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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Camilo Álvarez de Morales is a senior researcher at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Granada. He is a specialist in Islamic medicine and works extensively with the documents and archives of post-conquest Morisco Granada. He is the author of many publications in these areas.
Anne Boud’hors is a research fellow at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, section Grecque, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). With a background in Classics, she works on the cataloguing and editing of Coptic manuscripts and documents. Her main fields of interest are Biblical texts, the sermons of Shenoute, codicology and ostraca. She also teaches Coptic at various institutions. Gladys Frantz-Murphy teaches Middle Eastern History at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, USA. Her research and publications are focused on state formation in early Islamic Egypt based on correlation of the earliest Arabic narrative sources from Egypt with contemporary Arabic papyrus documentation. Her most recent publication is Arabic Agricultural Leases and Tax Receipts from Egypt 148–427 A.H./765–1035 A.D. (Vienna: Brüder Hollinek, 2001).
Alia Hanafi is professor of papyrology at {Ain Shams University Cairo. She is the former director of the Centre of Papyrological Studies and Inscriptions at {Ain Shams University and is the author of numerous publications dealing with Greek and Arabic papyrology. Robert Hoyland was formerly research fellow at St. Johns’ College, Oxford, from 1994–2001, and is currently Reader and Chair of the Department of Middle East Studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland. He is the author of Seeing Islam as Others Saw it (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997) and Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (London: Routledge, 2001) and of sundry articles on Arabic epigraphy and the history and material culture of the Late Antique and Early Islamic Near East.
Maria del Carmen Jiménez Mata is lecturer in Semitic studies at the University of Granada. She specializes in the administrative and geographical history of Granada during the Muslim period, and is the coauthor (with Emilio Molina) of Documentos árabes del Archivo Municipal de Granada (1481–1499) (Granada: Ayuntamiento de Granada, 2004). Geoffrey Khan is professor of Semitic philology at Cambridge University and a fellow of the British Academy. He has published widely in Hebrew grammatical thought, medieval Arabic documents, and modern Aramaic dialects, and is the author, among others, of Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Bills, Letters and Deeds: Arabic Papyri of the Seventh-Eleventh Centuries (Oxford University Press, 1993). Eduardo Manzano (M.A. SOAS, London; Ph.D. Universidad Complutense) is a senior researcher at the institute of history at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid. His books include: Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006), La frontera de al-Andalus en época de los Omeyas (Madrid: CSIC, 1991) and Historia de las sociedades musulmanas en la Edad Media (Madrid: CSIC, 1993).
Alex Metcalfe is lecturer in history at Lancaster University and the author of Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily (Routledge: London, 2003). He is currently collaborating on a new critical edition of the royal grants of lands and men made to the church of Monreale in Sicily which were written in Arabic, Greek and Latin between 1178 and 1183. Emilio Molina López is professor of Semitic studies at the University of Granada. He specialises in the Islamic institutions of al-Andalus, as well as in economic history of western Islamic countries. He is the coauthor (with Maria del Carmen Jiménez Mata) of Documentos árabes del Archivo Municipal de Granada (1481–1499) (Granada: Ayuntamiento de Granada, 2004). Petra M. Sijpesteijn completed her Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University and is currently a junior research fellow in Oriental Studies at Christ Church, Oxford. Her forthcoming book is entitled The Formation of a Muslim State: The World of an Early Muslim Egyptian Administrator. She is currently working on a rural history of Egypt during the first two centuries of Muslim rule. Sofía Torallas Tovar gained her Ph.D. in Classical philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at University College London (1997–2000). She is currently a permanent research fellow at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid and is also the curator of the papyrus collection at the Abbey of Montserrat, Barcelona.
