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MEDIEVAL ARABIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in thirteenth-century Syria and Egypt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, the study combines approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies and focuses on two well-known texts by Abn Shmma (d. 1268), The Book of the Two Gardens, and Ibn Wmxil (d. 1298), The Dissipater of Anxieties. Both texts describe events during the life of the sultans Nnr al-Dln (d. 1174) and Xalm. al-Dln (d. 1193), who are primarily known as the champions of the anti-Crusade movement. This book shows that the two authors were active interpreters of their societies and had considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social environment and the shaping of their texts. Through the use of a new theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, this book presents an original reading of the texts. Medieval Arabic Historiography provides a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies and is essential reading for those with interests in Middle Eastern Studies and Islamic and Arabic History.
Konrad Hirschler gained his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Kiel, Germany. His main research interests include modern and medieval historiography, as well as social and cultural history.
NOTES ON ROMANIZATION AND TERMINOLOGY
Romanization
Terms commonly used in English, such as amir, caliph, fatwa, imam, Quran, Shiite, sultan, Sunni, Sufism and vizier are reproduced without diacritics and are not formatted in italics. Similarly, proper nouns are never formatted in italics. For those referring to well-known places/regions and dynasties diacritics are omitted, except the letter ^ayn in the beginning, that is Damascus, Cairo, and Syria; ^Abbasids, Fatimids, Zangids, Saljuqs, Ayyubids and Mamluks. Other proper nouns are romanized with full diacritics: al-Jazlra, >arrmn. All other terms from foreign languages are formatted in italics and, if applicable, fully romanized according to the ALA-LC Romanization Tables for Arabic (Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts, approved by the American Library Association and the Library of Congress) with two changes. First, the final inflection of verbs, pronouns, pronominal suffixes and demonstratives is also retained in pause, for example, .aymtuhu wa-^axruhu instead of .aymtuhu wa-^axruh. Second, the ‘h’ for tm 6 marbnya at the end of nouns and adjectives, which are either indefinite or preceded by the definite article, is omitted, for example, madrasa and al-rismla instead of madrasah and al-rismlah. 1 In order to facilitate the text for readers who are not acquainted with Arabic, terms in plural are generally given in the singular form with an English plural, that is, ^mlim/^mlims not ^ulamm 6, .adlth/.adlths not a.mdlth.
References
Primary and secondary sources are referred to in the footnotes with dissimilar systems in order to facilitate a clear differentiation. Primary sources are cited with ‘author, title, page’, for example, Abn Shmma, Dhayl, 50. Secondary sources are cited with ‘author (year), page’, for example, Watt (1968), 86–7. Volume numbers are given in Roman numbers, for example Hodgson (1974), I, 233–40 and al-Xafadl, Wmfl, XVIII, 113–16. Footnotes referring to individuals do not provide all the available primary sources, but only those relevant for the argumentation. Readers looking for a more comprehensive list of the available sources should consult al-Dhahabl’s Ta6rlkh al-islmm, which is indicated whenever a reference exists.
Periodization The terms ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’, which are the terms most currently employed for the period dealt with in this study, are obviously neither neutral in a geographical nor in a chronological sense. For the European context they generally exclude certain regions, such as the Baltic and the Slavic parts, implying distinctively what is perceived to be the centre of Europe. Furthermore, the terms imply clear periods of break, which are mainly linked to the function of the Middle Ages as the scorned or romanticized Other of modernity. Nevertheless, the terms remain widely used, which is probably due to a further – sometimes quite helpful – characteristic: the fuzziness of their exact delimitation in space and time.2 The terms become even more problematic for the region called presently ‘Middle East’. Although the terms are widely used, one finds only rarely reflections on what period of Arab history can be seen as ‘medieval’ and what the characteristics of such a ‘Middle Age’ would be.3 The traditional periodization according to ruling dynasties is not very helpful, although it reflects to a large degree the schemes chosen by medieval Arab historians themselves. It is highly questionable to what degree changes of dynasties marked far-reaching shifts in the society as a whole.4 The widening of the field of history to issues beyond the traditional ‘grand politics’ during the last century renders such a narrowly defined periodization inapplicable for the variety of topics covered. Hodgson has proposed an alternative to the dynasty-based periodization by distinguishing the High Caliphate (until 334/945) from the following Middle Periods.5 While this terminology is not focused too strictly on dynastic changes, it is still mainly based on political developments.
