Download PDF | Anna Kollatz - A Window to the Past__ Tracing Ibn Iyās’s Narrative Ways of Worldmaking-V&R unipress (2022).
315 Pages
Introduction
This study is dedicated to the oeuvre of an author who, measured against the number of citations to be found in recent and not-so-recent literature on Mamluk times, and especially the transition to Ottoman rule over Egypt, has often been rated as the most eminent source, at least for his own lifetime.1 Ironically, Ibn Iya¯s al-H ˙ anafı¯(852–ca. 930/1448–ca. 1524) seems to have been of way less interest to his contemporaries than to modern researchers,2 given that not a single author of the numerous bibliographical dictionaries from his time bothered writing an entry about him. Interest in his person and his writings from the part of the intellectual community of his time3 seems to be rather limited as well, as no contemporary author of historiographical narrations did refer to or cite his works as far as we know.4
The emic5 knowledge on Ibn Iya¯s is therefore basically limited to the information he conveyed on himself. This is why, in my view, Ibn Iya¯s is the ideal figure for discussing some of the most crucial boundaries that cut through—and thereby strongly influence—research on (Mamluk) history. To date, to whom Ibn Iya¯s wrote and who was interested in his texts has not been thoroughly discussed. Due to his writing concept, and especially histendency to use vernacularArabic, his work has been associated with the rise of so-called ‘bourgeois’ recipients of knowledge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.6 The populartopics covered in his Bada¯ʾiʿ al-zuhu¯r, together with the vernacular style he used to spin his yarns, have led Ulrich Haarmann to name him, together with Ibn al-Dawa¯da¯rı¯, as a prime example of the “literarizing” historians7 of the Mamluk period and thus an instance of the ‘popularization’ of historiography by and forthe rising urban classes.8 By addressing the definition of ‘popular culture’, Konrad Hirschler has discussed a critical dichotomy in Mamluk studies.9Defining a ‘popular culture’ or addressing a ‘popularization’ during the long fifteenth century implicitly establishes a clear distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ or‘low’ culture, and furthermore assumes that texts in both fields were received and produced by two distinct social groups.
To avoid this dilemma, which could blur our sense of the fluidity and interactive nature of Mamluk society, he proposes identifying “communities that shared a similar relationship to the written word”, 10 studying “mechanisms of differentiation that indicate variations in cultural practices” and defining ‘popular reading practices’ along “the intersection of specific texts, spatial settings and social contexts.” 11 Taking into account these three criteria allows us to separate the term ‘popularization’ from dichotomic and thereby static conceptions of society. Drawing on Hirschler’s example, the term ‘popularization’ in this study will be understood as the increasing participation of individuals […] who had hitherto been excluded [from the reception and production of histories and other intellectual works, AK]. These individuals belonged to different social layers, but they all participated in the spread of the written word beyond the confines of the narrow scholarly, political and cultural elites.12
Ibn Iya¯s’s literary reaction to the needs and expectations of these emerging readerships, together with his use and re-use of compiled source material, has earned him criticism for having produced poorly organized historiographical accounts “inaccurate as to chronology”. 13 This critique has seeped into more recent literature and seems to be closely related to the persistent aim of perceiving and using the respective sources as conveyors of trustworthy facts. However, this claim does not do justice to the texts in their individuality. It can lead to the devaluation of the historiographical narratives’ original characteristics as ‘inventions’, for example when specific narrative strategies like fictionally retold dialogues between historical persons are misunderstood as ‘fake news’. 14
Somewhat inconsistently, Bada¯ʾiʿ al-zuhu¯r, Ibn Iya¯s’s most ‘literarizing’ chronicle, is, as stated above, of crucial importance as a contemporary source.15 For his own lifetime, Ibn Iya¯s has been acknowledged widely as a trustworthy eyewitness and has been received without hesitation by modern researchers as an author of texts that directly mediate reality.16 In any case, both appreciation and critique do not apply to his entire oeuvre: in no way have all his texts been explored by historians of the Mamluk-Ottoman transition period and others so far. Rather, only one of his texts has been used, namely his last work, the Bada¯ʾiʿ al-zuhu¯r, which has been the recipient of overwhelming long-term interest and trust. Thus, Ibn Iya¯s is not only a striking example of the differing appreciation and reception of authors by emic and etic recipients, but also a remarkable instance of the establishment of a master narrative founded on selective reading.
