Sixth Conference of the School of
Mamlūk Studies
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
June 15-17, 2019

Program and Abstracts

-

Organized by:
Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Course, School of Humanities andSocial Sciences/Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda
University
Research Institute for Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University-

The School of Mamlūk Studies
Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago--

Supported by:
Kajima Foundation
Mishima Kaiun Memorial Foundation
JSPS Kakenhi Grant No. 19H0504-

SMS Organizing Committee:
Frédéric Bauden (Université de Liège)
Antonella Ghersetti (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice)Marlis J. Saleh (University of Chicago)
Chief Local Organizer:
Tetsuya Ohtoshi (Waseda University)-

Local Organizing Committee Members:
Daisuke Igarashi (Waseda University)
Takao Ito (Kobe University)
Wakako Kumakura (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)-Alex Mallett (Waseda University)
Nobutaka Nakamachi (Konan University)
Takenori Yoshimura (Daito Bunka University)

Program

Venue: International Conference Center of Waseda University
Conference Room No.1 (3rd Floor)
Saturday, June 15
Themed Day: The Sacred in Mamluk Society
8:45

Registration

9:15

Welcoming Remarks by Tetsuya Ohtoshi (Waseda University)

9:45

Part 1Chair: Carl F. Petry (Northwestern University)-Mehdi Berriah (University of Paris 1 - La Sorbonne/SOAS /UMR 8167)“Visiting the Prophet’s grave: bidʿa or not ? A Case of Divergence and
Theological Debate in the Mamluk Period.”-Daphna Ephrat (The Open University of Israel) “The Shaykh, theSaintly Tomb, and the Sacralization of Space: A View from Mamluk
Palestine”-Hani Hamza (Independent Scholar, Egypt) “The Curious Case of theunrecognized turba of amīr Jirbāsh Qāshiq: New dating and attribution”
11:15

Coffee Break

11:30

Part 2Chair: Alex Mallett (Waseda University)-Aida Gasimova (Baku State University) “Mamluk Sultans, Hurufis andHurufi Poet Nesimi: Portraits from Medieval Arab Sources”-Elise Franssen (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice) “Al-Ṣafadī's al-Faḍl alMunīf fī al-Mawlid al-Sharīf... according to his Taḏkira”1-Kaori Otsuya (Kyoto University/University of Liège) “Reflections of thesacred in the historiography of Medina, city of the Prophet: Ibn Farḥūn
and his Naṣīḥat al-Mushāwir”
13:00

Lunch

14:30

Part 3Chair: Linda Northrup (University of Toronto)-Dotan Arad (Bar-Ilan University) “Moses, Samuel, Elijah and Ezra: The
Cult of Biblical Saints among the Jews in the Mamluk Period”-Asuka Tsuji (Kawamura Gakuen Women's University) “Contesting
Sacred Places in Mamluk Egypt: The Case of Lower Egypt”-Yehoshua Frenkel (University of Haifa) "The Sacred in Mamluk
Society: A Socio-Historical Investigation"
16:00

Coffee Break

16:20

Part 4Chair: Warren C. Schultz (DePaul University)-Eman Shokry Hesham (BTU Cottbus-Sengtenberg) “The Veneration
and Beauty of Marble Floors in Mamluk Mosques in Cairo”-Daniella Talmon-Heller (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) “Muṣḥaf
ʿUthmān and other Qurʾāns in Mamlūk Syria and Egypt”-Richard McGregor (Vanderbilt University) “Relics and Religious
Topography of Mamluk Cairo”
17:50

End

18:30

Reception (with a concert by Arabic violinist Nobuko Kimura)
Venue: Restaurant “Mori-no-Kaze”(15th floor of Okuma Memorial Tower)2

Sunday, June 16
Panels9:15

Mamluk Scholarship and the Transmission of Knowledge
Organizer – Chair: Elias G. Saba (Grinnell College)-Sean W. Anthony (The Ohio State University) “Before all things God
Most High created the light of your prophet from His light”: A Case
Study in How to Forge Ḥadīth in the Post-Classical Period”-Youshaa Patel (Lafayette College) “‘Blessed are the strangers’:
Interpreting an Apocalyptic Hadith”-Garrett Davidson (College of Charleston) “Reassessing the Role ofMamluk Women in Hadith Transmission”-Elias G. Saba (Grinnell College) “Islamic Law as Intellectual
Refinement in the Writing of Badr al-Dīn al-Zarkashī”

11:00

Coffee Break

11:15

Irrigation, Landscapes, and Environment: Towards a History of Mamluk
Agriculture
Organizer: Anthony Quickel (University of Marburg)
Chair: Wakako Kumakura (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)-Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary University of London) “Water
management, iqṭāʿ and tribes in the Fayyum, from Fatimids to theMamluks”-Stuart Borsch (Assumption College) “Water Management and the late
Fatimid Restructuring of Egypt”-Muhammad Shaaban (Queen Mary University of London) “Counting
Dirhams, Olives and Wheat: The Relationship Between Urban

3

Institutions and Endowed Agrarian Property in the Haram al-Sharif
Documents”-Anthony Quickel (University of Marburg) “A Topography of Taste:
Mapping Mamluk Cairo’s Food Markets”
13:00

Lunch

14:30

Mobility of Ideas, Individuals and Goods
Organizer: Abdelkader Al Ghouz (University of Bonn)Chair: Stephan Conermann (University of Bonn)-Abdelkader Al Ghouz (University of Bonn) “Paratexts in commentarymanuscripts and their function of tracing the mobility of ideas”-Bethany Joelle Walker (University of Bonn) “Locally Produced but
Regionally Consumed: The Circulation of Household Goods in the
Syrian Countryside”-Anna Kollatz (University of Bonn) “Mobility in Immobility: Tracing
travelling Narratives in Ibn Iyās’ Writings”

15:50

Coffee Break

16:15

Mamluks and Asia: Views from the East
Organizer – Chair: Nobutaka Nakamachi (Konan University)-Yoichi Isahaya (Hokkaido University) “Maragha across the Euphrates:
The Observatory in Mamluk Sources”-Yihao Qiu (Fudan University) “An Episode of the conflict between
Qaidu and Yuan in Mamluk Chronicle”-Yasuhiro Yokkaichi (Rikkyo University) “From Fārs to Misr: Reexamining the Indian Ocean trade network between the Il-khanate andMamluk Sultanate of Egypt”
4

-Yoichi Yajima (Nara Women’s University) “Diplomatic correspondence
between the Mamluks and the Mongols”
18:00

End

5

Monday, June 17
Panels
9:15

The Material Culture of Mamluk Cairo: Urban Fabric, Building Typology,
and Architectural Detail
Organizer: Naoko Fukami (Cairo Research Station, Japan Society for
the Promotion of Science [JSPS])
Chair: Takenori Yoshimura (Daito Bunka University)-Nicholas Jon Warner (American University in Cairo) “The urban fabricof Mamluk Cairo as represented in Matteo Pagano’s view of 1549”-Naoko Fukami (JSPS) “Typologies of Mamluk religious architecture
and their relation to Ilkhanid, Timurid, and Ottoman forms”-Gentaro Yamada (Tokai University) “Computational-geometrical Studyof Mumluk Muqarnas: Comparative analysis of its morphology using 3Dparametric models”

10:35

Coffee Break

10:50

Intellectual Activities across the Regions in the Mamluk period
Organizer – Chair: Kentaro Sato (Hokkaido University)-Maribel Fierro (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas[CSIC]) “Maliki jurists from the Maghrib in the Mamluk sultanate”-Mayte Penelas (Escuela de Estudios Árabes, CSIC) “Ibn Ḫaldūn’s
Kitāb al-ʿIbar as a Source for Mamluk Scholars on Iberian History”-Abdenour Padillo Soaud (Escuela de Estudios Árabes, CSIC) “Thescholars of the maghrib in the Mamluk madrasas”

6-Teruaki Moriyama (Doshisha University) “From Khurasani “Ashab alHadith” to Mamlukid Shafi‘i School: Succession to the Classical Hadith
Studies”
12:35

Lunch

14:00

Approaching Mamlūk Historiography: Narratologically, Literarily,
Computationally
Organizer: Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna)
Chair: Antonella Ghersetti (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)-Maxim Romanov (University of Vienna) “Computational Historiography:
al-Ḏahabī’s Taʾrīḫ al-islām and His Sources”-Rihab Ben Othmen (Ghent University) “Moving texts: a few remarks on
textual brokerage, intertextuality and authorial identity in the fifteenth
century Mamluk Historiography”-Kenneth Goudie (Ghent University) “A Tale of Two Dawādārs: alBiqāʿī’s Narrative Construction of Īnāl’s Court”-Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont (Ghent University) “The Inbāʾ al-ġumr
bi-abnāʾ al-ʿumr and inter-maḏhab competition: a network analysis casestudy”

15:45

Coffee Break

16:00

The Versatile Approach to the Diplomatic Dialogue
Organizer: Alessandro Rizzo (Milá y Fontanals Institute, CSIC)
Chair: Stephan Conermann (University of Bonn)-Georg Christ (University of Manchester) “"Alexander of our time": Was
Venice part of the Mamluk Islamic Empire?”-Frédéric Bauden (University of Liège) “Brokering power in Mecca:
Rasulid-Mamluk diplomatic exchanges about the Meccan Sharifate”
7