Frank R. Trombley is reader in religious studies at Cardiff University where he teaches Byzantine and early Islamic history. His research deals with the expansion and decline of Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean and war and society in the early medieval Near East. He published Hellenic Religion and Christianization c. 370–529 A.D. 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1993–1994). Francisco Vidal Castro is lecturer in Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Jaén. Holding a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Granada, he specialises in Islamic law as applied in al-Andalus, focusing on water rights, land tenure and irrigation systems, in both urban and rural spheres. Amalia Zomeño is a research fellow at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes in Granada. She holds a Ph.D. in Arabic philology from Barcelona University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University (1998– 2000). The main topic of her research is Islamic law, and she is currently working on different collections of Arabic documents and manuscripts in Spain.
INTRODUCTION
Eduardo Manzano Moreno
The past is a landscape of darkness. As human experience is devoured by the black hole of time, its echoes dwindle into those small fragments of memory that we usually call “historical evidence.” Such fragments shed some light into the night of oblivion but, as any historian knows, this light can be bright or pale, dazzling or reflective, depending on what the sources tell us and what we can make out of them. At best, evidence adds up to discrete pieces of information that can be related to each other, allowing us to draw some illuminating although partial historical interpretations. But in other cases, the picture is rather gloomier, as if confirming the assertion of that ancient Greek poet’s verse which regarded human beings as mere dreams of shadows. These are the periods in which historical evidence is no more than a conglomerate of sundry textual and material remains, which defy simple explanations and even prevent certain sets of historical questions. The historian’s task becomes then an endeavour which is not very different from weaving: threads have to be followed, tracked as far as possible and finally linked within a comprehensive fabric that sometimes, though, may have too many holes in it. Islamic history unfortunately has plenty of such difficult periods. Too often the historian who is engaged in elucidating them has at his disposal only a disparate bunch of narratives on political or military events, which provide a wide range of names, anecdotes, rebellions or battles taking place in an opaque context of poorly understood social and economic circumstances. These narratives are not only intentional, and therefore biased, but also the product of a long process of memory-shaping and reshuffling which we do not always wholly understand. How to use such murky lamps for attaining knowledge of complex societies extending across broad territories has been the subject of a good number of historiographical controversies, which have confronted positions ranging from the sceptical attitude towards what are labelled as “inconsistent” or “useless” bites of evidence, to more positive approaches which consider that a critical acceptance of these medieval Islamic sources may lead to sound, or at least coherent, historical interpretations. Both opinions share, though, the idea that the nature of our evidence is somewhat fragile, that we depend too much on a limited number of narrative accounts and that description supersedes explanation on more occasions than it would be desirable in the history of medieval Muslim societies. All this explains why the contributions gathered in this volume are so important and relevant. They focus on an exceptional sort of evidence: documents from the Islamic Middle Ages, written records witnessing a given action, transaction or exaction which was valued as worth being noted down by those involved in it with the aim of preserving its recollection and effects in the future. The relative scarcity of these documents for the medieval Muslim world make of them precious primary sources, particularly valued because of their radical contemporaneity to the people who took part in their formulation.
This feature gives them a flavour of immediacy that would be impossible to find in historical narratives, most of which were composed many years or even centuries after the events they attempted to describe. This confers on these documents the quality of scattered and unexpected shinings, sudden beams, which cast light on concrete spots, on concrete characters or on concrete circumstances which can be apprehended as frozen and fragmented scenes apparently recognisable against a misty background full of uncertainties. Many documents presented and analysed in this volume are unedited and see the light of publication for the first time. They have very different chronological and geographical origins, but all of them share in common their capacity to reflect those social and economic dealings which the accounts of the chroniclers usually overlook, or which the speculative nature of Muslim juridical works makes it difficult to assess. Many people die in the narratives of the historical sources, whereas treatises of law never fail to include solid chapters on partitions of legacies. However, it is not until we examine a specific will bequeathed by a testator that we begin to understand what economic implications this act had, how it was carried out and how it contributed to reproducing the existing social order.
