for a reconsideration of medieval Arabic historiography as a form of documentation, and a reading of resulting chronicles, a primary rubric of historical knowledge, as archives. Middle Period chronicles, a pre-eminent genre of Arabic historiography, can be seen to function as archives of both knowledge and knowledge-making practice, as storage spaces for deliberately preserved and strategically ordered reports that fulfi l an unspoken brief of archivality as conservation. Th ey are also texts constituted through a range of archival practices, bearing specifi c archival signs. Th e archival approach to historical narratives does not detract from immensely illuminating nascent research on documents per se, but rather emphasizes the seamless culture of archivality and documentation that permeates the medieval Islamic episteme within which chronicles were written. In short, I want to demonstrate that archivality is the heuristic key to Mamluk historical writing
While Arabic terms for ‘archive(s)’ range, depending on social and temporal context, from khiz ā na (repository), sijill ā t (registers), ma ḥ fu ẓ ā t (‘preserved material’, archivalia), wath ā ’iq rasmiyya (offi cial documents) to arsh ī f (the Arabic transliteration of the French ‘archive’), one term off ers particular elucidation of the archival aspect of the medieval Arabic chronicle: d ī w ā n . Ibn Khald ū n’s major book of history, Kit ā b al-‘ibar wa d ī w ā n al-mubtada’ wa al-khabar f ī ayy ā m al-‘arab wa al-‘ajam wa al-barbar, wa man ‘ ā ṣ arahum min dhaw ī al-sul ṭ ā n al-akbar ( Book of Lessons and Archive of Early and Subsequent History, Dealing with the Political Events Concerning the Arabs, NonArabs, and Berbers, and the Supreme Rulers Who Were Contemporary with Th em , in Franz Rosenthal’s translation), 5 uses the word d ī w ā n to refer to an historiographical archive, a usage consistent with the use of dīwān for diff erent categories of documentary archive by the renowned administrative historian al-Qalqashandī (1355–1418), 6 and widespread use of the term in Arabic letters to refer to an archive of poetry. Ibn Khald ū n’s choice of the word articulates a key feature of the medieval Arabic chronicle, namely its function as an archive, the theme of the present study.
Reading Mamluk historians as archivists
As an analytical category applied to the study of the medieval Islamic chronicle, the archive – alongside the archival practices of historians – documents the specifi c strategies by which Mamluk historians gathered and marshalled copious numbers of books in diverse genres of both prose and poetry, in order to create meaningful new works with contemporary relevance and resonance, for the education and stimulation of present and future readers. In this conducive milieu, clues to the inherently archival nature of intellectual labour help us to understand a culture of textual production in which books in many genres, including Ibn al-Fur ā t’s chronicle, were written by men (and rarely, women) of whom some honed an archival mindset through waged work in state bureaucracy, or in the apparatus of the multifaceted legal sphere. Th ese were activities that attest the ‘legal and notarial culture of Mamlūk urban society’ as the normative setting in which chronicles were produced. In this environment, a ‘documentary fabric … sustained and facilitated medieval life’ in its literary as well as social dimensions, as illustrated neatly by the small example of the legal and documentary journal of a fi ft eenth-century Damascene author, Ibn Ṭ awq’s (d. 1509) al-Ta‘l ī q , that ‘oft en reads like a chronicle’. 7 A recent survey of Islamicate archival practices prior to the Ottoman era cites the examples of Abu ’l-Fa ḍ l Bayhaq ī (d. 1077) and ‘Im ā d al-D ī n al-I ṣ fah ā n ī (d. 1201) as historians who used their access to administrative documents to fl esh out their accounts of history. 