-Malika Dekkiche (University of Antwerp) “Like father like son? Timuridparallel diplomacy with the Mamluk Sultanate”-Alessandro Rizzo (Milá y Fontanals Institute, CSIC) “Beyond the dār alIslām/dār al-ḥarb paradigm: the multiform dialogue between Mamluks
and Christian powers through a diplomatic approach”
17:45

Concluding remarks by Tetsuya Ohtoshi and Frédéric Bauden

18:15

End

19:30

Farewell dinner8

Abstracts of Themed Papers

9Visiting the Prophet’s Grave: Bidʿa or Not ?
A Case of Divergence and Theological Debate in the Mamluk Period.
Mehdi Berriah(University of Paris 1 - La Sorbonne/SOAS/UMR 8167)
Tomb visit was, and still is, a topic about which much has been written in theʿulamā’s sphere. This phenomenon can be explained by the existence of a great
number of hadiths dealing with tombs. But the main reason is probably because
the Sunna encourages visiting tombs, warning in the same time against some
practices, particularly these considered as being acts of širk, the worst sin in Islam.
The case of visiting the Prophet’s grave was an object of controversy during the
Bahri Mamluk period between three contemporaries, each one belonging to adifferent madhab: the malikī qāḍī al-quḍā’, Taqī al-Dīn al-Ikhnā’ī, the hanbali Ibn
Taymiyya and his greatest and most famous refuter, the shāfiʿī qāḍī al-quḍā’ Taqī
al-Dīn al-Subkī. All these scholars have written about the subject. In many of his
writings, Ibn Taymiyya defends the opinion that if Muslims go to Medina it’s only
to visit the Prophet mosque and not his grave, considering the latter action as areligious innovation (bidʿa). On this last point, al-Ikhnā’ī and Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkīadopted antagonist position, the second refuted explicitly Ibn Taymiyya’s opinion.
The debate on the visit of the Prophet’s tomb was intense and fiery as the numberof works it produced during a short period testifies; each camp needed to refute
the other. Besides, the debate was also so violent; Ibn Taymiyya’s Radd ʿalā alIkhnā’iyya as response to al-Ikhnā’ī led him to prison where he eventually died.
Based on Arabic sources this submission proposes to shed light on themost important theological debates of the Bahri Mamluk period; on the one hand,by analysing the discourse of each scholar and, on the other hand, by confronting
their religious arguments to understand how the visit of the Prophet’s grave in
Medina was simultaneously encouraged and criticized during the same period.

10The Shaykh, the Saintly Tomb, and the Sacralization of Space:
A View from Mamluk Palestine
Daphna Ephrat(The Open University of Israel)
The proposed paper forms a part of my ongoing research on the creation ofsaintly spheres around charismatic Sufi shaykhs who lived in Bilad al-Shamduring the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. Focusing on Palestinian cities and theirenvirons and placed within the broader context of the spread of the cults of saints
from the twelfth century onwards, the investigation is designed to offer
observations on the traditions, material means, and rituals that transformed theburial place of the Sufi saint into a sacralized space, central to Islamic piety,communal religious life, and the belief in the miraculous.
In studying the life-stories of the saintly figures, leaders of the spiritualpaths that spread in the region, the paper analyzes the traditions that embed themin the particular environment and bind them to regional and local scared history
and topography. In particular, the discussion seeks to highlight how Mamluk
authors tied the charismatic shaykhs to the glorious jihad traditions of thePalestinian coastal towns and incorporated their burial places into an expanding
landscape of sacred sites that began to take shape in the counter-Crusader
period. These include narratives that extol their extraordinary virtues and marvels,
lodge and tomb foundation legends, and descriptions of the devotional practices
that highlighted the significance of the site and maintained its sacredness. In
studying the concrete place that gave materiality to the presence of thecharismatic shaykh and served as arenas to his baraka, I use complementary
evidence, such a accounts that locate the burial places and describe thedevelopment of the site around them, inscriptions affixed to site, and physicalremnants. Through this analysis the paper seeks to contribute to the study of thelocal manifestations of the emplacement of spiritual power during a seminal
period in the history of in the spread of Sufism and the elevation of the Sufi shaykh
authority into new heights. Perspectives from social and anthropological studies
on the embodiments of charisma and the creation of landscapes of memories
surrounding venerated figures are designed to enrich the discussion of theparticular case study.

11

The Curious Case of the Unrecognized Turba of Amīr Jirbāsh Qāshiq:
New Dating and Attribution
Hani Hamza(Independent Scholar, Egypt)
The borderline between the sacred and profane, the living and the dead are so
blurred in the Mamluk Northern Cemetery of Cairo as in no other place in Egypt.
Sacred burial domes, prayer chapels, mosques, ṣūfī khanqās and zawīyyas
stood side by side with profane residential quarters, kitchens, latrines, stables,
kutābs and sabīls scattered around a ḥaūsh enclosed by a wall. The Northern
Cemetery was dotted with over a hundred of such Mamluk turba complexes,
many perished but thirty-five survived.
The majority of surviving turbas are identified with certainty but few havecontroversial attribution or doubtful dating. One surviving turba stands out as not
being recognized at all, let alone given attribution or date. This is the peculiarcase of the turba of Jirbāsh Qāshiq (d. 861/1456) standing between thecomplexes of Īnāl and of Qurqumāṣ at the edge of the Northern Cemetery.
Plan of Ῑnāl’s complex (855-60/1451-56) has a peculiar square area
protruding uncomfortably to the west, now in semi ruins. It was identified
empirically by the Comite in 1919 as courtyard C of the complex of Ῑnāl. None of
the later studies challenged this attribution. This paper will discuss the vague
attribution of three turbas in the area in general, and as a case study challenges
the Comite’s attribution of the ḥaush C as part of Īnāl’s complex; it proposes that
it is a separate turba for Jirbāsh Qāshiq. This conclusion is reached throughreading of several waqf manuscripts, comparison with other monuments of thesame genre and era, biographical dictionaries and chronicles. A plan and a threedimensional re-construction of the turba are drawn as well.

12Mamlūk Sultans, Ḥurūfīs and Ḥurūfī Poet Nesīmī:Portraits from Medieval Arab Sources
Aida Gasimova(Baku State University)‘Imāduddīn Nesīmī (d.1417-18) is one of the prominent figures of Medieval Azeri
Turkic literature. Although his poetry testifies the variability of his philosophicalthoughts, his name associates with Ḥurūfī teaching; the poet was a follower ofFaḍlullāh Astarābādī (d.1394), and a passionate agitator of Ḥurūfism. Nesīmī
was a martyr who suffered painful death by skinning alive that “raised him in theeyes of many to a level near that of sainthood”(Burrill). The poet suffered fromthe orthodox inquisitional policy of Egyptian Mamlūks who established theirauthority over Syria in the poet’s lifetime. Particularly Sulṭān al-Muayyad and his
followers demonstrated cruel pressure against Ḥurūfīs, although subsequentlyQanṣūh al-Ghūrī (d. 1516) showed sympathy towards Nesīmī and Ḥurūfī tenet.
The present paper aims to investigate Medieval Arab sources to shed light on
Orthodox persecutions of Ḥurūfīs during the reign of Mamlūk dynasty in Egypt
and Syria. The following sources will be analyzed: al-Nujūm al-zāhirah by ibn
Taghrīburdī; Anbā’ al-ghumr bi-abnā’ al-‘umr by ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d.1449);
Kunūz al-dhahab fī tārīkh Ḥalab by Sibṭ ibn al-‘Ajamī al-Ḥalabī (d. 1479); alYawāqīt wa-l-jawāhir fī bayān ‘aqā’id al-akābir al-ṣūfiyah by ‘Abd al-Wahhāb alSha‘arānī (d.1565); Shadharāt al-dhahab by ibn al-‘Imād Shihāb al-dīnḤanbalī (d. 1678).

13

al-

Al-Ṣafadī's al-Faḍl al-Munīf fī al-Mawlid al-Sharīf...
According to his Taḏkira
Elise Franssen(Università Ca' Foscari, Venice)Ṣalāḥ al-dīn Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī (m. 764/1363) is the author, among manyother books, of a small treatise about the Prophet's mawlid, entitled al-Faḍl alMunīf fī al-Mawlid al-Sharīf, wa-Yalīh ʿIbrat al-Labīb bi-ʿAthrat al-Kaʾīb (ed. M.
ʿĀyish, 2007). This short text will be contextualised in the Mamluk period interestfor saints and ṣūfī spirit.
Al-Ṣafadī also kept a reading journal, the Taḏkirah (al-ṣalāḥiyya), where
he would write excerpts of texts he thought of interest, texts he read, received orcomposed, in the frame of his personal or professional activities, and texts hewould reuse later on in the frame of his scholarly activities.
At least one holograph volume of the Taḏkira, the 44th, is preserved, andit features the very first version of al-Faḍl al-Munīf fī al-Mawlid al-Sharīf... This
unique testimony of the sacred in the Mamluk period finishes with a samāʿ thus
giving us first hand information about the use and interets for this kind of texts.
More broadly, it will be the occasion to understand better this important author's
methodology.
The close study of the text and of its paratext will allow us to draw a
precise image of the text conditions of composition and first transmission.