Furthermore, the perception of the cultural sphere, the second factor Hodgson refers to in his discussion besides politics, follows closely the approach of Rise (development of Islam during the first/seventh century), Golden Age (height of the Umayyad and ^Abbasid caliphates until the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries) and Decline (periods thereafter). As it stands, his proposition introduces merely the equivalent for the differentiation between Early, High and Late Middle Ages current for the European context. The employment of the relative neutral centuries, be it according to the Islamic or the Julian/Gregorian calendars, is free of the burdened connotations of the other periodizations. However, their coherent application merely avoids the problem without proposing any substantial alternative. While the use of terms such as ‘medieval’ obliges the author at least to reflect upon his or her understanding of periodization, the employment of ‘neutral’ centuries might lead to a periodization devoid of any analytical value. The only convincing solution for the moment seems to be a combination of the different possibilities. Despite the problems mentioned here I will often define the period I refer to in this study by chronological terms, for example, ‘Arabic historical writing in the seventh/thirteenth century’. This choice is a result of my study being mainly a microstudy of two authors and their texts in a circumscribed period. This means that the study’s results have to be understood within its well-defined temporal framework. Consequently, terms implying a too high degree of generality have to be avoided.
Whenever the terms ‘Medieval’/‘Middle Ages’ are used in this study, they refer to the period from the late fifth/eleventh to the early tenth/sixteenth centuries. Al-Azmeh (1998) shows that for this period the use of these terms with the connotations of transition has certain legitimacy, as the beginnings of Islam were a continuation of developments of late Antiquity. It was only in the later ‘medieval’ periods that most of the characteristic traits of Islamic societies emerged. Hence, it is in the aftermath of the ‘interregnum’ of the Turkic invasions in the fifth/eleventh century and after, that ‘medieval’ becomes a meaningful term for the Arab lands, without having the underlying connotations of Decline in the aftermath of what has been described the Classical or Golden Age. The early tenth/sixteenth century can be seen as a period of fundamental change due to the increasing dominance of the Ottoman Empire throughout the regions of the Middle East. For the first time since the regionalization of power in the late fourth/tenth century nearly all regions were, politically, orientated towards a single centre, Istanbul.
The Ottomans filled, similar to the Safavids and Mughals, the political vacuum left by the two Mongol incursions and the following disintegration of their empires. The rise of the Ottomans was not only relevant on the political level, but also with regard to the use of language. The increased importance of Ottoman Turkish replaced to a certain degree the predominant Arabic, with Ottoman Turkish starting to play a salient role in the Muslim west. Arabic historical writing must therefore be studied after this period in close connection with Ottoman Turkish historical writing and can hardly be considered independently. The periods before the Middle Ages, as defined here, will be called ‘formative’. Contrary to Hodgson’s term ‘High Caliphate’, ‘formative’ period seems to me less connected to the idea of a Golden Age with an implied following Decline. Azmeh’s proposal to term this period ‘late-Antiquity’ seems a valuable proposition, but would demand further research before being employed. The main advantage of the term ‘formative’ is the stress on the ongoing processes in developing distinctive traits in fields such as administration and jurisprudence.
INTRODUCTION
This study reflects on the room for manoeuvre – or the agency – that medieval authors of Arabic historical narratives disposed of in composing their texts. It will therefore ask what the authors’ degree of agency was in composing the works in terms of the social context in which they acted, the learned tradition in which they stood, and the textual environment in which they composed their works. Agency here means: the capacity of socially embedded actors to appropriate, reproduce, and, potentially, to innovate upon received cultural categories and conditions of action in accordance with their personal and collective ideals, interests, and commitments. (Emirbayer/Goodwin (1994), 1442–3) Reflecting on the room for manoeuvre in these different fields requires a detailed analysis of the authors’ social and intellectual contexts and their narratives. As the approach chosen here for studying medieval Arabic historical writing precludes a broad survey of a large number of authors and their texts, I offer a comparative case study by considering two specific examples in depth: Abn Shmma (d. 665/1268) and his Kitmb al-raw,atayn fl akhbmr al-dawlatayn al-Nnrlya wa-al-Xalm.lya (The Book of the Two Gardens on the Reports of the Two Reigns [of Nnr al-Dln and Xalm. al-Dln]) as well as Ibn Wmxil (d. 697/1298) and his Mufarrij al-kurnb fl akhbmr banl Ayynb (The Dissipater of Anxieties on the Reports of the Ayyubids).1 Although the narratives chosen here are important to the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries, they are rather minor texts compared with the ‘grand’ authors generally discussed in surveys of Arabic or Islamic historical writing. Two considerations informed the decision to focus on these two authors and their texts.