8 At the same time, historians like Ibn al-Fur ā t, who had been inculcated in hadith study – with its emphasis on philological precision and its privileging of careful, individuated attribution, among other features – could, as Khalidi has noted, be expected to bring these qualities to their ‘secular’ works, to underscore the point that the Middle Period chronicle developed under the infl uence of, inter alia, several genres of a practical nature. 9 Th e Middle Period chronicle examined in this study, in particular Ibn al-Fur ā t’s account of the fi nal century of Fatimid rule in Ta’r ī kh al-duwal wa ’l-mul ū k , presents both opportunity and resources for the present-day reader to engage systematically with the archival dimensions of the genre, as its author had collated many dozens of earlier and contemporary sources attesting the history of the Islamic Near East from Creation up to the fi nal stages of his own life in 799/1396. Th e magnum opus of this Burji Mamluk historian is a self-refl exive patchwork quilt of historiography, which performs documentation as much as storytelling. Th e archival approach adopted in the present book is distinct from, yet complements, valuable studies on the literary and aesthetic dimensions of medieval Islamicate historiography, in which intelligible if porous lines are drawn, in Bauer’s terminology, between pragmatic texts that address real-worldly issues and literary texts that are aesthetically driven and polyvalent within diverse contexts. 10 Th is book engages the reader in an epistemic journey of discovering the deeper value of the chronicle as an archive, and as a narrative-documentary record of historical and historiographical developments. In this process, the methodologies of archival studies off er a more crisp and compelling elucidation of the quasidocumentary and commemorative aspects of medieval Arabic historical writing as a practice devoted to supporting and creating memory, in Friedrich’s terms, and to ‘eternalizing’ the past, than has oft en been appreciated. 11 Th ese aims are achieved by authors like Ibn al-Fur ā t through a range of specifi c, locatable archival strategies, which I draw the reader’s attention to in later chapters.
Mamluk chronicles as documentary narratives
Drawing from the comprehensive defi nition of ‘archive’ off ered above, a key aspect of identifying the archivality of medieval Arabic chronicles is scrutiny of the evidentiary nature of historical texts that off er – separately or simultaneously – both documentary and narrative material. Moving from a general defi nition of the archive to the medieval Islamicate, this book draws on recent works that re-evaluate the nature and role of medieval Islamic archives, in particular the position formulated by Konrad Hirschler that the Mamluk archive is not merely ‘a stable spatial entity and a product, but rather a multifaceted set of processes spread across the Mamluk realm’. 12 More specifi cally, I off er a micro-historical reading of Ibn al-Fur ā t’s account of late Fatimid rule to demonstrate the key argument posited by Paulo Sartori that narrative sources can be treated as documentary material, for several reasons. One is that authorial manipulations are widely employed in genres conventionally separated as ‘documentary’ or ‘narrative’, so as to render the typological distinction between them dubious; a second reason is that historical texts oft en perform as evidence of past actions. Th us the presumption that ‘documents alone can serve as evidences, whereas narrative/literary sources should be relegated to the sphere of fi ction’, is ‘highly problematic and in urgent need of revision’. 13 Ibn al-Furat’s chronicle reproduces documents, but is also a documentaryarchival resource in itself.
