Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MMS-II (The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate II: historiography, political order and state formation in fifteenth-century Egypt and Syria)

Teaser

The MMS-II project studies how political order and historical truth were jointly constructed in the late medieval Middle East. It looks in particular at how 15th-century Islamic scholars/historians and their Arabic texts contributed actively to a state formation process that...

Summary

The MMS-II project studies how political order and historical truth were jointly constructed in the late medieval Middle East. It looks in particular at how 15th-century Islamic scholars/historians and their Arabic texts contributed actively to a state formation process that is identified in the project as ‘the Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate’.

The fifteenth-century history of the Sultanate of Cairo, also known as the Syro-Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate, is traditionally considered a period of socio-economic and political decline following thirteenth- and fourteenth-century successes. In our recent research, however, this fifteenth-century history has been revalued as a highly creative era of transformation, of local and regional empowerment, and of state formation. This revaluation has been captured in the neologism of Mamlukisation. The MMS-II project builds on this revisionism, claiming that newly framed social memories of a glorious past of Muslim championship and Mamluk leadership were part and parcel of this Mamlukisation process, as were contemporary laments that things are not what they used to be.

The MMS-II project surveys and analyses the production and construction of these social memories in 15th-century texts, as important specimens of political ideologies and truth claims that until today fail to be properly understood. This will contribute to ongoing new appreciations of the surprisingly rich and eclectic fabric of late medieval and early modern Islamic imaginations of normative political order. This will above all shed entirely new light on the interaction between those imaginations and some of the major narrative sources for medieval Islamic history, written in the particular fifteenth-century context of Syro-Egyptian centrality on the Eurasian stage. This will finally also help to further reveal how most engagements with the historical narrative of Islam and of Islamic leadership in today’s academic, popular, and religious contexts alike —from the perspective of a simple trajectory of swift rise and long decline— remain oblivious of the highly intriguing ambiguities from which that narrative always has been, and continues to be, claimed as historical truth.

MMS-II’s three specific objectives represent the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of this revisionist and reflexive exercise; they consist of:
[1] a comprehensive database-survey of Arabic historical works produced in the period 1410-1470, with particular attention being paid to the questions of authorship, inter-textuality, production, reproduction & consumption, and developed as a research tool for the wider scholarly community
[2] in-depth case studies of discrete sets of Arabic historical works from the period 1410-1470, selected with the intention to combine feasibility with representability, questioned from the perspectives of contexts, texts, and meanings, and generated in the format of individual postdoctoral publication projects and of a series of dedicated workshops with invited specialists.
[3] a discourse-analytical study of the political vocabularies of Arabic historiographical works from the period 1410-1470, with a particular focus on identifying and explaining the semantics of signifiers of particular political discourses that informed these texts and that, at the same time, materialised through them.

Work performed

\"During the first scientific reporting period (January 2017-June 2019) the MMS-II corpus of 15th-century historiographical texts was defined, identifying 74 texts and two generations of 26 authors as relevant for further exploration and study in the project. Together with Open Source developer INUITS the data tool for the database-survey and the discourse analysis was developed and a first round of testing was started. A first set of two workshop was organized with invited specialists (Frédéric Bauden [Liège], Stephan Conermann [Bonn], Konrad Hirschler [Berlin], Dimitri Kastritsis [St Andrews], Christopher Markiewicz [Birmingham], Bernadette Martel-Thoumian [Grenoble], Clément Onimus [Paris], Arjan Post [Leuven], John Meloy [Beirut], Eric Vallet [Paris], Frederik Buylaert [Gent], Malika Dekkiche [Antwerp]) and MMS-II (future) team members to discuss the MMS-II project, its objectives and its first set of results (Gent, 18 December 2017: \'Fifteenth-Century Arabic Historiography. Past, Present, Future\'; Gent, 17 December 2018: \'Fifteenth-Century Arabic Historiography: Historicising authors, Texts, and Contexts\'). In-depth case studies are in progress on the historiographical achievements of the authors Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 1449), Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba (d. 1448), Ibn ʿArabshāh (d. 1450), al-ʿAynī (1451), Ibn Taghrībirdī (d. 1470) and al-Biqāʿī (d. 1480).