14

Reflections of the sacred in the historiography of Medina, city of theProphet:Ibn Farḥūn and his Naṣīḥat al-Mushāwir
Kaori Otsuya(Kyoto University/University of Liège)
While remarkable works on the historiography of Egypt and Syria have been
published, studies have not fully examined the historiography of the holy city ofMedina, with the exception of a few works including Munt’s recent study on alSamhūdī. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the history of Medina as
provided in: Naṣīḥat al-Mushāwir by Ibn Farḥūn (d. 769/1367), who was born ina Medinan scholarly family, and became the first Mālikī judge in Medina.
First, I will outline the political situation of Medina and the life of Ibn
Farḥūn including his career and his motivation for writing the history of Medina.
Of utmost significance in this respect is that during the first half of the Mamluk
period, the Sinān family of Medinan amirs seemed to adhere to the Imāmī branchof the Shia and opposed Sunni scholars. Second, I examine how Ibn Farḥūn
emphasized the virtue of the Prophet’s Mosque by quoting anecdotes of theProphet, his companions, and preceding scholars. Third, I discuss how hedescribes various “bid͑as” that these “rāfiḍūn” did in the Prophet’s Mosque, andhow Sunni scholars opposed the amir’s family and eventually improved
conditions for Sunnis. In this manner, I propose to explore how a Medinan
historian tried to incorporate sacredness of the Prophet’s Mosque into his work
to support his view of the contemporary history and to express his ideas on what
the Medinan society should be like.

15

Moses, Samuel, Elijah and Ezra:
The Cult of Biblical Saints among the Jews in the Mamluk Period
Dotan Arad
(Bar-Ilan University)
The Jews of the Mamluk Sultanate had an advantage over their brethren in
Europe and other places. They lived in the lands where biblical events had
happened and had the privilege to visit the tombs of Biblical and Talmudic figures.
The tombs of the Patriarchs (in Hebron), of the Prophet Samuel (near Jerusalem)and of Joseph (in Nablus) were central places of worship.
But the cult of saints among the Jews in Syria, Palestine and Egypt was
not limited to prayers near sacred tombs. Two of the figures who were very central
in the popular religious life in the Mamluk period, Moses and Elijah, had no graveat all. According to the Bible, the location of Moses’ tomb is unknown, while Elijah
arrived in heaven alive. How do Jews commemorate those figures? Which places
were sanctified to Moses and Elijah and what was the character of the worshipthere? What gave the figure of Ezra the Scribe such a special importance in the
Jewish mind in this period?
Discussing these questions can help us to clarify the nature of thereligious life of the Jews in Syria, Palestine and Egypt and to illuminate thecentrality of the sacred in their consciousness. Their religious life wascharacterized with a deep connection to the Biblical (and Talmudic) figures,
special rites, which they shared with the local Muslims, and a variety of traditions
and legends, which will be partly presented in the lecture. The different questions
above will be discussed in the light of various sources: travel literature, Genizah
documents, Responsa literature and more.

16

Contesting Sacred Places in Mamluk Egypt:
The Case of Lower Egypt
Asuka Tsuji(Kawamura Gakuen Women's University)
Claiming sacred places as their own is a phenomenon witnessed in Egypt sinceLate Antiquity. The period first witnessed the destruction of temples and theirtransformation into churches, as well as that of its cults, such as that of Goddess
Isis, into the Cult of Saints, thereby the transformation of their pilgrimage sites aswell. The same phenomenon emerged during the Islamic period when churches
and Christian holy places were transformed into mosques and Muslim sites ofveneration. Such changes in the religious environment continued until the
Mamluk period, as presented in this paper.
I would like to draw attention to the itinerary of a little-known Coptic
saint/ascetic Yuhanna al-Rabban, who wandered from village to village in the
Gharbiya province in the late thirteenth to the early fourteenth centuries. His
travels, as described in his Sira or Life, overlap those of Ahmad al-Badawi’s
disciples, who were, as claimed in their biographies, instrumental in spreading
his cult in the Gharbiya as well, approximately during the same period.
One of the functions of hagiographies in Late Antiquity was to record
place names in connection to a certain saint and claim the place “sacred” or“Christianized.” Could it be that the same happened during the Mamluk period,
but due to Muslim saints, and that Christians tried to fight against it? If so, then towhat extent were they successful? Could this challenge the image of Islamization
as a one-way street?

17

The Sacred in Mamluk Society:
A Socio-Historical Investigation
Yehoshua Frenkel(University of Haifa)
Years ago Emile Durkheim constructed the dichotomy model of sacred andprofane, a pattern that was taken up by later scholars. This paradigm, I believe,
can serve for studying the history of Late Middle Islamic Period societies.
It is widely accepted that the Mamluk sultans relied on Islam as the major
source of legitimacy. Administrative manuals clearly illuminate the role of the almuḥtasib, who was nominated to impose law and order. Evidently his duties werebased upon an Islamic perception of shared social imagination (Q. 3: 104).
Contemporary sources make it evident that the Sultanate’s rulers andtheir subjects were guided by belief in the supernatural. We can distinguish three
prototypes of sacred components in Mamluk existence:
1) Persons- Sufi authors regularly mention friends of God (awliya). Mamluk
period Muslims highly believed in saints’ blessing power (karāma) and their
miraculous intervention in cosmic order (mu‛jiza).
2) Space- Supported by legal deeds, contemporaneous narrative sources
illuminate holy places (ḥaram) that attracted visitors and pilgrims, who
hoped to gain blessing (baraka). Religious institutions dominated the urban
landscape.
3) Time and Rituals- The third department were, not surprisingly, thepresence of sanctity is observable are clearly perceived religious events thatcreate liminal conditions. Rituals were a sacred time of elevation. Sufi dhikrs(Q. 33: 35) can be delineated as such arena. The participants werepromised to generate positive energy (ḥasanāt).
The aim of this short contribution is to expose documented evidences ofsoldiers’ and civilians’ aspirations to draw close to sources of sacred inspiration:
to dwell in a sacred place, to be in the circle that engulfed an admired sheikh, totouch sacred items and to participate in religious rituals. These data material will
be used to depict the cultural history, sacred topography and the high visibility ofsearch for holy and explain the social role of the sacred in Mamluk circles.

18

The Veneration and Beauty of Marble Floors in Mamluk Mosques in Cairo
Eman Shokry Hesham(BTU Cottbus-Sengtenberg/The German Archaeological Institute Cairo)
The art and architecture of the Mamluk style in Cairo have dominated thearchitectural and urban character of Historic Cairo. Not only as part of its urban
tissue, but the Mamluk architectural details also have contributed to the spiritualand the sacred of the interiors, prayer and study courts.
The key architectural details vary, from glass windows, minibars, marble
Qiblahs, to marble floors in courts. The marble floors, in particular, enjoy uniqueand magnificent patterns and colors that complement the wholeness of thestructure and its religious and spiritual role of the mosque buildings. Very recently,
scholars start to focus more on such architectural details such as glass windows
and minibars for documentation and protection reasons. Whereas, little havebeen conducted to give more attention to the marble floors, and having astandardized documentation for them have been underestimated.
This paper focuses on the design of patterns of three courts in threemosques in Cairo built in the Mamluk era. After proper documentation is provided
in it, the paper tries to understand and construe the meaning of the patterns andtheir contribution to both the veneration and beauty of these mosques.
This paper is the nucleus to build a database for the marble floors ofMamluk mosques and madrasas in Cairo. The main objectives are to make astandardized documentation of what still remains of these marble floor patterns,
and to explore beyond to reinterpret them and perhaps discuss their integration
possibilities in new structures.

19Muṣḥaf ʿUthmān and Other Qurʾāns in Mamlūk Syria and Egypt
Daniella Talmon-Heller(Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
The fourteenth-century Syrian historian and commentator Ibn Kathīr labels theancient Qurʾān that was held in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus "the bestknown of the ʿUthmānī muṣḥafs." He describes it as a great, precious, noble book,
written on parchment in steadfast ink in a good hand, and adds: "May God add
to its honour, greatness and reverence." Ibn Baṭṭūṭa notes that Damascenes
swore oaths (yuḥlifu) on this particular muṣḥaf and treat it as a sacred relic.
Chroniclers mention that on several occasion in the 12th-15th centuries it was
taken out of its usual place and paraded, in order to ward off danger or deal witha crisis. Fearing defeat at the hand of the Ottomans, the last Mamlūk sultan,
Ghawri, allegedly deposited an ʿUthmānī Qurʾān and a few other relics in thefortress of Alexandria, planning to take the collection with him to North Africa.
In line with the recent ‘material turn’ in Religious Studies - calling for ashift of emphasis from texts to things and from thought to practice, as betterreflecting the religion of the people - my paper will focus on the sacred object of
the Qurʾān in Mamlūk society. I will pay special attention to a couple of ancient
copies known as muṣḥaf ʿUthmān, which enjoyed excessive veneration, as
reflected in the examples above. I will analyze their use as cultic objects, precious
gifts, political assets, symbols and relics. I will also draw on Mamlūk-era legal andprescriptive literature for the rules of proper conduct with all copies of the Qurʾān;
regarding ritual purity, safe keeping, touching, holding, kissing and adorning ofQurʾān codices, and the disposing of copies damaged beyond use. Data about
actual practices of Muslims - namely the employment of the codex in ceremonial,
judicial, talismanic and therapeutic contexts, both in the public and in the private
spheres (collected from sporadic reports in biographical dictionaries, chronicles,
and travelers' accounts) - will be presented as well.