An archival turn in Mamluk letters
The Mamluk era witnessed a turn towards archivality in administration and letters, as mapped by Hirschler, that wielded great infl uence on Mamluk historiography. 14 Within chronicles, the drive to create historical records for commemorative and ‘identityformation’ purposes, that is, to map the contours of past and present society, and to locate noteworthy individuals and communities within them, stood as a counterweight to the social and political turbulence of Burji Mamluk urban elite life as recorded in the annalistic chronicles of Ibn al-Fur ā t, Ibn Khald ū n, al-Maqr ī zi and a host of others. Th e two latter historians had deep and personal experience of this turbulence, during careers in which they were appointed to and dismissed from a variety of highly visible religio-legal positions in the state. A prominent characteristic of Mamluk urban life was the coexistence of social dynamism and precarity, attributable in part to the ruling military–civilian elite’s massive investment in civic and intellectual institutions such as the madrasa, coupled with a penchant for confi scations and other fi nancial depredations expressive of ‘despotism, mismanagement and cruelty’. 15 With upward (or downward) mobility came a volatility oft en prevalent in scholarly professions as much as in sultanic or lower-level politics in civilian and military spheres. A range of fourteenth- and fi ft eenthcentury chronicles off ered an unfolding register of economic fl uctuations, religio-legal controversies, environmental anomalies and domestic or foreign political developments and disputes. 16 Historiography in this context, chronicles alongside the biographical dictionaries, could off er a space for critique, for social-cum-intellectual catharsis in a positivist vein, yet also operated as a bulwark against lack of security, including the loss of books and documents, with archivality as its salient modus operandiTh e prism of archive allows us to understand not just historiography in new ways but also broader trends in epistemology. Th us the study of medieval Arabic historiography promises to be invigorated by a more recent ‘archival turn’ in the study of history, which is multidisciplinary, global and explained and practised by a range of scholars of, inter alia, the Near Eastern and European pasts: Paulo Sartori, Markus Friedrich, Filippo de Vivo, Maria Pia Donato, Konrad Hirschler, Shannon McSheff rey and Tamer el-Leithy among others. 18 Th is up-and-coming mode of enquiry encompasses several founding axioms, including a recognition of the contingent and subjective nature of archives of every variety, scrutiny of the conditions that shape the creation of archives, and a move away from the concept of the archive as a necessarily fi xed spatial entity towards emphasis on archival practices that suff use the epistemic environments of many premodern societies, whether in the production of documents or in other modes of record-keeping. My argument uses Ibn al-Fur ā t’s history to demonstrate that Arabic chronicles should be read as archives in themselves. In the Mamluk era, they were a vital form of documentation, repositories of shared (though not necessarily settled) memories of an oft en contested past and a unique means for the consciencedriven self-examination of literate communities in the premodern Arabophone world. In these books, irrespective of their size or stated focus, the authorial agencies of representing society, appraising hegemonic conduct, positing ideals, grinding personal axes and apportioning censure or praise could be exercised freely. 19
Capturing epistemic moments in Islamic history
Conversely, the archival reading model adopted in this book pushes against the limits of reading medieval Arabic chronicles as tendentious narratives devised mainly for the pursuit of various religio-political causes. While some excellent studies have used chronicles to illuminate, for example, Mamluk socio-political dynamics eff ectively, there is also wide scope for examining in detail how chronicles refl ect both the politics of their world and its vigorous, adaptable and catholic epistemic values. 20 Arabic historical texts can and should be read as radically revealing knowledge archives that capture epistemic moments in Islamic history: points in time for which the state of historical and historiographical knowledge can be charted and evaluated via scrutiny of the archival practices of their authors, as applied to a variety of source texts. In these epistemic moments, the archive concept is more than simply a trope, for it off ers a hermeneutic framework with potentially wide applicability across various forms of historiography. Th is approach has been hinted at, and even obliquely pursued in some previous studies, in relation to the so-called Syrian school of historiography as a ‘register of Muslim religious learning’, and in regard to biographical dictionaries as ‘comparable to the role of documentary sources in other traditions’, in which they attest ‘those informal relationships between individuals that secured the stability of Middle Eastern societies’. 21 In the present study, the primary focus is on the chronicle as a narrative and archival form, with additional reference to biographical monographs and administrative works from the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk eras that subsume and incorporate historical accounts
New light on archival practices in the Mamluk chronicle