Taxes and, more generally, the control of resources, were the main reasons behind many struggles for power which are described by the dozens in the available chronicles, but it is impossible to grasp how fiscal exaction was organized or what were its effects upon the daily lives of the tax-payers unless we read the documents produced by the efficient tax-raising machine which medieval Islamic states always managed to set up in one way or another. As sudden bites of written reality, documents reveal a short-lived instant of life, but this xviii eduardo manzano moreno is an instant which gathers some of the relations, tensions and contradictions prevalent in the social milieu that produced them. It is not only the valuable new evidence which the different contributions offer to specialists, that makes this volume significant. Once the reader has finished reviewing its fascinating and novel contents, there is no doubt that he or she will find him or herself asking the nagging question that underlies many of its pages: why have medieval Islamic societies left such a relatively small quantity of documentary evidence, particularly if we compare them with their western counterparts? Medieval Christian documents have come down to us because there was a certain availability of writing materials, because there were an increasing number of people with enough skills as to allow them to compose and decipher such documents, because these documents were preserved in safe locations and were deemed important by those who held them and, finally, because the social milieu had an appreciation for their contents which justified their safeguarding throughout countless spring cleanings, removals or deteriorations caused by natural elements.
Were Muslim societies so different that these factors were absent or widely ignored in them? The question is critical. It is a commonplace to describe Islamic culture as dominated by orality. The whole framework of the transmission of knowledge is even portrayed as based on personal contacts, as illustrated by the spread of Prophetic traditions through chains of successive transmitters. Early Muslim dogma was shaped by the contents of the Revelation gathered in the written verses of the QurxÊn, but also by the dense network of masters and students who expanded the sunna of the Prophet talking to each other. Even important early written works were not ‘published’ in the modern sense of the word, but rather went through a number of different recensions, which were the product of different transmissions in a variety of places. Texts certainly existed and circulated, but it is commonly agreed that the Islamic theory of knowledge stressed the spoken more than the written word—which was reserved for the Book containing the Revelation—as the rhetoric means which created the basic consensus among the Community of Believers. The supposed prevalence of orality in Muslim societies also finds support in the importance given by Islamic law to witnesses and oaths in the resolution of disputes. Legal Muslim practice seems to have been more inclined to accept this kind of testimonies than written records when proof was needed in trial before the qÊÓÒs. Again, the idea is that although documents may have existed, they played a subsidiary role introduction xix which never matched the oral hearings and the depositions taken from reputable men under oath. If such was the prevailing mood in the legal arena—the argument goes—it is then small wonder that in medieval Muslim societies documentary evidence never reached the prominent character it acquired in the West, at least until a relatively late date. For the advocates of this notion, it is apparently easy to link the pervasiveness of oral culture with the original tribal milieu within which Islam was born.
The idea is that in such surroundings, social dealings had an ‘informal’ character which prevented the emergence of more ‘official’ formal interactions. Ties of kinship bound people more than dozens of clauses inscribed on legal documents, whereas observance of the unwritten rules which made up the tribal codes of honour meant stronger compromises than any penalty sanctioned by the pre-emptive sections of written agreements. Quite naturally, Islam absorbed these existing features of Arab tribal society and integrated them into a social and political culture, which certainly had solid textual references, but nevertheless was keen to articulate itself on the basis of informal bonds, which did not require the endorsement of documentary provisos. The contributions collected in this volume add a whole array of new evidence, which compels one to revise—or at least to look at them from a different perspective—these notions. All of them show that from a very early date Arab society relied heavily on documents not only as means to present and represent itself, but also as instruments of social control. The organization of the fiscal system, the appointment and removal of governors or the transfer of armies from one territory to another were regular events mentioned in narrative sources which would have been impossible to carry out without the writing and forwarding of countless documents carrying orders from one place to another. Take, for instance, the two papyri presented by Petra M. Sijpesteijn in her work: one of them dates from the second/eighth century, whereas the other is dated in the next century. But the contents of both of them display a similar familiarity with the written record as an instrument of communication among tax and legal officials of the administration: people who exchanged views on particular problems because they could write and read, were engaged with documents on a daily basis and belonged to a sophisticated state machinery which could only be run on the basis of a careful upkeep of countless records. Documents were part of everyday life in places like Egypt. One needed them just to survive in a land tightly dominated by the administration, as shown by the very early papyri gathered by Anne Boud’hors in her xx eduardo manzano moreno contribution.