20

Relics and Religious Topography of Mamluk Cairo
Richard McGregor(Vanderbilt University)
Any survey of Egyptian and Syrian relics of the medieval period encounters awide variety of objects. Records from the period show that believers’ contact withsuch objects took place within a web of competing significations, with relics
regularly shifting location, adopting new identities, and evoking various devotionaland ritual responses. From the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, various politicalprojects were launched to collect the most valuable relics of the region, and toengineer pilgrimage itineraries; while in Syria, a distinct practice associating
Prophetic relics with libraries and hadith study developed (e.g. al-madrasa alAshrafiyya). In Mamluk Egypt, relics gave birth to new institutions expressly
intended for their display and promotion (e.g. Ribat al-athar al-Nabi, or Shrine of
Sayyidna Husayn). Using sources such as al-Maqrizi, al-Sakhawi, and Ibn
Taymiyya.

21

Abstracts of Panel Papers

22Panel 1: Mamluk Scholarship and the Transmission of Knowledge
This panel explores the ways in which the tradition of scholarly knowledge wastransmitted in the Mamluk Sultanate. Although we now know a great deal about
learning institutions, practices for teaching and learning, and book writing, thispanel investigates three cases of the transmission of knowledge and its adaption
in the Mamluk Sultanate. Sean Anthony’s paper offers a look into the practice ofhadith forgery in Mamluk Cairo. Through a study of the biography of Muḥammad
written by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qasṭallānī, he sheds light on the malleability of history.
Youshaa Patel, meanwhile, looks at the interpretation of the hadith of al-ghurabāʾin a variety of Mamluk sources to see how Mamluk jurists adopted andunderstood the concept of strangers. Garrett Davidson’s paper studies the roleof women as hadith transmitters. Davidson shows how women’s involvement inhadith transmission was not a product of a scholarly education, but rather of long
lives and, consequently, the unusually elevated chains of transmission theysometimes possessed. Finally, Elias G. Saba’s paper explores the legal
dictionary, al-Manthūr fī al-qawāʿid of Badr al-Dīn al-Zarkashī. By analyzing alZarkashī’s description of Islamic law, Saba demonstrates how this work presents
a novel conceptualization of Islamic law through examples from Islamic legal
history. Taken together, these four papers reveal the vibrant Mamluk
engagement with the Islamic heritage and how they shaped this heritage for
future scholars.
Organizer – Chair: Elias G. Saba

PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Sean W. Anthony (Associate Professor; The Ohio State University; USA)
Before all things God Most High created the light of your prophet from His
light”: A Case Study in How to Forge Ḥadīth in the Post-Classical Period
The Cairene scholar Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qasṭallānī (d. 923/1517) composed one of
the most influential biographical treatises on the prophet Muḥammad to emerge
23

from the Mamluk period, al-Mawāhib al-ladunniyyah. In its opening passages, thebook reproduces a ḥadīth attributed to the famed Companion Jābir ibn ʿAbdallāhal-Anṣārī in which the Prophet narrates his creation from God’s own divine light
before the creation of all things. Although previously a familiar theme in popularnarratives of Muḥammad’s birth, by the stroke of his pen al-Qasṭallānī here gives
the tradition a scholarly pedigree and cites the revered early muḥaddith ʿAbd alRazzāq al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 211/827) as his authoritative source. This paper examines
the veracity of al-Qasṭallānī’s citation and explores the intellectual debates
between Ṣūfīs and traditionalists, and even a modern manuscript forgery, that
followed in its wake.

Panelist 2
Youshaa Patel (Assistant Professor; Lafayette College; USA)
‘Blessed are the strangers’: Interpreting an Apocalyptic Hadith
According to a hadith transmitted by Muslim (d. 261/875) in his Ṣaḥīḥ, the Prophet
told his companions, “Islam began strange, and will [one day] return to being
strange—just as it began—so blessed are the strangers (ṭūbā li’l-ghurabāʾ).”
Other hadiths further define this idea of estrangement, strengthening the hadith’s
apocalyptic tone. Today, many followers of extremist groups such as ISIS callthemselves ghurabāʾ, or strangers, but how did pre-modern religious authorities— Sufis, jurists, theologians, and historians — understand this concept? In thispaper, I trace the reception of the hadith of al-ghurabāʾ during the Mamluk period,
documenting its interpretation in a range of religious texts, including encyclopedic
hadith commentaries, fatwa collections, and independent treatises such as Kashf
al-kurba bi-waṣf ḥāl ahl al-ghurba by Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī (d. 795/1393), in apreliminary attempt to compose a conceptual history of nonconformity inmedieval Islamic thought.

Panelist 3
Garrett Davidson (Assistant Professor; College of Charleston; USA)
Reassessing the Role of Mamluk Women in Hadith Transmission24Mamluk sources preserve a substantial body of evidence attesting to the activerole Muslim women played in the transmission of hadith. Recent studies ofwomen hadith transmitters have, however, misinterpreted much of this material,
inferring that because women participated in the transmission of hadith they musthave also participated in learning and scholarship. This paper reassesses thenature of women’s participation in Mamluk hadith transmission, demonstratingthat contrary to claims made in previous studies, the evidence instead shows thatthe vast majority of women hadith transmitters, like many of their malecounterparts, had no training in the texts they transmitted. While there were
women who were both scholars and transmitters, such as the famous transmitterof the Ṣaḥīḥ, Karīma al-Marwaziyya, these women were the exception not therule. Most of the women who engaged in transmission in the Mamluk period had
little if any knowledge of the texts they transmitted. In fact, a significant body ofevidence suggests that the majority of these women were likely illiterate. Many ofthese women, nonetheless, become prominent transmitters, not for any learningor scholarly reputation, but for their longevity and the short chains of transmission
they possessed as a result. Indeed, it is shown that in almost all of the more thana thousand cases analyzed, these women audited hadith, or received ijāzas, as
young very children or even infants, then have no contact with the world oflearning and scholarship until they had outlived most of their peers and are soughtout by hadith collectors not for any knowledge of the texts they transmitted, but
for the unusually elevated chain of transmission they now possessed.

Panelist 4
Elias G. Saba (Lecturer; Grinnell College; USA)
Islamic Law as Intellectual Refinement in the Writing of Badr al-Dīn alZarkashī
Al-Manthūr fī al-qawāʿid by Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Bahādur al-Zarkashī (d.
794/1392) is an alphabetically arranged legal companion to Islamic law. The
entries contain definitions of legal terms, discussions about legal cases (masāʾil),
explanations of legal maxims, and more. The work begins with a brief theoretical
discussion of Islamic law, in which legal distinctions are a core component of25

Islamic law. Additionally, knowledge of Islamic law included mastery oversubstantive law, legal scaffolding, difficult questions (muṭāraḥāt), sophisticalargumentation (? mughālatāṭ), examinations (mumtaḥināt), riddles (al-alghāz),legal strategems (ḥiyal), knowledge of legal scholars, and familiarity with precepts
and maxims (al-ḍawābiṭ wa-l-qawāʿid). Of the ten components of Islamic law, alZarkashī only includes entries for muṭāraḥāt, mughālatāṭ, mumtaḥināt, and ḥiyal
in the main body of his text, discussions of the rest are interspersed throughout
the volumes of this texts. It is possible that al-Zarkashī defines these components
because he feels they are less understood than the others. Certainly, muṭāraḥāt,mughālatāṭ, and mumtaḥināt are parts of Islamic law that do not figure into
twenty-first century expositions on Islamic law. In his discussions of the four
components, however, al-Zarkashī is interested in justifying them throughappeals to past practice, of the Prophet and of early jurists. This paper
demonstrates how al-Zarkashī presents a particular and novel conceptualizationof Islamic law through his discussion of Islamic law’s history.