Today’s etic image and reception of Ibn Iya¯s and his work are deeply influenced by the decisions of scholars in Oriental studies, who since the nineteenth century have perused Arabic historiography for ‘trustworthy’ authors, eyewitnesses who convey ‘historical reality’, on the basis of a general assumption that accounts that use fictional or semi-fictional narrative strategies must be unreliable. They share this attitude with both contemporary and later critiques, as “learned scholars in Arab-Islamic culture vigorously denounced the imaginary world of story-telling, especially when it touched on the field of history”. 17 Even some of the fathers of (German) Mamluk studies joined the call for the text-critical study of Mamluk historiographies in order to determine a source’s “grade of originality” and “value” 18 and establish a hierarchy of reliable sources rather than to understand the respective source materials in terms of their emic concepts and with regard to their narrativity.19
However, Ulrich Haarmann must be appreciated as one of the first voices to call for “additional” fields of research on the materials, such as the emic genre conceptions.20 Since then, historiography not only in the field of Mamluk studies has changed direction thoroughly. Writing another statement advocating for the acknowledgment of the literary, narrative character of his toriographical sources would be like beating a dead horse.21 After the linguistic turn, historiographical scholarship had to acknowledge that the evaluation of ‘historical facts’ in emic narrative sources had to struggle with a twofold challenge: both emic sources and the historiographical narratives constructed on their basis by modern scholars should be assessed as products of a selective, reconstructive and interpretative process. Their statements were heavily formed by and thus dependent on the “interpreting eye of the narrating historian”. 22 However, we still ignore wide portions of the source material that have been, at certain moments in the history of European or ‘Western’ Islamic studies, declared as less valuable due to oscillations between claims of factuality and distinct fictional modes of narration.23
Thus, Li Guo’s statement in his 1997 assessment of Mamluk historiography, or the statement by R. Steven Humphreys cited below, are still valid: we need more case studies on authors and their works to build a stronger basis for a thorough understanding of the intellectual contexts of the time, which deeply shaped the authors’ output andwere in turn shaped by them.24 As Humphreys has stated, “we ought to have book-length analyses of the interplay between a historian’s life and career, the cultural currents in which he was immersed, and the development of his thought and writing.” 25
In the case of Ibn Iya¯s, and the many other Islamicate authors from different times and places about whom we currently lack personal information, unearthing his personal life and career will be a hard, perhaps irresolvable task. However, it must be possible to explore an author’s wider intellectual context—the “cultural currents” as Humphreys put it—and the development of his writing from the writing itself. Again, Humphreys can stand as witness: “Questions of concept, method and structure are essential to understanding how a historian has constructed his account of events.” 26 In the following lines, Humphreys turns to another aspect of an author’s intellectual context. He points to the study of intellectual history, stating that the dissection of the sources of knowledge used by a historical author is as important, if not even more so, to the study of his methods and concepts as a critical reading of his narrative concepts: Equally important, however, and in a sense logically prior, is the technical matter of determining the provenance of his data. We need not discuss the general problems and procedures of Quellenkritik here, since these are dealt with adequately in many places […] 27 This study pleads for the importance of a further category of analysis, namely an author’s narrative strategies.
The narrative construction of a text, naturally, is closely entangled with both the author’s choice of sources and the structuring of his account. Following Ferdinand de Saussure, post-structuralist theories have argued that common discourses, values and convictions determine human perceptions of reality in such way that the ascription of meaning to social life or historical events resemble collective fictionalizing and the construction of master-narratives more than purely objective reconstruction. From this point of view, Hayden White, similar to Paul Ricœur, has identified historiographical narratives as “most manifestly […] verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with counterparts in literature than they have with those in science.” 28 Since the publication of White’s theories, which, although belatedly, also shook the German Oriental studies to its bones, many examinations have acknowledged the narrative character of historiographical (and other) sources.
In the context of this movement, new theoretical approaches have been applied to the material.29 Thus, Konrad Hirschler centered his study on the agency of authors,30 thereby exploring their room for manoeuvre in terms of text production, the choice of material or narrative strategies and influencing their historical and social context by writing history. The methodology tailored for this goal nevertheless is a rather traditional one in the best sense of the word. Hirschler rightly stated that the study of the “room for manoeuvre” historians had “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” needs to be founded on “a detailed analysis of the authors’ social and intellectual contexts and their narratives”. 31 With this statement, he calls for scrutiny of both text and context, including the author’s wider and narrower historical contexts. Yet, does this approach necessarily require a certain set of basic (emic) information on the historical author, his individual living situation etc.?