First, Ibn Wmxil and Abn Shmma are particularly suitable for comparison, as they both lived in the same period and in the same region. And as their texts also partly deal with the same events, it is possible to analyse how these two Shmfi^ite ^mlims developed, in their outwardly quite similar texts, distinctive versions of their immediate past. In this sense, they are ideal examples of the diversity and complexity of premodern Arabic historical writing. Second, although a study of grand historians and their texts, such as al-Yabarl’s (d. 310/923) Ta6rlkh al-rusul wa-al-mulnk or Ibn Khaldnn’s (d. 808/1406) Kitmb al-^ibar, might have reinforced the notion of these authors’ exceptionality, it is one of the central contentions of this study that even texts of ‘minor’ authors appear as more multi-faceted than previously assumed. The rationale for proposing yet another study of pre-modern Arabic historical writing is that narrative texts still provide the main sources for studying this period: despite increasing diversity in the sources consulted (e.g. architecture and numismatics),2 the relative scarcity of documentary material3 leaves the present-day historian with little choice but to consult narrative texts. In contrast to long periods of European medieval history, these texts are often the only way a given age can be accessed.4 Because narrative texts are so significant to our understanding of the past, it is essential to reflect on how they were produced and what different layers of meaning they contain. The choice of the specific issue treated here – agency – is chiefly a reaction to previous evaluations of medieval Arabic historical writing. In addition to the texts of many other medieval historians, Abn Shmma’s and Ibn Wmxil’s narratives have been seen as being largely determined by ‘external’ factors: the circumscribed social environment (e.g. Ibn Wmxil’s dependency on his royal patron), the stagnating intellectual context of the ‘post-classical’ age (in Abn Shmma’s case his immersion in the ‘barren’ field of religious sciences), and the authors’ close reliance on previous historical narratives, which they supposedly merely reproduced in more or less elaborate ways. This perspective on authors of medieval Arabic narratives is closely connected to the Rise – Golden Age – Decline paradigm,5 which to some extent influenced twentieth-century scholarship of Arabic historical writing, for instance Rosenthal’s (1968) monumental A History of Muslim Historiography.
In his view, all crucial developments had their source in the early ‘ideal’ periods of Islam, that is the texts ‘written in the second half of the first century [...] contained already all the formal elements of later Muslim historiography’.6 Due to this assumption that each later phenomenon can be explained by the genre’s inherent origins or genealogy, he traces the texts back to their origins in the Rise and Golden Age of the civilization and considers them to be quasi-independent of later developments within society.7 History writing is conceptualized here in terms of encapsulated civilizations with underlying schemes of comprehensive ‘genetic’ interconnections. The early Islamic origins of this genre, not its respective contexts, were the determinants for most of its later developments. Rosenthal’s notion of time is not one of change, but rather one of endless repetition.8 Within this analytical framework, the only possible major development is the genre’s decay parallel to the general decline of the civilization.9 Nevertheless, during the past decade there have been two important trends in the study of Arabic historical writing, which are best represented by the studies of Khalidi (1994) and el-Hibri (1999). Khalidi considers Arabic historical writing from the point of view of the social historian by taking into account the respective social and political developments, which influenced the production of historical texts. Despite some shortcomings, such as the absence of a discussion of what he understands by the crucial term ‘historical thought’,10 his inquiry represents a substantial re-orientation towards taking social contexts into account, and focusing less on the issue of ‘origins’.11 El-Hibri’s (1999) work on ^Abbasid historical writing reflects the second trend, namely the increasing influence of literary approaches in the field of history.