26

Panel 2: Irrigation, Landscapes, and Environment: Towards a History of
Mamluk Agriculture
While the agricultural history of Mamluk Egypt, especially in economic terms, isbeing better comprehended, the environmental and rural history of the provinceremains greatly understudied. This panel hopes to expand beyond the taxable
and economic study of Egyptian agriculture and land use and look at therelationships between the regime and the natural environment, the urban and therural settings, and the relationship of people to the spaces they occupied. As
irrigation and water-usage is fundamental to understanding Egypt’s rural history,
several of the papers in the panel highlight dynamic changes in irrigation overtime. They will examine the agency and collaboration of state and local actors indesigning irrigation systems and making decisions over allocation of water rights.
Furthermore, the panel will introduce the EGYLandscape Project, a joint
French/German cooperation with an international scope, that will set out toexplore the changing nature of the Egyptian landscape and environment during
the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (thirteenth to eighteenth centuries). The
EGYLandscape Project proposes a multi-disciplinary approach that combines
traditional textual analysis alongside archeological findings and new digital
methods like GIS-mapping. This panel will illustrate some of the possibilities ofthis approach and give a sample of the sorts of research that the project will
hopefully produce in the coming years while also showing the exciting directionthat Mamluk Egypt’s rural and environmental history is taking.
Organizer: Anthony Quickel
Chair: Wakako Kumakura (Assistant Professor; Tokyo University of Foreign
Studies)

PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Yossef Rapoport (Reader in Islamic history, Queen Mary University of London;
UK)

27

Water Management, Iqṭāʿ and Tribes in the Fayyum, from Fatimids to theMamluks
This paper will describe the development of the irrigation system of the Fayyum
from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, based on the uniquely rich sources
for the history of the province. Fatimid-era sources show the Fatimid state to be
directly involved in the supply and management of water resources. An irrigation
schedule dating from 421/1030 CE, based on a survey (kashf) of the mainbranches of the canals in the Fayyum, includes a thorough technical explanationof the structure and function of the Lahun Dam, the locations of the main canals,
the water rights of each village unit, and the schedule of opening and closing of
the main canals. Another eleventh-century account shows that the key event in
the annual cycle of local irrigation, the blocking of the Dam at al-Lahun, was an
official ceremony attended by the local governor.
Following the great crisis of 1068-1073, which led to desertion of villages
on the edges of the province, and as a result of decentralisation brought about
through the introduction of the iqṭāʿ system in the twelfth century, managementof water resources has been devolved to local officials and village communities.
When al-Nābulusī visited the province in 643/1245, his main informant on thelocal irrigation system is the khawlī al-baḥr (Overseer of the Canal). The annual
blocking of the dam at al-Lahun is described as led by self-appointed engineersfrom among the local villagers. Management of water rights appears to have been
based on tribal networks, and amirs who hold fragmentary iqṭāʿ¬ units had limited
influence on the water supply. While some aspects of this process may have beenunique to the Fayyum, I will argue that the same picture was probably true ofother Egyptian provinces under the Ayyubids and the Bahri Mamluk sultans.

Panelist 2
Stuart Borsch (Professor; Assumption College; USA)
Water Management and the late Fatimid Restructuring of Egypt
I present here a theory that explains why Egypt, c. 1100 CE, transformed its
internal structure by creating large provinces in the place of the much smaller28

kuras, and argue that water management must have been a primaryconsideration.
By the eleventh century, an increasing number of large-scale flood canals(the largest and longest in the Nile Delta: those which were taking the place ofthe old Deltaic river channels) were calling for effective water management. When
new provincial boundaries were created, it is striking that the boundaries of the
new provinces match exactly the boundaries of the individual water management
systems, canal-by-canal. It seems that the intention was that each of these twelve
or so large-scale canals be contained within a single province, a single-water
management system. And therefore, though there could be more than one canalper province, the general rule seems to have been that a canal should not crossprovincial boundaries. Quantitative simulation, the water law texts, and Ayyubidmemoranda make the case that regional control of water law (and a singleauthority for each canal) was a necessary corollary for what was a relatively new
system of large-scale flood canal; after all, the sharing of canals or watermanagement across provincial boundaries would have presented the risk ofwater conflict. I will use spatial mapping, documentary evidence, and quantitative
hydraulic simulation to show how the dictates of water management account forand explain this comprehensive alteration to Egypt’s administrative structure that
included its internal geography (kūra to ʿamal), its political governance (ṣāḥib alkūra to wālī), and its economy (qabāla system to regional statist).

Panelist 3
Muhammad Shaaban (Graduate Student; Queen Mary University of London; UK)
Counting Dirhams, Olives and Wheat: The Relationship Between Urban
Institutions and Endowed Agrarian Property in the Haram al-Sharif
Documents
The relationship between urban religious institutions and the endowed agrarian
properties that helped fund them has often been a subject of scholarly attention.
Recent scholarship has focused on the growing agrarian assets of endowmentsin the late medieval period, especially in Egypt, from the perspective of politicaldevelopments or socio-economic disasters like the Black Death. This macro lensvantage point provides evidence of historical trends but also leaves many29

questions unanswered. While the extensive building programs of Mamluk sultans
and amirs left an indelible imprint on the urban landscape, changes in theagrarian landscape which funded and fed these institutions are relatively opaqueand largely unexplored in comparison. This paper will examine records found in
the Haram al-Sharif collection in order to discuss issues of fiscal and asset
management that will tackle these changes from a different perspective. An
exploration of these records will not only provide a better understanding of how
agrarian properties helped fund endowments, thereby placing their growing
popularity in the late Mamluk period in the context of recent scholarship, but also
demonstrate the ways in which endowments influenced agricultural development
and markets.
The accounting records, declarations and other legal documents found in
this collection provide a closer view of the interactions between urban and rural
environments. These sources offer perspectives from the managerial aspect ofendowments past the point of their inception documented in endowment deeds.
The mundane but far more revealing daily operations of specific institutions
permits individual case studies that can be integrated into the larger discussion
on these developments for a more nuanced understanding, thereby posing
further avenues of inquiry.

Panelist 4
Anthony Quickel (Graduate Student; Philipps-Universität Marburg; Germany)
A Topography of Taste: Mapping Mamluk Cairo’s Food Markets
The layout of Mamluk Cairo’s marketplaces and their orientation and distribution
throughout the city is increasingly being understood. Critical to studying thesemarkets is an understanding that their positioning within the city was
representative of various factors, most of which were economic in nature, but also
relating to demographic change and sultanic policy. The food markets of the city
are a highly illustrative example of this process of siting and spacing, sometimes
determinedly, markets throughout the city’s quarters. This paper will explore theaspects of the spatiality of food markets in Mamluk Cairo as both a consequenceof the historical urban development of the city but also with regards to changing
economic (especially agricultural) and environmental realities. Examples of these30

transformations or critical factors include the shifting course of the Nile, the city’s
trade with Bilad al-Sham, Cairo’s grain and sugar supplies, and more. Thus, thispaper will show that by looking at the topography of the city’s food markets
alongside the historical and economic developments of the Mamluk Sultanate, amore complete portrait of the economic and urban development of the city may
be gained as well as glimpses to the state of the Mamluk rural and naturalenvironment.

31Panel 3: Mobility of Ideas, Individuals and Goods in the Mamluk Period
Bilād al-Shām and its neighbours are considered in this panel not as ageographically clear-cut area but rather as a multiply interconnected space. This
space is formed and re-formed by human acts and interaction crossing andtranscending spatial, social and cultural boundaries. Mobility of ideas, individuals
and goods is characteristic for this space of interaction: the physical movements
of individuals and groups, i.e. social mobility along horizontal and vertical lines;
mobility between social positions and within hierarchies; but also the mobility ofknowledge expressed in the ‘movement’ and transfer of ideas, images anddifferent aspects of material culture. The aim of this panel is to shed light on themobility of ideas, individuals and goods in the Mamluk Period from a crossdisciplinary perspective.
Organizer: Abdelkader Al Ghouz
Chair: Stephan Conermann (Professor; University of Bonn; Germany)

PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Abdelkader Al Ghouz (Research Associate and Scientific Co-ordiantor;
Annemarie-Schimmel-Kolleg, University of Bonn; Germany)
Paratexts in Commentary Manuscripts and their Function of Tracing the
Mobility of Ideas
The Sunni-Ashʿarīte theologian and chief judge (qāḍī al-quḍāt) ʿAbd Allāh alBayḍāwī (d. 1316) composed his theological treatise entitled Ṭawāliʿ al-Anwār
min Maṭāliʿ al-Anẓār in Tabriz. A remarkable number of commentaries were
written on al-Bayḍāwī’s Ṭawāliʿ in Mamluk Cairo from the fourteenth to thebeginning of the sixteenth century. For instance, the Ashʿarīte theologian Shams
al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī composed – on behalf of the Mamluk ruler al-Nāṣir Muḥammad
Ibn Qalāwūn (d. 741/1341) – a commentary on the Ṭawāliʿ entitled Maṭāliʿ alAnẓār Sharḥ Ṭawāliʿ al-Anwār. In the Mamluk period, the Maṭāliʿ al-Anẓār enjoyed32

wide popularity among theologians and philosophers who wrote many glosses
and super-glosses on it.
This paper is formed of two main parts. The first part – based on network
analysis – expounds al-Iṣfahānī’s network with the Damascene and Cairene
political and intellectual elites that led to the composition of the commentaryMaṭāliʿ al-Anẓār and its diffusion in the Mamluk period. Using Gerard Genette’s
literary concept of paratext, the second part of this paper sheds light onparatextual evidences of different individual copies of Maṭāliʿ al-Anẓār in order to
identify some aspects of the social context of these manuscripts and to trace thekinds of scholarly hubs in which al-Iṣfahānī’s philosophical ideas circulated.