If so, the approach would not fit many authors, and especially anonymous texts from the Islamicate tradition. Is it then possible to supplement a deficit of biographical information on historical authors by other ways of researching a certain textual corpus? Such an approach must also include reflection on a text’s context—be it inside a certain author’s oeuvre or in the wider arena of contemporary writing traditions and generic allocations and influences.32 To decode the multiple interrelations of a certain text, the study of its composition and language are of great importance. Arguments and working plans similar to Hirschler’s approach are to be found in methodological discussions in literary studies, for example in the context of the development of narrative studies from a rather structuralist approach into a form of cultural studies,33 and in studies aiming for the reassessment of historiographical sources from different times and contexts.34 The basic steps to be made before one can discuss room for manoeuvre, intertextual relations or the interagency of society and writing are, however, still close to longestablished methods. While historians tended, and sometimes still tend, to neglect the fictional side of narrative sources, Gérard Genette criticized, in his book Fiction et Diction (1991), narratology for its exclusive concentration on fictional texts, calling it pejoratively “narratologie fictionelle”. 35
He also pointed out that fictional narration can by no means be regarded as a prime example of narration per se. Rather, the methodology for the analysis of factual narratives, or narratives oscillating between factuality and fictionality, must be adapted to these materials. In addition, the structuralist toolkit, as well as Genette’s methodology, is restricted not only in terms of its focus on a corpus of fictional narratives, but also by the fact that this corpus consists almost exclusively of fictional narratives written in European languages.36 Methodological approaches that seek to combine the history of cultural and mental aesthetics with narratology have followed the direction proposed by Genette. Connecting a thorough study of the historical, social and intellectual contexts of a certain text or author with narrative analysis (as proposed by Astrid Erll and Simone Roggendorf and successfully applied by the studies mentioned above and many more) also takes us back to the core of historical-critical analysis.
By the term ‘cultural historical narratology’ (“kulturgeschichtliche Narratologie”), Erll and Roggendorf refer to an inherently heterogeneous new field of research, one located within the framework of an interdisciplinary reorientation of the formerly structuralist narratology. Common to the approaches and studies that belong to cultural historical narratology is the orientation of narratological theory and practice towards the epistemological interests and theoretical assumptions of the New Cultural History.37 The present study draws on the wide toolkit of this new field, combining narratological approaches and a focus on intertextual analysis.
Based on this methodological inventory, it takes an approach similar to Hirschler’s study on ‘medieval Arabic historiography’, as it is likewise interested in shedding light on the node of interaction between the historical author, his writing processes and the different contexts of which he and his texts form part. However, while Hirschler takes a comparative approach and scrutinizes two authors, this study’s focus is much more on the development of a single author, namely Ibn Iya¯s alH ˙ anafı¯. In a comprehensive analysis that, for the first time, takes into account all of Ibn Iya¯s’s known historiographical writings, it aims to trace the working process of this single author in the context of the processes’ and the author’s entanglements with social, historical and intellectual contexts.
The reason for proposing yet another study on Ibn Iya¯s and pre-modern Arabic historiography that advocates for a combined literary and social historical approach to narrative sources is that our discipline still struggles with a lack of biographical information on individuals like Ibn Iya¯s. How can we approach authors of key sources for today’s etic understanding of their times when we have little to no independent information on them? Judging from the master narratives established in basic inventories of our discipline, like the Encyclopaedia of Islam, one would suspect this problem to be non-existent.38 We have a sound and logical narrative of Ibn Iya¯s’s life and social context, which, as for so many other premodern authors, is founded on the scarce information transmitted by the authors themselves, emplotted and re-emplotted by historians over decades of Orientalist scholarship.
Here again, we find traces of the ‘Rankeian’ heritage of ‘looking for historical reality’, which lures us into the trap of accepting that ‘we cannot find any other trustful sources’ and ‘we have to work with the information at hands’. This study aims to explore an approach to elusive authors of Ibn Iya¯s’s kin, which more radically than before opts for the informative power of the literary approach. If, as in so many cases, it is impossible to gather ‘trustworthy’ independent information on certain historical persons who happened to become central sources for our discipline—and if, in turn, we accept relying on the information they themselves transmitted—then why not take advantage of the full range of information they left us? This study is based on the distinction between the term author, meaning a historical person who acted as a real or empirical individual that “can be defined in a narrow sense as the intellectual creator of a text written for communicative purposes. In written texts in particular, the real author is distinguished from the mediating instances internal to the text”, 39 and narrator, or narrative voice, meaning “the inner-textual (textually encoded) highest-level speech position from which the current narrative discourse as a whole originates and from which references to the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are being made”, 40 be it a fictional or factual narrative, a postmodern novel or pre-modern historiography claiming to convey factual knowledge about the past.41 In the case of the latter, the narrative voice often appears very close to the historical author, if not identical with him.