His main argument is that the ‘historical accounts of the early ^Abbmsid caliphs were originally intended to be read not for facts, but for their allusive power’.12 Although he refrains from formulating a specific framework, his study is, for the moment, the most comprehensive and far-reaching examination of pre-modern Arabic historiography, which includes ideas from the field of literary studies.13 In this way Khalidi and el-Hibri have advanced the field by applying a specific set of approaches, respectively drawn from social studies and literary studies. However, both studies stand rather isolated from one another and largely exclude other concerns. Thus Khalidi is barely concerned with the texts themselves, while the social context of the texts rarely appears in el-Hibri’s work. It is in the study of European medieval historical writing that Spiegel has proposed a fruitful combination of the concerns of social history and literary studies.14 In her study on thirteenth-century vernacular prose historical writing in France she stresses that the meaning of those texts can only be grasped in relation to their social context, in this case, essentially, the development of the societal position of the aristocratic patrons.15 At the same time, she strives to deal with the complex relationship between text and context, since in her approach texts both reflect and produce social reality. She applies elements of literary analysis, for example when the transformation of vernacular historical writing from poetry to prose is not seen as a move towards accuracy, but as a discursive means in order to ‘appropriate [...] the inherent authority of Latin texts’.16 Spiegel has striven to conceptualize her approach on a more general level by aiming at a Theory of the Middle Ground. 17 In this discussion she deals mainly with the paradox of simultaneously applying literary approaches based on the assumption of the non-referentiality of texts and approaches of social history based on the referentiality of texts.
The approach of this study The present study aims to use this combination of approaches to the field of Arabic medieval historical writing to bridge the gap between recent trends in the field as represented by Khalidi and el-Hibri. It assumes that medieval Arabic historians were active interpreters of their society, and that these authors sought to make sense out of the past, which they presented in (relatively) coherent narratives by employing the right to speak. In this regard the central question will therefore be how they produced meaningful narratives within their societal context. But before turning to the sources, the three axes of inquiry set out in the question – ‘meaning’, ‘narrative’ and ‘societal context’ – need to be conceptualized. In recent decades ‘meaning’ has become an increasingly important concern in historical studies.19 Geertz is one of the influential writers who consider culture to be a system of symbols and meanings. Texts (in a very comprehensive sense) are mainly interesting as a part of this system: they have not so much to be explained as interpreted in order to grasp both their symbolic content and meaning,20 and are not seen as merely the direct outcome of material reality or of social processes.21 However, under the influence of structuralism, Geertz considers culture in sharp contrast to a societal system (norms and institutions) or a personality system (motivations).
In that way he endows culture with rather static and coherent characteristics and with a very high degree of autonomy vis-à-vis these other systems. In reaction to this, the approach to culture has been further developed by considering it as a sphere of practical activity, where wilful action, power relations, contradiction and change play a significant part.22 Sewell, amongst others, proposes culture as an indissoluble duality of system and practice: in order to act, a system of symbols is required, but this system of symbols exists merely through practice.23 Human practice has been structured by elements by meaning, but also by power relations or resource distribution. Although these fields have a certain degree of autonomy vis-àvis one another, they also shape and constrain each other. Thus, in discussing the texts under consideration in this study I will ask how they produced meaning by considering other relevant spheres. The linked assumption is that the criterion for inclusion of information was not necessarily their truth-value but possibly their significance within a specific context. With regard to narrativity, the basic concern comes down to the question of how medieval authors fashioned originally isolated and disparate facts and events into a literary narrative. One of the starting points for the analysis of the narratives in Chapters 5 and 6 will be the concept of ‘modes of emplotment’. Here, I will draw on the writings of Hayden White in order to propose an alternative reading of seventh-/thirteenth-century historical writing. White’s main argument is that historical writing is as fictional as other forms of literary expression, being ‘a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse’.24 Individual events, persons and institutions are formed into a coherent story based on a tropological strategy: the narrative is prefigured by the author’s decision to use one of the four main tropes (Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche and Irony). Although White’s concept of historical writing has been widely criticized,25 his crucial point has proved to be influential: the consideration of historical writings less as unproblematic and directly mediated reality, and more as literary narratives endowing events with meaning. Kellner formulates this as ‘the tendency of late 20th century thought to look at rather than through a telescope’, the telescope being language.26 However, the principal aim in this study is not to apply a given concept to the field under consideration deductively: rather, the analysis is supplemented by criteria developed inductively from the historical narratives. In this regard, authors such as Frye and Auerbach27 offer a broad framework for the inquiry. The main question is how the authors ascribed different meanings to their immediate past, although they largely drew on a common textual basis. Here, three themes will reappear frequently in the course of the textual analysis of Ibn Wmxil’s and Abn Shmma’s narratives: exclusion/inclusion, arrangement and different literary elements.