Panelist 2
Bethany Joelle Walker (Chair of Mamluk Studies/Research Professor (tenured,
life-time appointment) and Co-Director; Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg of Mamluk
Studies, Department of Islamic Studies, University of Bonn; Germany)
Locally Produced but Regionally Consumed: The Circulation of Household
Goods in the Syrian Countryside
A tight network of villages and smaller communities developed in the Syrian
countryside from the 14th century under the impact of investment into travel andtransport infrastructure by the Mamluk government and exponential growth in thenumber and diversity of rural markets. As a result, peasants were highly mobile
and in regular contact with villages at some distance away. While these networks
and this physical mobility are hinted at by contemporary written sources, they are
vividly illustrated by the archaeological record, in the form of portable objects,
travelers’ graffiti, and production and storage facilities and their region-wide
distribution.
This paper highlights the role that the circulation of everyday goods –both consumable commodities and household accoutrements – in the
countryside played in reinforcing rural social and economic networks. It will centeron the production of typical course wares (handmade table wares and cookingpots) and the cultivation/husbandry of food staples of the period (namely
particular kinds of cereals, sugar cane molasses, olive oil, fish, and mutton) andtheir circulation among rural communities, near and far. The geographical scope33

of the paper in southern Bilād al-Shām (Transjordan and Palestine), with aparticular focus on the results of ongoing fieldwork at the castle-village site of TallḤisbān in central Jordan and the amiral estate of Khirbet Beit Mamzil outside
Jerusalem. Formal archaeological and laboratory analysis of domestic pottery,food remains, and agricultural fields from these two highland sites, compared withpublished results from other rural sites in the region and a critical readings ofrelevant period sources, suggest ways in which highly mobile “things” brought
people in closer contact with one another.

Panelist 3
Anna Kollatz (Research Associate and Board Member, SFB 1167 “Macht andHerrschaft: Premodern Configurations in a Transcultural Perspective”;
University of Bonn; Germany)
Mobility in Immobility: Tracing travelling Narratives in Ibn Iyās’ Writings
Ibn Iyās’ Badāʾiʿ az-Zuhūr is one of the most widely received sources, especiallyfor the transition period of the 15th and 16th centuries in Egypt. The complete
works of the historiographer, by contrast, have received little attention so far.
While the historical author, after all we know, practically did not leave hishometown Cairo, his texts deal with the history of the whole Levant. Out ofrelative immobility they consider a broad time frame in which social, military,economic and individual mobilities shaped history. Yet a high degree ofintertextual mobility of narratives, plots and narrative structures can be observed
between the individual texts from Ibn Iyās' pen. This lecture follows thosenarratives and plots that appear again and again in the various writings of thehistoriographer. How does the representation of individual events change? Is it
possible to dissect a working process among the sources that were createdsequentially or in parallel? Along which criteria does Ibn Iyās process hismaterial?

34

Panel 4: Mamluks and Asia: Views from the East
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Mamluk Society was forced toconfront the wave of globalization of those era, so-called, the Pax Mongolica. Not
only the Mamluk government had diplomatic relationship with the Mongol Empire,
but also intellectuals and merchants exchanged their knowledge, materials, andculture with the Eastern countries. This panel aims to shed a light to the Asianconnections of the Mamluk Sultanate in the fields of intellectual history,
philological study, and archival study.
Yoichi Isahaya, comparing the descriptions of the Maragha observatory
between the Mamluk sources and the Ilkhanate narratives, reveals unknown
relationship between the Ilkhanate intellectual center and the Mamluk scholars.
Yihan Qiu surveys Baybars al-Mansuri’s reports on a conflict between Qaidu andQubilai Qa’an and analyzes how and why the Mamluk historian get to acquaintthe event, which occurred in the Mongol Empire. Yoichi Yajima examines
diplomatic correspondence between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mongol
Empire and demonstrates a particular style of the documents from Mamluk to
Mongol. Yasuhiro Yokkaichi, refferring to the collection of the Rasulid official
documents, Nur al-Ma’arif, illustrates the multilateral trading network of Indian
Ocean merchants, from China, via Kish and Hormuz, to Mamluk Hijaz and Cairo.
Organizer – Chair: Nobutaka Nakamachi (Professor; Konan University; Japan)

PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Yoichi Isahaya (Assistant Professor; Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido
University; Japan)
Maragha across the Euphrates: The Observatory in Mamluk Sources
The tide of the Mongols was dammed by a crushing defeat at ʿAyn Jālūt in 1260,
which resulted in fixing the political boundaries between the Mamluk Sultanate(1250–1517) and the Mongol Ilkhanate (ca. 1256–1357), despite the latter’s
several encroachments after that. However, the boundaries were not much35

confined to the mobility of intellectuals. Quite a few scholars in Syria and Egypt
visited the Maragha observatory—a foremost intellectual center in the Nile-toOxus region—even from the time of its foundation. This paper attempts toreconstruct a history of the observatory from the Mamluk sources in comparison
with narratives from the Ilkhanate. Information about the Maragha observatory in
the Mamluk sources is mainly divided into two parts. On one hand, Mamluk
chronicles refer to the observatory in particular in the political context.
Biographical dictionaries authored in the regions of the Mamluk Sultanate, on theother hand, also provide us with a fair amount of information about theobservatory in relation to scholars who were active there. That information
includes not only scholars of the Ilkhanate such as Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201–
1274) and Ibn al-Fuwaṭī (1244-1323) but also ones from the Mamluk realm.
Marshalling a wide variety of sources, unknown aspects of the history of the
Maragha observatory are expected to be revealed. In fact, the scholar who mostly
inherited the tradition of the Maragha astronomers was Ibn al-Shātir (1304–1375),
a timekeeper (muwaqqit) in Damascus, but he did not come to Maragha at all.
This paper would also shed some light upon this elusive connection between the
Syrian scholar and the Maragha astronomical heritage.

Panelist 2
Yihao Qiu (Lecturer; Fudan University; China)
An Episode of the conflict between Qaidu and Yuan in Mamluk Chronicle
Among the numerous Mamluk historians, one important author who devoted amore informative work about the Mongols and their history is Baybars al-Manṣūrī
(Rukn al-Dīn Baybars al-Dawādar al-Manṣūrī al-Khaṭaʾī, 645/1246-7—725/13245), a Mamluk general, local governor and historian (Ashtor, 1986: v.1, 1127-8). In
his universal chronicle, Zubdat al-fikra fī taʿrīkh al-hajira (hereafter ZF), Baybars
al-Manṣūrī reports on a fierce conflict which occurred between the Toluid prince
Nomoqan and Qaidu, the nephew and a recalcitrant rival of Qubilai Qa’an. His
record, so far as I know, is a distinctive narrative relating to Qaidu’s militaryactivity in Mamluk sources, but the information of the actual date and place wasambiguous. Furthermore, it is strange that the contemporary Persian historical
works keep an unusual silence on this event. Likewise, in Chinese sources we36cannot find any record similar to the story recorded in the ZF. Thus, is it just arumor due to the geographical distance or more likely, a misrepresentation
because of the overt enmity against the Yuan Dynasty? In addition, since Qaidu’s
story seems rather abrupt in the entire text of ZF, so why the author includes it in
his work?
To answer these questions, the report relevant to Qaidu’s conflict should
be examined in detail. Hence this article aims to follow two sections: firstly, basedon the Chinese, Persian and Arabic sources, I try to identify the person, the placename and date relevant to this event. This event and its influence, will also be
surveyed from a macroscopic view. Secondly, from Baybars al-Manṣūrī’s
personal experience and the government policy of the Mamluk Sultanate, I will
analyze the reason why this event gained this special attention by Mamluk
historians.
Associated with it, the informants and economic motivation relating to the
Mongol affairs has also to be discussed.

Panelist 3
Yasuhiro Yokkaichi (Associate Professor; Rikkyo University; Japan)
From Fārs to Misr: Re-examining the Indian Ocean Trade Network between
the Il-khanate and Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt
According to the assertion of Arabic historians including Bernard Lewis, thecenter of Islamic economic sphere shifted from Baghdad to Cairo and that themainline of the western Indian Ocean moved from the Persian Gulf route to the
Red Sea route after the decline of the Abbas Caliphate. However, judging fromthe multilateral trading network of Indian Ocean merchants, the framework may
not be as simple as they showed. Baghdād and Shīrāz under Mongol rule andCairo under the Mamluk Sultanate functioned as the hubs of international trade,
whereas the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea were, through the intermediary ofFārs, Iraq, and Hijāz, incorporated in the same multilateral trade network.
Generally speaking, Chinese and Indian goods were brought to Egypt by the
Kārimī merchants via sea route. However, Indian Ocean merchants including
Kish and Hormuz merchants who were patronized by the Il-khanid and Pandiya
Dynasties brought commercial goods from China, Southeast Asia, and India to37not only Iran and Iraq but also Syria and Egypt. In addition, the royal family of
Kish also had the commercial connection with the Rasulid court and Makka of
Hijāz.
The Nūr al-Ma’rif, the collection of the Rasulid Sultanate’s official
commercial and administrative documents in the reign of Sultān al-Muẓaffar
Yūsuf (647-94 AH/1249-95 CE), includes the customs tariff of Aden Port used by
the end of the thirteenth century. Based on these records, goods from China,
India, Fārs, and Iraq were imported to Aden, and a large number of the goods
transited Kish Island. In this manner, Kish merchants edged into the market of
Aden Port. They had two commercial routes, namely, that between Fārs andAden and that between Iraq and Aden via Hijāz. This paper addresses themultilateral structure of the Indian Ocean trade focusing on the commercial
relation among Iran, Iraq, and Egypt under Mongol and Mamluk Sultanate’s
confrontation.

