Download PDF | (Muslim World in the Age of the Crusades, 5) Alexander Mallett (editor) - Arabic Textual Sources for the Crusades-Brill (2024).
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Notes on Contributors
Fozia Bora is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Leeds, where she serves as Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies. She is the author of Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World. The Value of Chronicles as Archives (London, 2019), a monograph study of the chronicle of Ibn al-Furāt.
Niall Christie is an Instructor in History at Langara College, where he teaches the history of Europe and the Muslim world. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on Muslim responses to the Crusades. He is the author of numerous articles and two books: The Book of the Jihad of ʿAli ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106): Text, Translation and Commentary (Farnham, 2015); and Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095–1382, from the Islamic Sources (now in its second edition; Abingdon, 2020).
Anne-Marie Eddé is Emerita Professor of Medieval Islamic History at the University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. She is, in particular, the author of many works on Arabic sources, on the Ayyūbid dynasty (La principauté ayyoubide d’Alep [1183–1260] [Stuttgart, 1999]), and on the history of Syria in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Saladin [Paris, 2008; English trans. Harvard University Press, 2011]). She has recently published (ed. and trans.), Muḥammad Ibn ʿAqīl. Les Perles ordonnées. Des vertus du sultan Barqūq (784–801/1382–1399). Al-Durr al-naḍīd fī manāqib al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Abī Saʿīd (Paris, 2023; in collaboration with Abdallah Cheikh-Moussa, Sorbonne-Université).
Alexander Mallett is Associate Professor in the Faculty of International Research and Education and a member of the team of the State of Qatar for Islamic Area Studies at Waseda University, Tokyo. His main area of research interest is ChristianMuslim relations in the pre-modern Mediterranean, focusing particularly on the period of the Crusades, and on Muslim responses to and perceptions of the Franks. He has (co-)edited various related volumes, including Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant (2014) and Franks and Crusades in Medieval Eastern Christian Historiography (2020). He is currently working on an edition and translation of al-Maqrīzī’s Arabic chronicle al-Sulūk for the Ayyūbid period with Essam Ayyad (Qatar University), and a monograph on the Arabic historiography of the Crusades.
Maiko Noguchi is Assistant Professor of Social Science Education at Shinshu University (Nagano, Japan) and formerly a postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo. Her main area of research interest is the ʿulamāʾ of the medieval Maghrib and al-Andalus, focusing on the Almoravid and the Almohad empires, and their activities and roles in these societies. Her published articles include ‘Communicating a Biography: A Comparison of the Maghribi-Andalusi and Mashriqi Sources on al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’ (in M. Fierro and M. Penelas [eds], The Maghrib in the Mashriq [Berlin, 2021]), and ‘The Evolution of the Oath of Allegiance (bayʿa) as Justification for Rule during the Almoravids’, Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 79 (2021). She is currently researching the process of Arabisation and Islamisation under those Berber empires.
Clément Onimus is Associate Professor at Paris 8 University. He has published a monograph on the internal wars of the Mamlūk sultanate (Les maîtres du jeu : pouvoir et violence politique à l’aube du sultanat mamlouk circassien [784–815/1382–1412] [Paris, 2019]) and several articles about the historiography and the social history of the late medieval Middle East.
Bogdan Smarandache Bogdan Smarandache’s research focuses on Christian-Muslim diplomatic relations in the medieval Mediterranean. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2019 under the co-supervision of Professor Mark D. Meyerson and Professor Emerita Linda S. Northrup. He recently began a postdoctoral fellowship with the Excellence of Science (EOS) project DiplomatiCon (no. 40007541), funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS) and the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO-Flanders).
Gowaart Van Den Bossche obtained his PhD in history at Ghent University in January 2019 for a dissertation on early Mamlūk historiography, chancery practice and literary culture. This dissertation won the 2020 BRAIS-De Gruyter prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World, which resulted in the 2023 publication of his first book Literary Spectacles of Sultanship: Historiography, the Chancery, and Social Practice in Late Medieval Egypt. Between 2019 and 2022 he worked as
a postdoctoral Research Fellow with the KITAB Project at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, in London. He is currently a postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), working on universal historiography in early 8th/14th century Egypt and Syria. He has published articles in al-Masaq, Annales Islamologiques and Islamic Law and Society on various aspects of late medieval Islamic historiography, literature, and law.
Ayumi Yanagiya is Research Fellow at the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library) in Tokyo and lecturer at Waseda University. Her main area of research interest is the nature of political and social ties in the post-Seljūq period (focusing particularly on the Zengid dynasty) and their transformation over time. She has published various related articles, including ‘The Establishment, Cancellation and Continuation of the khidma in Regime-Formation: Cases from the Post-Seljuq Dynasties’ in Shigaku 81/4 (2013). She is also participating in translation projects for Ibn Khaldun’s autobiography and Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari’s al-Taʿrīf bi-l-mustalah al-sharīf
Introduction
Alexander Mallett
It should not need underlining here that the human landscape of the area of Greater Syria (Arabic: al-Shām) and the eastern Mediterranean more widely during the medieval period was extremely heterogenous. Consequently, the Latin European Christians known collectively as the Franks encountered a wide range of linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and religious communities when they arrived in and conquered much of the region at the end of the fifth/eleventh century during and as a result of the First Crusade. As many of these groups left written records relating to the crusading period, the evidence for Frankish activity during that time is extant in a wide variety of languages. The majority of the relevant sources are in Latin, Arabic, and Old French, although there are many other important works in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Persian.