The obsession of that administration was to develop effective means to control the comings and goings of a population whose exact location had to be always assessed in order to prevent that nightmare of caliphal officials called “fiscal evasion.” Passports, communications among officials or censuses were written down as effective means to impose strict control upon the population, which was effectively listed with the careful annotation of the amounts due by each subject, as the paper document from tenth century FayyÖm edited by Sofía Torallas clearly demonstrates. A good indicator of the machinery’ efficiency is the number of complaints that arose from ecclesiastical writers living under Muslim rule and in this connection testimonies like that of the Ps.-SawÒrus b. al-Muqaffa{ in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria are particularly interesting, because many circumstances described in this work can effectively be connected to actual evidence from existing papyri, as Frank R. Trombley clearly demonstrates in his contribution. That the early Arab empire depended heavily on documents for its administration is further confirmed by the fascinating evidence coming from second/eighth century Abbasid Khurasan examined by Geoffrey Khan. The Egyptian papyri can no longer be regarded as exceptional items from an exceptional province, as these new findings demonstrate that in the lands of modern-day Afghanistan tax officials under the authority of the local governor issued quittances for the receipt of taxes or conducted cadastral surveys which were written down on parchment. The fact that these documents show some formulaic elements which are similar to those present in their Egyptian counterparts again points to a tendency towards administrative uniformity that can only be explained as a factor of consolidation of an empire in which a well-established bureaucratic practice reached all its corners.
This practice was in the hands of officials, who probably got successive appointments in different provinces thus contributing to spread sets of common procedures. One of these procedures concerned the authentication of documents—indirectly demonstrating that written forgeries were a problem—as shown by the bullae attached to the Khurasan documents which were stamped with clay seals. On the other end of the territories affected by the Arab expansion, al-Andalus’ governors first issued lead seals which were used to confirm their orders in the aftermath of the conquest (92/711). It remains, however, to be explained how the Arab conquerors managed to set up such a sophisticated administrative system so soon after their expansion. The most common explanation portrays them as the tribal rulers of a huge empire who profited from pre-existing structures introduction xxi which they adapted to their own demands. In her contribution, Gladys Frantz-Murphy points in this direction when she stresses the collaboration of the Coptic church in the running of the fiscal administration in Egypt in the years following the conquest. A more centralized system was implemented in the late Umayyad period, when the Muslim elite attached to the dynasty took control of the province and its resources. Finally, the coming of the Abbasids was signalled by the appointment of Persian officials who introduced new sets of practices which culminated a process of increasing centralization.
This revealing interpretation shows how an important province like Egypt was integrated into the empire of the Arabs. What is interesting is that the conquerors were never entangled in the administrative machinery which controlled the lands they were ruling; instead, they were capable of imposing their language and their practices over a vast empire made up of territories with very different traditions. For a people who were supposedly unfamiliar with the intricacies of state-government this was not a small achievement by any means and perhaps it should be better explained than it has been until now. One way of tackling this question is by following the approach that Robert Hoyland presents in his contribution investigating the emergence of a distinctive Arab identity among the different peoples of the Near East at least two hundred years before the coming of Islam. Drawing mainly on epigraphic evidence, Hoyland demonstrates an increasing sense of belonging to well-defined Arab groups at least from the third or fourth century C.E., to the point of suggesting that these groups may have had a clear consciousness of sharing a common language, script, history and literary tradition.