Panelist 4
Yoichi Yajima (Professor; Nara Women’s University; Japan)
Diplomatic Correspondence between the Mamluks and the Mongols
A substantial number of diplomatic letters in Arabic were exchanged between the
Mamluks and the Mongols. Although none of their original documents exist, in
historical sources some are cited and some are mentioned without citing thecontents. Whereas they have been utilized by historians as informative sources
for the relationship between the Mamluks and the Mongols, their formats
themselves deserve consideration. This paper aims at discussing the styles andbackgrounds of the diplomatic correspondence between the Mamluks and theMongols.
The Arabic letters sent to the Mamluks from the Ilkhans Hülägü, Abaqa,
Aḥmad and Ghazan are preserved mainly in the Mamluk sources. They follow
basically the format of the Mongol decrees as are the diplomatic letters by the
Mongols in other languages such as Mongolian, Chinese and Latin, and areusually called farmān (Pers. "order, decree") in the Arabic sources. The main
body of them, however, follows the Arabic epistolary tradition with rhyme
sentences, Arabic poems, citations of al-Qur’ān, etc.
38

On the Mamluk side, manuals for chancery clerks written by authors suchas al-Qalqashandī and al-‘Umarī include the format of diplomatic letters to be sent
to the Mongols, and its peculiarity obviously reflects the style of Mongol decrees.
The style of the letters exchanged between the Mamluks and the Mongols were
mixtures of the two epistolary traditions. Although the relation between the twowere generally adversarial, they took it for granted that the diplomatic letterswould be written with respect for the counterparts’ traditions in some degree.
What made it possible was the presence of the bureaucrats familiar with bothtraditions. The diplomatic correspondence reflects not only the political relations
between the states concerned but also the cultural situation in those days.

39

Panel 5: The Material Culture of Mamluk Cairo: Urban Fabric, Building
Typology, and Architectural Detail
Within Cairo’s complex urban tissue there are multiple Mamluk architectures. Thispanel addresses Mamluk material culture at a variety of scales, starting with apresentation of the wide panorama of the city as first comprehensively
documented by the Venetians in the time of Sultan al-Ashraf Qaytbay. The focus
then narrows in the second presentation to individual religious foundations,grouping them by plan-typology, rather than by denominations of function, anddefining clear correlations with Ilkhanid, Timurid, and Ottoman building types. The
third presentation examines a characteristic detail of Mamluk architecture – theMuqarnas – through the lens of a mathematical algorithm. The panel will apply
new methodologies to address local and universal themes in Islamic architecture
and to relate them to the lived continuum of the city of Cairo, adducing informationthat may be complementary to readings of Mamluk history based on written
records. The historian, Dr. Takenori Yoshimura, will act as chair and makeconnections between the surviving material culture and historical data.
Organizer: Naoko Fukami
Chair: Takenori Yoshimura (Lecturer; Daito Bunka University; Japan)

PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Nicholas Jon Warner (Architect, Research Associate; American University in
Cairo; Egypt)
The Urban Fabric of Mamluk Cairo as Represented in Matteo Pagano’s Viewof 1549
Pagano’s great bird’s-eye view of Cairo was printed in Venice in 1549 but was
seemingly compiled during the reign of Sultan Qaytbay. It is the first semiaccurate topographical representation of the city, not to be surpassed until the
publication of the Description de l’Egypte 250 years later. The view not only
informs us about the general lineaments of the Mamluk (and pre-Mamluk) city40

and its urban components, but also provides some astonishing architectural detailat the scale of individual buildings. This presentation considers the streets, urban
blocks, key junctions, and expressed architecture of the city as first graphicallyrecorded by Europeans.

Panelist 2
Naoko Fukami (Director; Cairo Research Station, Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science [JSPS]; Egypt)
Typologies of Mamluk Religious Architecture and their Relation to Ilkhanid,
Timurid, and Ottoman Forms
This presentation is dealing about the existing religious monument of Cairo in
Mamluk era comprehensively, once leaving from the historical name andrearranged by typology of architectural formation from colonnades, domes andiwans paying attention of their vaulting and arrangement, as a result the three
types are revealed.
The first is using colonnade and inserting the small dome or the large
dome that occupies plural bays. It did not become the main trend, although there
are some examples and it is clear that the big dome was inserted from the late of
the 13th century to the first half of the 14th century, and the new form wasoccurred in the first half of the 15th century.
The second is using the iwans in symmetry and added the domed roomas the mausoleum. It is the main stream of Mamluk era from the beginning
continuously, although the early examples are using tunnel vault in iwan, it isclear that the tendency towards localism gradually, for example to make the flat
roof instead of tunnel vault or to be the shakhsheikha instead of the courtyard.
The third makes a domed walled room as main factor, and some small rooms areadded, it includes some buildings that the original arrangement is unknown. It
functioned as the mausoleum ordinarily, though it is very rare to be only thedomed room like canopy tomb all over the Islamic territory, it increases to add the
sub-rooms.
It will tackle these phenomena comparing to Il-Khanid, Timurid andOttoman architecture, the changing process of Mamluk architecture in Cairo fromthe acceptance of new tendencies to create the local style with considering the41

influence from other regions, the trigger of transformation and the sublimation as
local style.

Panelist 3
Gentaro Yamada (Student; Tokai University; Japan)
Computational-geometrical Study of Mumluk Muqarnas: Comparative
Analysis of its Morphology Using 3D-parametric Models
This article aims to apply methods of computational reconstruction to Egyptian
muqarnas examples and pretends to clarify circumstances of their developmentfrom a viewpoint of computation.
Muqarnas, or stalactite vaults, are three-dimensional architectural
ornaments made of numerous niche-like curved elements, arranged in horizontal
tiers. Muqarnas are common in the Islamic world and used in different
architectural parts such as portals or domes.
To produce such complex curvilinear ornamental structure in historicmonuments, it is believed that artisans used plane projection drawings, consistingof simple straight lines. It is fairly safe to say that the interpreting process fromthis two-dimensional plan to three-dimensional structure is procedural andalgorithmic. Although many studies have been done on the process and its
computational reconstruction, most of their targets are chosen from rather limited
regions such as Iran or Uzbekistan, covering the period from the Seljuk to the IlKhanid.
However, muqarnas have a wide distribution in the Islamic world andreflect rich local diversity. Egyptian muqarnas, targets of this article, differ inmaterial and appearance of planar information from examples in the regions
mentioned above. The Mamluk era represents a remarkable turning point for theirformation. Some of the most unique features of Mamluk muqarnas include
stalactite-like dripping parts and ceiling-like flat muqarnas vaults, which start toappear in the Bahri Mamluk dynasty.
Geometrical analysis of muqarnas has generally done in direction from
3D to 2D, namely, reverse order of design process, but computational method
makes us possible to trace practical procedure of its design. By using the method,42

this article contributes to the understanding of the design process of the Mamluk
muqarnas, overlooked in the context of computation despite their importance.

43Panel 6: Intellectual Activities across the Regions in the Mamluk Period:
Views from al-Andalus and Khurasan
Cairo under Mamluk rule, along with other cities of Egypt and Syria, saw aflourishing of intellectual activities. Many significant scholars emerged, and they
produced several distinguished works on fiqh, hadith, history, and any othersubjects. This dynamism of intellectuals has attracted much interest in modern
scholarship. Such a prosperity, however, was not solely attained by the efforts of
Egyptian or Syrian intellectuals. In Cairo, we find quite a number of intellectualsfrom various regions outside the Mamluk Sultanate: Maghrib, Iraq, and others.
One of the most prominent examples is the famous historian from Tunis, Ibn
Khaldun. Scholarly heritages accumulated in these regions also affected theintellectual milieu of Mamluk Egypt and Syria. Therefore, the following questions
arise: What kind of influences did those intellectuals from various regions haveon Mamluk Egypt and Syria? How and to what extent were scholarly
accomplishments of those regions incorporated into the academic sphere of
Egypt and Syria? How did intellectuals of the Mamluk Sultanate see those"foreign" intellectuals and scholarly heritages? Taking these questions into
consideration, four speakers will give their presentations in this panel. None ofthem is a "Mamlukist", in the strict sense of the word, rather they are specialists
on geographically remote regions from Mamluk Cairo, i.e. the western andeastern edges of al-Andalus and Khurasan. This panel aims to place intellectual
activities in the Mamluk period against the background of a wider geographic
range.
Organizer – Chair: Kentaro Sato (Associate Professor; Hokkaido University;
Japan)PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Maribel Fierro (Research Professor; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas [CSIC] Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y delPróximo Oriente Antiguo CENTRO DE CIENCIAS HUMANAS Y SOCIALES;
Spain)
44

Maliki Jurists from the Maghrib in the Mamluk Sultanate
Malikism had become the official doctrine of the Cordoban Umayyad caliphate
during the 4th/10th century and prevailed in Ifriqiya after the Zirids abandoned
their allegiance to the Fatimids. Although the Almohad period challenged Maliki
predominance in the territories under control of the Mu’minid dynasty, Maliki
jurists managed to maintain their tradition as they had previously done byadapting it to the new times. By then, in fact, they were used to successfully
defend Malikism against attacks such as those of the Shafi`is and the Zahiris.
The increasing emigration of Maghribi scholars to the Mashriq that took placefrom the 6th/12th century onwards made it more pressing to praise the merits ofMalikism and therefore that of the Maliki jurists who represented it. The mostoutspoken representative of such a trend was al-Rāʽī, a Mālikī from Nasrid
Granada who settled in Egypt where he died in 853/1449. His Intiṣār al-faqīr alsālik li-tarjīḥ madhhab al-imām al-kabīr Mālik (English transl. by Y. Dutton) is afascinating text that accumulates arguments in favour of Maliki superiority over
the other legal schools such as a Prophetic ḥadīth stating that the people of theWest will continue to be on the path of truth until the Hour comes, this being
ensured by the adoption of Malikism, and also the merits of Mālik b. Anas,
including that on his thigh it was written “in the writing of Divine Power, ‘Mālik is
Allah’s proof against His creation’”, and that there was a secret between Mālikand God. In my paper I will explore how Maghribi Maliki jurists who migrated to
the lands under Mamluk rule fostered their insertion in the new legal milieus andthe effects such efforts provoked.