In re-evaluating Mamluk chronicles as archives recording valuable streams of knowledge, the analytical approach of this book builds initially upon Donald Little’s micro-historical exploratory method of comparing historical accounts, an approach especially suited to the study of writing in general and archives in particular. 22 Little’s aims are threefold: to draw out variations in Mamluk reports, similarities between them and establish a ‘repertorium’ of sources for particular epochs of history. 23 While incorporating these benefi cial aims, I add as my principal objective the identifi cation of the specifi c archival practices of Ibn al-Fur ā t, notably his gathering, prioritizing and rearranging of source material on late Fatimid history in Ta’r ī kh al-duwal , with concerns of conservation, ease of reading, retrievability and space management very much in mind. Th rough this inductive analysis, the ultimate desiderata are a clearer picture of, fi rst, the archival function of historiography as it is operationalized in steps and stages; and second, the tangible spatial epistemic archive (or repertorium, in Little’s wording) in book form that results from this archival activity. Th is archive transmits material onwards to further chronicles qua archives, but remains in itself a repository of previously created records for present and future pedagogic, heuristic and recreational use. Th e uptake of material from Ibn al-Fur ā t’s repository and its contribution to further chronicle-archives is a theme explored in Chapter 2
Epistemology or confession: Th e priorities of the Mamluk historian
While pursuing dual aims of identifying and glossing both archive and archival practices, the textual analysis at the heart of this study alternates between descriptive and analytical modes in order to elucidate Ibn al-Fur ā t’s method of discrimination between the sources (archival hierarchization), to ascertain the breadth of authorities he presses into service for each section (epistemic scope) and to appraise how much Fatimid-era material was available to him or his sources in each instance (archivality as conservation). In a departure from what a recent study of medieval Arabic authorship termed a ‘polyphony’ of texts characterized by ‘double or multiple hermeneutic layers, multiply hidden authors, and authors in disguise’, 24 Ibn al-Fur ā t’s preference in Ta’r ī kh al-duwal is to keep his informants’ voices clear, separate and ideologically measurable. In this, he presents an alternative, if not a challenge, to the verdict proposed by Bernard Lewis and taken up by Michael Brett that the post-Fatimid Arabic literature on the Fatimids is ‘highly apologetic, highly polemical in character, for and against the dynasty’s religious and political claims’. 25 Furthermore, in reading Ibn al-Fur ā t’s chronicle as a register also of socio-political and intellectual attitudes, his privileging of epistemic concerns over confessional ones comes to the fore, a point I return to later in this study. Th e Mamluk historians’ eff orts to rebuild and synthesize Fatimid historiographical archivalia (a body of texts surveyed in Chapter 3), which forms the backdrop to Ibn al-Fur ā t’s account of late Fatimid history, is an understudied phenomenon. For earlier phases of Fatimid Isma‘ilism, signifi cant textual work in the areas of the collation, edition and analysis of reports and chronicles has been carried out by A. F. Sayyid, M. Brett and H. Halm among others. 26 Overall, however, recent scholarship has paid scant attention to Fatimid-era historical accounts as they appear in later works. Th is is less attributable to a lack of interest in the subject than it is to the demands upon scholarly attention made by the contemporary history recorded in vast Ayyubid- and Mamlukera compilations, not all of which have been published, and also to the fact that Fatimid historiography presents today’s historian with an intriguing if rather knotty challenge. We have, on the one hand, ample material evidence attesting the Fatimids’ dramatic and precipitous political ascent, which has engendered a substantial body of scholarship, for ‘what is at stake is not the history of a marginal religious group in a peripheral area, but rather a centrally important, prolonged chapter in the history of Islam, with profound consequences for what came aft erwards’. 27 On the other hand, the physical traces attesting the Fatimids’ development of Egypt and its culture, in the forms of architecture, epigraphy, numismatics, glass weights, textiles embroidered with writing ( ṭ ir ā z ) and objets d’art , off er but a skeletal outline of socio-political history at most, supplemented with sporadic atomistic insights. 28 For the wider trajectory of Fatimid rule in Egypt, and crucially, for its detail, we are reliant on reconstructions off ered by Ayyubid and Mamluk chroniclers, including Ibn al-Fur ā t. 29 Th us we are, in many ways, like Ibn al-Fur ā t’s contemporary Ibn Khald ū n, ‘at the mercy of the akhb ā r ’. 30 However, given the multiplicity of earlier sources available to both authors, this is not an unhappy dependency, especially in light of the paradox expressed by al-Maqr ī z ī , who suggests in the Itti‘ ā ẓ that Egyptian books on the Fatimid caliphate were hard to fi nd, even if both his Itti‘ ā ẓ and his Khi ṭ a ṭ , like Ibn al-Fur ā t’s Ta’r ī kh al-duwal , subvert his argument and bear witness to the richness of the source base for the Fatimids available to the historians of their era and earlier. 31 Th at the present-day scholar has little or no independent access to most of these works is the real cause for regret.