This identity grew in tandem with the intensification of contacts with the neighbouring empires, particularly the Roman, which fostered formal alliances with groups increasingly aware not only of their importance for the military strategy of the emperors, but also of their distinctive character vis-à-vis other groups which were not so highly regarded or rewarded by imperial officials. According to this view, the eruption of Islam and, particularly, the military expansion which followed should be considered as hallmarks—obviously of paramount importance—in a process of ethnogenesis which was already in progress and which paved the way for the definition and articulation of the empire which emerged after the conquests. It remains to be seen, however, how these identities were knitted together and to what extent written culture, which would articulate the administration of the empire after the Arab conquests, played a role on it. If we could confirm that xxii eduardo manzano moreno such was the case, the recurrent idea of the lack of familiarity of the Arabs with the written document would have to be radically revised. But if there is growing evidence which shows that the early Arab empire depended heavily on documents and that written culture was not so alien to the conquerors as has been widely believed, why is it that we have comparatively fewer documents from Umayyad Syria than from, say, Merovingian or Carolingian France?
What has prevented the survival of the Islamic equivalents to cartulae or capitularia? How do we explain the disappearance of the thousands of records which were necessary to regulate the complex administration of such huge territories? Where have they ended up, the contracts, obligations and agreements that supposedly were written down? One possible—and, arguably, too easy—explanation for their scarcity would be to suggest that the political turmoil which throughout history has affected the lands of the Near East and North Africa had devastating consequences for the written memories of these societies. No territory was free of rebellions, wars, dynastic changes or foreign invasions and these events always went together with serious disruptions and destruction. There is nothing more vulnerable than records, because once their order and logic established through conservation are thrown into disarray, their single components becomes useless and, therefore, disposable. The takeover of a city, the occupation of a palace, or the sudden arrival of new administrators into bureaucratic workrooms probably entailed on many occasions a general destruction of documents. Sometimes this destruction may have been consciously carried out by the new rulers or by followers with a vested interest in breaking with the past, but in other cases new administrative practices or contempt for the old rule were perhaps responsible for the neglect and final elimination of previously highly valued records. As plausible and coherent as it may seem, though, it is obvious that this interpretation does not offer an adequate explanation for the lack of a consistent documentary record from medieval Islamic societies.
It implies that political or military havoc always resulted in administrative breakdown, an overall assumption that simply cannot be generalized. Continuity and rupture in Islamic medieval politics is a broad and appealing topic that perhaps deserves more attention than has hitherto received; but nevertheless one is inclined to believe that the most common practice of new regimes or dynasties was the incorporation within their ranks of existing bureaucratic personnel as the setting up of a reshuffled administration was a difficult and costly endeavour. The introduction xxiii history of medieval Islamic societies may have been complex and eventful, but this does not necessarily mean that the documentary record was irreversibly affected by its action-packed episodes. Therefore, if there is a comprehensive explanation for the relative lack of documents from medieval Islamic societies the answer must lay elsewhere. In this connection, perhaps the relevant question is not so much why the historical legacy of western Europe is plenty of documents, but rather where this legacy has been preserved until the present day. This is certainly a more illuminating perspective: although we do not have all the documents which were written down in the western Middle Ages—just a fraction of them—the important thing is that such fragile evidence has survived during hundreds of years in long-lasting, old and venerable institutions which have reached the contemporary world with a considerable part of their documents conveniently stored and even classified. It is very important to bear this in mind, because sometimes historians tend to think that historical evidence has been preserved just in order to satisfy their needs. This has hardly been the case, at least until relatively recent times. Documents were accumulated, filed and looked after throughout the centuries because their contents were considered useful by certain institutions which claimed to have deep historical roots and were ready to use such roots as proof of their legitimacy.