This holds especially true for texts that show the characteristics of ego-documents, like travelogues or historiographical texts in which the narrative voice clearly identifies itself with the author’s person. Although there are many texts in which this connection is much clearer, Ibn Iya¯s does identify himself as the superordinate narrator in his writings. This offers the possibility to approach the author through the analysis of his narrative voice.
The construction of a narrative is a complex process that requires many decisions to be made by the author. These include the choice of material and topics, form, ordering principles, narrative strategies, intended readership and the degree of presence an author grants to himself in his texts. These decisions, to a certain degree, are influenced by the contexts of which an author and his work form a part. But still, as Hirschler has shown, there is room for manoeuvre, spaces of agency in which authors can take decisions, shape their texts individually and thereby influence their contexts. This means that an author’s narrative voice, his way of shaping his narratives and fitting them into the contexts he and his texts lived in, is an open gate that offers us the opportunity to dig through the words of a text into its worlds. Thus, even highly tendentious historiographical narratives can become a window to the past. With the comprehensive analysis of the historiographic oeuvre of a single author on whom we have little to no contemporary independent information, this study aims to test this approach as a way of getting closer to such elusive authors and their contexts.
The endeavor is based on a comparative reading of Ibn Iya¯s’s different historiographic texts, with a strong focus on dissecting the working process behind them. The basic idea is to transpose what Frédéric Bauden was able to do with al-Maqrı¯zı¯’s scratchbooks42 onto a set of closely interrelated and interdependent texts that have equal status as finished narratives by one author. For unlike in the case of the notebooks examined by Bauden, this book is about three historiographical narratives completed for publication. This side of the study relies on compilation analyses that will help us to trace the author’s strategies of intertextual re-use and re-arrangement of text parts, information and narrative strategies. Compilation as a technique of text production has long been underrated for producing mere plagiarism and rather derivative texts, in which “the compiler himself does not speak”, 43 an assessment closely related to the narrative of decline fostered by etic attempts to periodize Islamicate intellectual history.44
The narrative of decline is problematic in itself, as it contrasts the late fourteenth to sixteenth centuries with a mostly undefined ‘golden age’, which was and still is presented as the culmination of Islamic scholarship, art and political significance. This negative assessment, of course, also has its roots in emic historiographical narratives, especially of the later Mamluk period, in which authors tend to glorify the beginnings of Mamluk rule in Egypt against the background of their own times, often associated with economic and political decline.45 Although scholars like David Ayalon and Donald P. Little have warned against falling into the trap of reading the “nostalgic idealization” present in many historiographical narratives from later times as sincere depictions of reality, this notion has been reproduced to a certain extent by modern research that has described (late) Mamluk rule and society while relying on those very depictions.46 Various recent publications argue against this master narrative, constructed by the interplay of a questionable periodization and the reproduction of emic assessments. Using the example of the history of the Islamicate natural sciences, Sonja Brentjes has shown the shortcomings of the master narrative on decline in the Islamic middle periods.47 Similarly, Christoph Herzog has argued this from the point of view of Ottoman history.48
Thomas Bauer has called for a realignment of the discipline’s internal master narrative, being particularly critical of the common periodization and devaluation of Mamluk literature.49 Triggered by the findings of Islamic archaeology and a few other voices, the perception has changed to the effect that the fifteenth century, as well as the era during and after the Ottoman conquest, is now increasingly regarded as a transition period.50 The problem with the decline paradigm is not only that it is based on theories centered on the West, but also that it is determined by linear models of social evolution, which assume the direction of development towards modernity. W. W. Clifford has criticized this in the theories of Bourdieu, Parsons and Elias.
However, research following this long overdue re-evaluation has unfortunately not yet been able to fill the gap left by the disregard of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a time of “mental flaccidity” and merely defective imitation of former cultural achievements, as Brockelmann put it in 1909.52 Although numerous projects have already turned their attention to this period,53 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries remain, especially from the angle of literary studies directed towards factual or semi-factual texts, a largely unwritten page. One symptom of this, for example, is that a disproportionately large number of writings from this period, which were not covered by Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur or were considered subordinate in value, still remain only in manuscript form or at best published in uncritical editions.