The theme of exclusion/inclusion is an important one, as Abn Shmma produced hardly any ‘original’ material in his text and Ibn Wmxil only as the narrative reaches the author’s maturity. Contrary to studies focusing on factual concerns, in the following discussion these citations are not considered to be irrelevant if a more ‘original’ text exists. Rather, these citations might gain a different meaning in different textual context or by very slight changes. Medieval Arabic texts seem at first glance to be chaotically arranged and to contain a number of different elements: narrative sections, disconnected anecdotes, direct quotations, poetry, letters, etc. However, it might be better to understand these texts (as has been recently suggested for the genre of pre-modern autobiographies) ‘not [as] a chaotic jumble devoid of personalities, but [as] a discourse of multiple texts’.28 Despite its non-originality, Abn Shmma’s work gained considerable popularity from its ‘publication’ in the seventh/thirteenth century onwards.29 This development arguably demonstrates that it was not only the material included, which decided a work’s popularity but also the specific outlook, with which the author framed his narrative. Beyond doubt, historical writing in the pre-printing era also served to preserve existing information or to display literary refinement. However, a comparative analysis between the Mufarrij and the Raw,atayn will show to what degree quite similar texts drawing on the same textual basis might acquire different meanings. Inclusion is thus understood here as the author’s conscious choice to shape his text. By taking one or more texts as models on which to base his narrative, a specific vision of the past emerges. Passages from the model texts can be reproduced verbatim, changed slightly and/or set into a different textual context.30 For example, while Abn Shmma tended to cite reports verbatim, Ibn Wmxil mostly integrated the different sources into an ‘original’ narrative.
I will generally cite the two works without necessarily indicating whether it is an ‘original’ or ‘copied’ passage. However, the assumption of authorial control over the texts should not be taken too far. While the authors were, in my opinion, able to shape the narratives to a greater degree than previously assumed, this control clearly had its limits. For example, on the one hand Abn Shmma was able to provide his text with a clear profile with regard to arrangement by including citations from previous texts. However, on the other hand by doing it that way he lost some control over such literary elements as ‘motifs’, since the inclusion of fragments derived from a variety of texts precluded here the development of a distinctive profile. The second main theme is the question of arrangement. Even where Abn Shmma and Ibn Wmxil both used the same material, the question remains as to how it is positioned in their respective texts, and how the texts are internally structured. In my textual analysis I refer to the two possibilities as ‘macro-arrangement’ and ‘microarrangement’. ‘Macro-arrangement’ is to do with why specific reports, included in both texts, are differently placed within the narratives. A prominent example of this is Nnr al-Dln’s biography: although it appeared in both texts, its different positions (in Ibn Wmxil’s text at the usual place, after his death; in Abn Shmma’s text as the opening scene of the whole narrative) give it quite distinct meanings (as discussed in Chapter 5). Micro-arrangement, on the other hand, is concerned with reports included in both texts in the same position. It deals with the internal arrangement of these reports, that is how did the authors arrange their material about a specific event to form a report. These differences between Abn Shmma’s and Ibn Wmxil’s narratives will be described in Chapter 6, with the opposed terms ‘circular’ and ‘linear’.
The last theme, literary elements, refers to the integration of different means in order to narrate a specific report. The textual strategies included such elements as direct speech with shifts between first and third person, oaths, poetry, letters, quotations from sacred texts and overt authorial intervention. Meaning and narrativity cannot be considered in isolation from other spheres existing in a given society. Contextualization is meant here in a broad sense, including both the social and the intellectual environment in which the authors acted. The first step (Chapter 3) will be a social contextualization in the established sense of the term. Here, the concept of networks allows reading texts of authors close to court circles as more than mere reflections of the patron’s outlook. The application of the concept of networks to the social context is similar to the understanding of culture as outlined earlier: both are characterized less by rigid institutions and structures than by processes and relations. The second step will be an intellectual contextualization in the sense of the history of ideas. Issues such as the authors’ educational background (e.g. fields of learning) and their works in the different fields will be considered (see Chapter 4).
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