That was, for instance, the case of the Church, which is the main provider of documents during the early medieval centuries and arguably the biggest repository of written records in western Europe. When monasteries, abbeys or bishoprics became extensive and durable landholders, documents which allowed them to substantiate these claims had to be safeguarded and eventually produced as a safeguard against future disputes. As the bishops gathered at a council in Visigothic Spain in 633 had acutely declared, the Church was considered as “a proprietress that will never die” a proclamation that implied a consciousness of eternal dominion that scribes working in numerous scriptoria across Europe were ready to corroborate. The documents they wrote and which bore witness to economic and social dealings like land transactions, payments of peasants’ dues or pious donations helped to build the historical record of ecclesiastical institutions with a clear consciousness of their perpetuity and with a formidable readiness to build their own and undisputed memory. Other medieval lay institutions in the West followed identical procedures, although at a later date: royal chancelleries, parliaments, courts of law, town councils, guilds, etc. built up their distinctive identities and xxiv eduardo manzano moreno legitimacies on the basis of a strong self-definition, which defied the boundaries of time by producing and collecting documents which were considered to be links of a continuous chain bearing a recognisable past but also a vocation to last into the future. By the end of the Middle Ages, this sense of continuity was so widespread that even noble families began to keep their own archives. As a result of this a widespread model emerged which was based on the idea that to maintain current social and economic privileges it was necessary to preserve the written historical memory provided by documents. As in most cases this pre-eminence reached the modern era largely intact, so did the documents which justified it, thus allowing professional historians to make a living thanks to the hundreds and thousands of documents that these ecclesiastical or lay institutions had been producing and storing for centuries. In sharp contrast with these situations, medieval Islamic societies did not foster institutions of this kind.
The rejection of Islamic law of the creation of privileged spheres within the Community of Believers was one of the factors which prevented the emergence of social, economic and political organizations with their own distinctive rules and regulations. It is a commonplace to state that in Islam, contrary to what happened in Christendom, there was no centralized institution comparable to the Church. But this lack was not unique and it affected other social realms. Thus, Islamic cities did not develop bodies of government like the councils or the municipal authorities which mushroomed everywhere in medieval Europe; Islamic states did not hierarchise territories in the way that counties, ducates or margravates did in the Western landscapes; Muslim artisans or traders did not create such strong organizations as were the urban guilds of the Western late Medieval Ages. If there is a clear trait that distinguishes East and West in the Middle Ages, it is the very formal aspect that European institutions acquired in this period and which was missing in their Eastern counterparts. This does not mean, obviously, that there were not Islamic institutions: cities were certainly governed and organized, states administered their territories efficiently and urban classes were a factor to be reckoned with in the day-to-day running of urban communities. But the important thing is that these associations, bodies of government and political organizations never had the kind of formalised corporate existence found in their European equivalents. Whereas these achieved a degree of consolidation, formalization and self-consciousness, which helped to mould the complex political situations of modernity, the Islamic institutions took a more imprecise profile, a less clear definition and a matter-of-factness introduction xxv which, curiously, resulted in a very informal configuration. This difference also marked distinctive perceptions of history.
Western European institutions generated documents because they were essential parts of their raison d’être. As fundamental pieces for the creation of an historical memory of the institution, these documents proclaimed that the preservation of the past could provide useful arguments for the articulation of the present. This does not seem to have been the case in Islamic societies, where history never played such an important role as other arguments of legitimacy, like divine sanction or moral standing did. Therefore, if Islamic societies did not fare very well in the conservation of records, this was not due in my opinion to the persistence of ancient tribal hang-ups or to the prevalence of a culture based on orality or to a consicous neglect of useless instruments. Written records disappeared en masse because they could not find their way to the appropriate repositories: institutions with a vested interest in preserving the memory enclosed in them. This has entailed that the shreds of documentary evidence which have come down to us are more the result of stray finds or lucky unearthing than of their patient collection and keeping throughout the centuries in specific places which have survived more or less intact up to the present day. In this connection the case of al-Andalus is extremely significant. The documentary record of this western Islamic society is practically non-existent: we simply lack Umayyad, Taifa, Almoravid or Almohad documents, in sharp contrast with the evidence coming from northern Christian kingdoms which consists of thousands of written deeds eagerly kept in ecclesiastical institutions at least from the ninth century onwards and which gradually increased in the central Middle Ages, as lay and royal institutions consolidated. Were the Andalusis less familiar with the written record than their northern neighbours? It is hard to believe so. Notarial culture in tenth century Cordoba and other cities was extremely sophisticated as shown by the thick compilations of legal formulae that have come down to us, and judging from the number of literary, legal and religious works that have survived it seems unquestionable that literacy was much more widespread in the urban and economically flourishing south than in the rural and impoverished north. Therefore, al-Andalus provides a good example of documentary mass extinction which perhaps was partly caused by political turmoil, internal wars, invasions and reconquistas, but which had a deeper reason in the absence of consolidated institutions reclaiming their privileges in the past and which would have gathered and systematized the bulk of documents produced by Andalusi society.