This also applies to a large extent to historiography, with the exception of the use of historiographical sources from the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods in Egypt as the basis for historical studies dedicated to the reconstruction of ‘historical reality’. As Hirschler has pointed out, the perspective “on authors of medieval Arabic narratives is closely connected to the ‘Rise/Golden Age/Decline paradigm.’” 54 Even Hodgeson’s otherwise highly welcome proposals for the periodization of Islamicate history based on emic criteria are not free of the idea that a cultural decline occurred by the fifteenth-sixteenth century at the latest, which was thought to be characterized by a lack of originality on the part of thinkers and authors of the time.55 These interpretations of literary production, deeply engraved in reference works, can ultimately be traced back to a Western concept of the author, which has its origin in the romantic idea of the creative author as a genius. Ripping this idea out of its context of origin and applying it to a completely different environment has had problematic effects similar to the application of the concept of the Middle Ages to Islamicate societies, recently criticized by Thomas Bauer.56 The present study, however, recognizes compilation as a process deeply and actively shaped by the compilator’s (henceforth the author’s) individual aims and decisions. As Kurt Franz has shown in his study on compiled narratives on the Zanjrebellion,57 it must be recognized as a complex, multi-step writing technique that makes use of information and narrative techniques already present in the intellectual archive of an author’s cultural and social environment. The compilation process involves the choice of material according to the author’s aims and intended agenda, the conscious arrangement of the chosen material and thus the creation of a new, individually shaped narrative.
Thus, the benefits compilation analysis can contribute to the understanding of the working process of Arabic historians lie in the ‘gaps’ between the bits and pieces of information an author re-uses. Here, the process of conscious (re-)emplotment of knowledge by an individual author, in relation and interaction with his social and intellectual contexts, become even more observable than in a purely ‘original’ text.58 Hayden White’s theory provides the basis for considerations on the narrativity of historiographical sources in this study.59 However, the process of emplotment should not be interpreted in a formalistic-structuralist way, especially since White’s rather rigid classification of texts and the distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘events’ has been rightly criticized.60 Rather, I would like to emphasize the processual, and thus elastic, character of emplotment. Here I see parallels with Norbert Elias’s theory, who uses the term figurations.61 In reference to his con cept of fluid, constantly moving figurations of human society, processes between author, texts and recipients can also be conceived of as figurations.62 As has been stated above, White’s categorizations, like the majority of current historical and literary theoretical research, have been developed on a text corpus that can be characterized as European or Western. Categorizations and terminology must therefore be critically evaluated.
Apart from their sharp demarcation from one another, to which a more fluid conception is certainly preferable, they must also be examined against the background of their applicability to nonEuropean contexts. For this reason, the reference to Hayden White here is mainly to his basic idea of emplotment. All further categories of analysis must always be checked against the source material and adapted accordingly. Dissecting the narrative voice of Ibn Iya¯s, and its possible development and reemplotment for different contexts and intended readers, will help to draw a less blurred picture of the author and to explore his writing techniques and intentions. Besides being a test case for using a literary study methodology to explore the social historical contexts of an elusive author, the study will thus add valuable information to the assessment and use of Ibn Iya¯s’s writings as historical sources. The first part of this study will be dedicated to a comprehensive stock-check of information on the contexts of which Ibn Iya¯s and his writings form a part. This includes, first and foremost, a critical reading of information provided by the research literature and the quest forfirst-hand sources of information.
This leads to an integral review of the works attributed with certainty to Ibn Iya¯s and their preservation. Manuscripts can help us gain information on the author’s working process, especially when, like in the case of Ibn Iya¯s, autographs provide insight into how the author arranged his texts and how he commented and amended them.63 Besides this, the general state of the tradition can give insight into the reception of an author’s work during his lifetime and after.64 Finally, it is necessary to revisit the corpus that has come to us in order to identify the text base for the following narrative analysis. The inventory will be completed with an initial narratological experiment dedicated to exploring the self-representation of Ibn Iya¯s’s narrative voice. Here, the basic question will be what kind of information the author shares about himself and in what ways he enters into contact with his readers. His choice of topics is even more interesting in this respect, as Ibn Iya¯s is so scanty with personal information.