Over the last few decades, scholarship into the source material from the Latin European cultural arena has forged ahead tremendously, with dozens of articles, monographs, editions, and translations related to the Latin and Old French texts appearing. However, in comparison there has been very little research on the Middle Eastern-origin source material as it relates to the events of the crusading period, and even some of the most basic scholarly work related to it has not yet been carried out. In particular, there are two extensive and serious gaps in modern scholarship into the Arabic-Islamic material for the crusading period. One of these is the lack of full editions of some of the most important sources for the period. For example, Ibn al-Furāt’s (d. 807/1405) indispensable chronicle remains largely in manuscript form only despite its inclusion of significant quantities of material found nowhere else, which is also the case for sections of the text composed by Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī (d. 855/1451).1 Additionally, there are a number of other relevant Arabic texts that have been edited but poorly.2 As such, more research remains to be carried out within this arena. Yet perhaps more pressing is the severe dearth of in-depth studies of practically all the Arabic-Islamic source material for the era of the crusades, which contrasts markedly with other periods of Islamic history, such as early Islamic times or the Mamlūk period.3
This volume attempts to pick up on limited earlier efforts to rectify the latter problem4 by presenting studies of a number of Muslim writers who wrote works related to the crusades and the Frankish presence in the Levant in order to help scholars and students understand and contextualize them, so as to better draw them into crusader studies. It is also the third of a series of edited volumes on the sources from the medieval Middle East that look to do so. In 2014 was published in the same series as the current book the volume Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant, which contains explorations of the lives and works of the seven most important Muslim historians relevant for the events of the crusading era.5 Then, in 2020, came the collection Franks and Crusades in Medieval Eastern Christian Historiography, which examined the same issues within the most important Christian sources from the eastern Mediterranean, including Arabic-language texts composed by Coptic Christians in Egypt.6 In the period of nearly a decade since the publication of the first volume, scholarly investigation into medieval Islamic historiography has advanced at a significant pace, and is now one of the most fruitful areas of research within Islamic studies more widely. In addition to the production of various editions of texts, recent research on the subject may be divided into four broad areas. First are those works which focus on the lives of Muslim authors and the text(s) they composed, and which have been particularly concerned with the political, social, and intellectual contexts in which the writers lived and worked.7
A primary focus of attention within such studies has been on how these aspects influenced how the writers and their texts presented certain events or the personalities being described. A second broad set of studies have examined how different accounts of the same event or events changed over time and place, and why; as, from a methodological standpoint, these are reliant on the conclusions of the first set described above, these two above approaches are often combined in the same study.8 Third has been a trend examining historical sources as literary works, and focusing on questions such as narrative devices—for example, themes, topoi, motifs.9 A final broad avenue of research has been that of reception history. Derived ultimately from certain philosophical trends within literary theory (foremost among them poststructuralism), this examines how individual texts or groups of texts were received in the decades and centuries after their composition as they came to have a life of their own, often (though not always) after their author’s demise. For the crusading period, this approach has not, as far as I am aware, been employed for historiographical works, although there have been some explorations of how and why various religious texts, such as Ibn ʿAsākir’s forty ḥadīth text, came to be employed after their author’s death.10 The studies contained in this volume primarily follow the first of these approaches. Each examines one Muslim writer from the medieval period who wrote on a subject related to and relevant for the crusades, and thereby follows the template of the previous two volumes.
As such, the first part of each article presents an overview of the life of the medieval author and the environment in which they lived and worked, which will permit a fuller understanding of the factors which may have influenced their presentation of the crusades and the Frankish presence. After this, there is a brief overview of the author’s overall literary activity to permit an understanding of their agenda in writing to be understood.
Then, the works specifically relevant for the history of the crusading period are discussed in each article, and generally include: the history of modern studies, editions, and translations of the work; the overall scope of the text, why it was composed, and the agenda; and, in summation, how the Franks and the Crusades are presented within it and why. By employing this approach, it is hoped that scholars and students researching the Frankish presence in the eastern Mediterranean in the period in question will be able to better understand the circumstances and aims of composition in order to cut through those to understand the events and personalities better, as well as to help drive forward future research into areas such as narratology, rhetoric, and literary devices.
The aim of the series of volumes of which this is the third is to provide, as far as possible, a full series of studies of the Arabic-Islamic and Eastern Christian source material for the period of the crusader states in the Levant. The prime caveat to this is that, because they are primarily aimed at scholars and students making use of translations of the medieval texts in question, the studies are limited to those medieval texts which have been rendered from the original into a western language. This means that, due to there being a limited number of texts which remain wholly untranslated, some relevant works have been omitted.11
One further point to note for those who have consulted the earlier volumes is that, while those two focused exclusively on historiographical texts, the scope of the present one is considerably wider. As such, it is split into two different parts based on the genre. The first part focuses on the authors of historiographical works: al-ʿAẓīmī, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir, Ibn al-Furāt, and al-ʿAynī. The second part covers all other texts, which include the authors of a religious text (al-Sulamī), a ‘Life’ (Bahāʾ al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād), personal reminiscences (Usāma b. Munqidh and Ibn Jubayr), and a topographical work (ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād). This third volume and its broader scope should, together with the previous two, provide researchers with a useful set of studies into the source material for the crusading period originating in the eastern Mediterranean region.
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