This is why the contributions gathered in this volume and dealing with this territory are so illuminating. When the NaÉrid kingdom of Granada was conquered, the new Christian lords became very interested in a number of issues like certain rights of property, allocations of water resources or land-divisions. This resulted from a genuine concern for some parts of the documentary legacy of the defeated kingdom, which was partially examined, translated and preserved, as Camilo Álvarez de Morales, Amalia Zomeño and Francisco Vidal Castro show in their respective contributions. The documents presented by these scholars bear witness to a fascinating cross-cultural move, and show how Christian institutions—churches, town councils or the royal chancellery—were eager to preserve them, despite the fact that they referred to a past that was increasingly alien to the curators of these records—as it is clearly shown in Emilio Molina López and María del Carmen Jiménez’s contribution. Exactly the same thing had happened in Sicily more than three centuries before: the decision by Roger II (r. 1130–54) to admit Arabic along with Latin and Greek in his comital diplomata, allowed for the composition of documents which were preserved in regional or church archives where Alex Metcalfe has been busy working on them in order to produce a compelling contribution examining how Arabic texts were translated into Latin and what the effects were of such translations. All in all, the fresh evidence gathered in this volume also points to new lines of research waiting to be followed in the future and whose extreme importance is only proportional to the neglect that scholarship has bestowed upon them. One of these issues is, for instance, the spread of literacy in Islamic medieval societies, as the extension of the written record as a means to articulate social dealings has always been a powerful motive for acquiring reading and writing skills. This general question indirectly addresses the particular problem of who made use of documents in these societies: there is no doubt that states generated a considerable amount of records in their normal administrative practice, as taxes had to be collected, soldiers had to be paid and officials had to communicate among themselves. It remains to be seen, though, whether most of these societies used written instruments in their social relations or rather whether these were restricted to dominant groups; early papyri like the one edited here by Alia Hanafi seem to suggest that at least in places like Egypt, written documents were commonly used by many parts of the population. In this connection, another crucial issue is the legal dimension and value of documents in Islamic law and the existence of legal archives, a problem which still has not been the subject of comprehensive and diachronic studies. Social history badly needs documents. Narratives like those that swamp Arab historical chronicles are not the best tools to understand the deep trends that shape the evolution of societies; at best, such narratives can only reflect certain symptoms, but it is difficult to identify in them the actors and actions bred in the social bone.
In contrast, documents concentrate on specific acts whose leading participants are usually well defined. The problem, though, is that social dynamics can only be grasped in the repetition of certain patterns of collective behaviour. In order to register such reiterations we need series of documents referring to different circumstances but pointing to occurrences of similar social trends. For the reasons already discussed, we lack this sort of documentary series in Islamic medieval societies. Our best documents are isolated fragments of a whole that probably existed in the past, but that now is lost forever. Any historical interpretation drawn from this piecemeal evidence should bear in mind its sketchy character and its possible correlation with an original ensemble that we no longer have. However, this should not prevent historians from using these documents as valid sources for the study of the past. As the bulk of published documents continues to increase, we are able to get a better understanding of how, why and even when they were composed. This will never replace the amount of evidence that has been irremediably lost, but nevertheless it will help to provide a better sense of what the intentions of the social actors were who wrote down those precious texts on papyrus, parchment or paper that have defied the passing of time and have reached the present day. In the pages that follow, the reader will find that these intentions are sometimes clearly apprehensible.
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