The overall objectives of the project, as well as results and hypotheses, were presented at the following occasions:
* Vienna, 12-13 January 2017, Visions of Community — ÖAW: Medieval Biographical Collections. Perspectives from Buddhist, Christian and Islamic Worlds
* St Andrews, 6 April 2017, University of St Andrews: Middle East and Iranian Studies Seminar: “Narratives of Royal Pilgrimage, Constructions of Muslim Kingship, and Authorship in Late Medieval Egypt” by J. Van Steenbergen
* Beirut, 11 May 2017, American University of Beirut: The Fourth Conference of the School of Mamluk Studies: “From the court in Cairo to the kingdoms of the Franks. Political order and world-making in 15th-century Egyptian chronicles” by J. Van Steenbergen (+ organization of session \'New Perspectives on Late Medieval Arabic Historiography: History, Order and Truth in/of the Cairo Sultanate\"\" [participants: J. Van den Bent (Amsterdam), M. El-Merheb (London), N. Hofer (Missouri), J. Van Steenbergen]
* Frankfurt, 8-9 June 2017, DFG-Forschergruppe Personalentscheidungen bei gesellschaftlichen Schlüsselpositionen - workshop: “Sultans, amirs, scholars, and scribes. Tanistric succession practices at the court of Mamluk Cairo (14th-15th centuries)” by J. Van Steenbergen
* Leeds, 3 July 2017, International Medieval Congress 2017: “Performing the Self by Advising the Sultan: Caliphate, Kingship, and Authorship in a 15th-Century Arabic History of Royal Pilgrimage” by J. Van Steenbergen
* Nijmegen, 27 October 2017, 23rd Medieval Studies Day 2017: Perceptions of East and West in the Middle Ages: “The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate II. Historiography, Political Order and State Formation in 15th-century Egypt” by J. Van Steenbergen
* Washington, 18-21 November 2017, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting: “Narrative strategies, state formation, and world-making in fifteenth-century Egyptian chronicles” by J. Van Steenbergen
* Utrecht, 27 November 2017, PhD symposium A. Post: “The ‘Mamlukisation’ of the Mamluk Sultanate: Rethinking Mamluks, Turks and Sultans in late medieval Cairo” by J. Van Steenbergen
* Paris, 24 January 2018, Université Paris 1 — Panthéon-Sorbonne: Journée d’étude Ğihād et fitna: penser et concevoir la guerre dans le Mašriq medieval (xie-xvie siècles): “The semantics of order and fitna in the chronicles of al-Maqrīzī” by J. Van Steenbergen
* Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, 14-16 June 2018, Colloquium A Eurasia of Composite Polities, 1250-1500: Collective Identities & Communications in the Premodern World:\"

Final results

[1] Basic research tools are still lacking for late medieval Arabic historiography, including dedicated reference works taking stock of all historiographical texts, of the status of their textual preservation, of the contexts of their production and consumption, and of completed and ongoing relevant research. In the 20th century, Brockelmann’s GAL meant a huge breakthrough in this respect for the full scope of Arabic literature, but it is hopelessly out-dated by now (Brockelmann—1937-49). Christian-Muslim Relations, a bibliographical history, vol. 5 (1350-1500) offers a much needed, extremely rich and very useful upgrade, but takes a very specific approach to the subject (Thomas & Mallet—2013). Online resources such as the Mamluk Bibliography Project (University of Chicago Library, http://mamluk.lib.uchicago.edu) finally offer access to a comprehensive set of bibliographical metadata on Mamluk research published in any language of scholarship, but its ambitions, scope and organisation are very different from being a research tool for late medieval Arabic historiography. Combining all these and related data sets (e.g. http://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en, http://www.fihrist.org.uk) and enriching them with other relevant metadata in an online and open access reference tool is therefore the first objective of this project. This will create a comprehensive survey of Arabic historiographical texts (defined in the widest sense) produced in the period 1410-1470, with particular attention for questions of authorship, patronage and inter-textuality, of textual production, consumption and reproduction, and of modern research.
[2] With the exception of only one or two historians and their writings, this important body of Arabic historiographical texts has so far only partially and haphazardly been studied, if at all. The project will address this issue via the set-up of in-depth case studies of discrete sets of Arabic historical works from the period 1410-1470, with the precise aim of understanding and situating these texts at the performative interface between power relations involving author, audience and others and discursive meanings including claims to historical truth and to particular political orders. The outcome will not be the publication of new critical editions or annotated translations of these texts, but rather a pushing of their understanding beyond mere positivist assumptions and thus the realization of an entirely new and genuine assessment of the historical value of their inter-subjectivities.
3] There exists to this day no systematic study of the vocabulary that these texts, their authors and their audiences employed to construct their historical narratives of truth and order (and of their opposites). The field continues to have to rely on the standard lexicographical tools produced in the 14th and 15th centuries and in the 19th and 20th centuries. The third objective of the project will therefore consist of engaging in a discourse-analytical study of the political vocabularies of Arabic historical works from the period 1410-1470, with a particular focus on identifying and explaining the semantics of signifiers of particular discourses of political order that informed these texts and that, at the same time, materialised through them. The result will be a better understanding of these vocabularies, more in general of the relation between constructions of historical truth and of order in 1410-70, and of the Mamluk sultanate as a particular product of that relation.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.mms.ugent.be.