Th e chapters and appendices of this book
As far as research priorities go, in 1995, Ulrich Haarmann argued convincingly that ‘hardly anything is … more urgent in Mamluk studies than the systematic exploration of the literary (prose) writings of Mamluk authors’, and to date, key aspects of historiography remain unexplored in the depth they deserve. 32 Th is study of Ibn al-Fur ā t’s chronicle fi ts squarely into that endeavour. Th e operationalization of the archival approach forms a main theme of Chapter 1 that follows, which also contemplates the prospects and limits of present-day research into medieval Arabic historiography, chronicle writing in particular. I begin by delineating, briefl y, the epistemic environment in which Ibn al-Fur ā t produced his account of late Fatimid history, then examine in more depth the elucidatory potential of the archival approach for re-framing historiography as documentation. Th is naturally engenders a discussion of the implications of the archival reading model for a hitherto largely fi xed separation of ‘narratives’ and ‘documents’ in contemporary scholarship. Th e further strands of this chapter encompass the contribution of the archival approach to a fi eld still marked by traces of an ‘authenticity’ debate in reading medieval Arabic sources, and the modes in which archivality is a necessary complement to, indeed component of, the encyclopaedism of Mamluk literary production In Chapter 2, I introduce the archive, that is, Ibn al-Fur ā t’s chronicle as a set of codices carrying material signs of archivality. I then pursue the elusive details of the author’s life and evaluate his place within the intellectual culture of Mamluk Cairo and (to a lesser extent) Damascus, while tracing the clandestine infl uence of his chronicle on contemporary and later historical texts, those of his peers as well as successors including Ibn Khald ū n and especially al-Maqr ī z ī . What I fi nd is that the later (nearcontemporary) sections of Ibn al-Fur ā t’s chronicle are ubiquitous in more ‘celebrated’ accounts, but he is rarely if ever named. Chapter 3 audits the extent of historiographical and documentary production in late Fatimid Egypt, in order to evaluate the range of potential archivalia that Ibn al-Fur ā t and other post-Fatimid authors could draw on to populate their chronicle-archives. Chapter 4 sets the scene in historiographical terms for a move from broader arguments to the minutiae of Ibn al-Furat’s text, and is followed by two chapters that off er detailed analyses of Ibn al-Fur ā t’s accounts of the late Fatimid vizierate and caliphate, as compared with more than a dozen earlier, contemporary and later sources, chosen according to methodological criteria outlined in Chapter 4. Th e seventh and fi nal chapter indicates the broader implications of this research for our understanding of medieval Islamic archivalities. Th e three appendices provide textual and contextual information that, it is hoped, will help to pinion the archival argument to specifi c texts. Appendix A indexes the range of historical sources archived by Ibn al-Fur ā t for late Fatimid history. Appendix B provides a diplomatic edition 33 of unique extracts from Ibn al-Fur ā t’s narrative on Fatimid historical events – that is, sections of text that are not available elsewhere in modern editions of works that are used by Ibn al-Fur ā t. Lastly, Appendix C off ers an English translation of those extracts. Taken together, the chapters and appendices of the present book aim to pursue fi ve components of an analytical matrix for archival study as delineated by Friedrich: the material/spatial aspects of the archive, in this case the archive of historiography; its modes of organization; its intended uses; the epistemic environment in which the archive plays a role and the connections between archival practice and conceptions of history and memorialization. 34 Th e fortuitous survival of Ibn al-Fur ā t’s chronicle presents contemporary historians with both a wellspring of rich material and an ideal resource for deeper archival– historiographical enquiry.
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