A further focus will be on the literary presentation of the narrative voice. Dissecting the intentions of an author that made him write, and write in exactly the way he chose to, is a core element of the historical-critical method and all later approaches based on narrative analysis. They are also a bridge between the author’s historical person and contexts and the intratextual narrative voice. Contexts, the narrative voice and a writer’s intentions closely interact with each other. Fortunately, Ibn Iya¯s is much more communicative concerning his writing intentions than he is when conveying personal information. A comparative analysis of the preambles or muqaddimas (though he never calls them this) will thus establish a basic understanding of Ibn Iya¯s’s own openly communicated contextualization, which allows us to identify his targeted intended readership, the social contexts his work is related to and the intellectual framing of his writing projects.
The basic aim of the study’s second part is to fathom Ibn Iya¯s’s way of working and thereby approach his positionality as narrative voice, reporter and commentator about his time through narratological analysis. For this purpose, the second part will concentrate on the representation of transition processes, especially political changes or transitions of rule. This approach is based on the now widely acknowledged hypothesis that historical writing serves the purpose of endowing events with meaning and explaining the course of events by emplotting them into a worldview familiar, or understandable, to the author and his intended readership.65 By choosing information from different sources, re-arranging them, adding their own material and judgments and especially by choosing narrative modes for the representation of certain (historical) events, each author configures a unique interpretation of the events he writes about, even if he draws heavily on compiled material.66 By this configuration, he produces social capital that, with every step of reception (as well by the authors themselves) is re-figurated, in Norbert Elias’ sense. Transitions of rule have been recognized as events that seem to require special attention concerning the configuration of meaningful narratives that explain or legitimize transformation of rule.67 This holds true even more for situations in which foreign, i. e. intruding groups from outside, adopt and change the traditional system, as the booming historical narratives on the Mongol invasion into Islamicate realms stand witness to.68 Ibn Iya¯s’s reports cover four larger transitions of rule, namely the Islamic conquest of Egypt, the emergence of Mamluk rule, the change to Circassian rule and finally the Ottoman conquest of Egypt.
The negotiation, explanation and justification of these four transitions in his different historical narratives will form the basis for the narratological analysis in the second part of the study. Owing to the study’s social historical focus, the analysis will put special emphasis on the narrative negotiation of power and the interaction of different societal agents in the course of transition processes. Here I follow the definition of Anthony Giddens, who distinguishes the two forms of influence power over and power to. Giddens refers to domination, that is the institutionalized rule over others, as power over, while power to refers to the possibility of exerting influence on others without an institutionalized frame.69 Giddens’s very broad definition can be well applied to non-European and premodern systems of rule without imposing more elaborate concepts.
The most interesting agents in this context are those individuals competing for the position of the principal representative of institutionalized power, as well as the powerful groups supporting or fighting the different competitors.70 The analysis will therefore concentrate on the representation of these groups and their interactions. Wherever possible, the ‘people’ will be taken into account as well as a third relevant group in the representation of power-figuration processes. The representation of group or individual agents will be analyzed concerning their spatial setting, their characterization asfigures and the space they occupy in the narrative. The analysis will draw on categories derived from the ‘toolkit’ of narratology, as described by Gérard Genette and others.71
Due to the character of the material and to the sheer fact that the methodology of (structuralist) narratology has been developed on a body of nineteenth-century European fictional literature, the ‘toolkit’ will be adjusted to the needs and characteristics of the analyzed text. It will be used only as an etic, descriptive meta-language, which makes the material accessible for later comparative readings. Each set of transition narratives will be studied following a common scheme. Wherever possible, a collation of Ibn Iya¯s’s different narratives on the same timespan or events will serve to trace his working techniques, such as compilation processes, the re-use and re-arrangement of material and the history of reemplotment or refiguration of the same plots in his different accounts. The narrative analysis will furthermore present the possibility to deduce the underlying convictions, norms and judgements that Ibn Iya¯s intendedly or unintendedly inserted into his narratives. This offers the opportunity to learn about the author’s mindset, his writing motivation and possible agendas.72
Narratives as ways of worldmaking—or narrative ways of worldmaking—have been recognized as vital aspects of human interaction, as opportunities to negotiate the author’s as well as the readers’ living contexts, and even to venture freely into possible other worlds in the secured spaces of fiction.73 Thus narratives as awhole, the author’s choice of content and his modes of narration, especially the explicit or implicit strategies for guiding the reader, will help us to obtain a more focused picture of his intended readership, the intended contexts of reception and, finally, the wider social processes with which his work was in touch.74
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