Panelist 2
Mayte Penelas (Tenured Scientist; Escuela de Estudios Árabes, CSIC; Spain)
Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Kitāb al-ʿIbar as a Source for Mamluk Scholars on Iberian
History
As is well known, Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Kitāb al-ʿIbar was an important source of
information for Mamluk historians, including such influential authors as his
contemporaries and near- contemporaries al-Qalqašandī (756–821/1355–1418)
45

and al-Maqrīzī (766–845/1364–1442), both of whom worked in the Mamluk
chancellery (dīwān al-inšāʾ) in Cairo.
Born in Tunis in 732/1332, Ibn Ḫaldūn spent over twenty years in thewestern Maghreb and al-Andalus, devoting himself to both political andintellectual pursuits. He spent three years in Granada. There he enjoyed thefavour of Muḥammad V (r. 1354–1359 and 1362–1391), who sent him asambassador to Peter I, king of Castile (r. 1350–1369). At the age of 50 Ibn Ḫaldūn
arrived in Cairo, where numerous students—al-Maqrīzī among them—wereattracted to his lectures at al-Azhar and some of the most important madrasas.
He was appointed to the office of Mālikī grand qāḍī of Cairo on several occasions,and in this city he died in 808/1406.
This paper will specifically focus on the information about the history of
the Iberian Peninsula—both Islamic and non-Islamic—that Mamluk historians
such as al-Qalqašandī and al-Maqrīzī derived from Ibn Ḫaldūn’s ʿIbar. As asignificant example, the passage concerning the Visigothic rule in the Iberian
Peninsula was borrowed both by al-Qalqašandī, who inserted it in an abridged
form into his Ṣubḥ al-aʿšā, and by al-Maqrīzī, who reproduced it almost verbatim
in al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar. Mention will be also made to other Andalusi andMaghribi sources from which Mamluk scholars drew historical information on
Iberia. An examination of this material will certainly inform us, among otherquestions, about what information on the Iberian Peninsula interested Mamluk
historians and why that information was of interest to them, as well as about theperception they had on this land.

Panelist 3
Abdenour Padillo Soaud (PhD candidate; Escuela de Estudios Árabes. CSIC;
Spain)The Scholars of the Maghrib in the Mamluk Madrasas
The consolidation of the madrasas as a religious institution during the Mamluk
period attracted numerous scholars from different parts of the Islamic territory.
Among these were travelers and emigrants from al-Andalus and North Africa.
During their stay in the East these scholars not only attended classes in themadrasas, but many of them also acted as teachers as a means to finance their46

trips or as a profession in the places where they settled. Among these scholars
were relevant figures in the Islamic West such as Ǧamāl al-Dīn al-Šarīšī (d. 1286),
professor at the Fāḍilīya Madrasa in Cairo and the Nurīya in Damascus; theAlmerian grammarian Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Ṣāʾiġ (d. 1349), who taught at the
Madrasa Ṣāliḥīya; and Muḥammad al-Mālaqī (d. 1370), who took over the
direction of the Naǧībīya Madrasa. In my paper, I will identify the scholars fromthe Islamic West who played a role in the madrasas during the Mamluk period
and will explore the impact they had on these institutions and their contribution to
the institutionalization of religious knowledge.

Panelist 4
Teruaki Moriyama (Associate Professor; Doshisha University; Japan)
From Khurasani “Ashab al-Hadith” to Mamlukid Shafi‘i School: Succession
to the Classical Hadith Studies
In this presentation, I discuss how theories and practice that the 10th to 12th
centuries eastern Hadith scholars made around Hadith were transmitted to Syrian
and Egyptian Shafi‘i scholars under the Mamluk dynasty. I also discuss how thosetheories and practice were transformed through the transmission.
The classical Hadith studies developed in the eastern regions of theIslamic world from Khurasan to Iraq between the 10th and 12th centuries.
Especially, scholars who linked to a scholarly line originating from the 10th
century Khruasan played important roles in development of theories and practicerelating to authenticity of Hadith. They called themselves “Ashab/Ahl al-Hadith.”
Al-Hakim al-Naysaburi (d. 1014) and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 1071) might be
the most famous among them.
They extended their networks into Syria by the late 12th century.
However, the Mongol invasion in the 13th century destroyed major parts of the
networks. Consequently, their scholarly line melted into the Shafi‘i school. Their
academic achievements were succeeded by Syrian and Egyptian Shafi‘i scholars,
and crystallized as the Sunni orthodox Hadith studies in Cairo under the Mamluk
dynasty. Those Mamlukid Shafi’i scholars who accepted the theories and practiceof the Khurasani “Ashab al-Hadith” include many prominent figures such as
Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi (d. 1348), Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (d. 1449), and al47

Sakhawi (d. 1497).
To discuss that transmission of the theories and practice relating to
Hadith and their transformation in the Mamlukid Syria and Egypt, I analyze
literature that those Shafi‘i scholars wrote on Hadith. Through the analysis, I
consider how they accepted the legacy of the Khurasani “Ashab al-Hadith” andutilized it for their own activities in the Muslim society under the Mamluk dynasty.

48

Panel 7: Approaching Mamlūk Historiography: Narratologically, Literarily,
ComputationallyThis panel presents several case studies focusing on the literary, narratological,
and intertextual analyses of various Arabic historiographical works produced in
the Mamlūk period. Each case study deals with a different period of the Mamlūk
Sultanate’s historiographical production, from the reign of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (r.
1299-1309; 1310-41) to al-Ẓāhir Ḫušqadam (r. 1461-1467). The case studies
engage with the tools and approaches of redaction criticism and narratology, anduse them in conjunction with computational methods text analysis in order tocontextualise and analyse the writings of four major historians: al-Ḏahabī (d.
748/1347), Ibn Ḥağar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449), Ibn Taġrībirdī (d. 874/1470),
and Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480). By focusing on the intertextuality,
narrative constructions, and discursive strategies in these texts, and how
historiography was used to legitimise visions of the past, this panel seeks toreorient our understanding of the agency of these texts.
Organizer: Maxim Romanov
Chair: Antonella Ghersetti (Professor; Università Ca' Foscari Venezia; Italy)

PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Maxim Romanov (Universitätsassistent; University of Vienna; Austria)
Computational Historiography: al-Ḏahabī’s Taʾrīḫ al-islām and His Sources
Many large works of Islamic history were produced in the Mamluk period: e.g.,
Ibn Taġrībirdī’s al-Nujūm is the size of about 15 Qurʾāns, al-Ṣafadī’s al-Wāfī—25,
and al-Ḏahabī’s Taʾrīḫ—40. We know these sources are “compilations”, but wehave a poor understanding of what “compilation” even means in this context, as
their volume poses an insurmountable challenge. How were such texts compiled?
How did authors work with the sources? What agendas were they pursuing?
Despite the value of traditional approaches—close reading and codicologicalcum-paleographic analysis—drawing broad conclusions based on necessarily
49

limited case studies can be problematic. How, then, can we answer thesequestions in a representative manner? Computational methods and digital
corpora offer another option, which, in combination with traditional approaches(and only so!), promise to yield more comprehensive results. E.g., text-reusedetection methods allow us to assess the composition of such works through thecomparison of all texts in a corpus with one another. Thus, we learn that
quotations amount to at least 23% of al-Ḏahabī’s Taʾrīḫ (750k words, 50% of
quotations: 25-59 words). This number is so high that author’s writing stylevanishes from his own book—a conclusion corroborated by computational
stylometry (2018). Algorithmic analysis (2017a) of his Taʾrīḫ suggests that alḎahabī worked in a manner akin to that of modern quantitative historians—hequeried his sources in a representative manner and had a solid grasp of thechronological distribution of his data (2017b). The current paper will address “theissue of selection”, or why al-Ḏahabī chose some biographies and left out others,
and “the issue of alteration”, or which parts of biographies he changed and which
he kept unaltered. Then, with clustering methods we can identify dominantpatterns in these activities, and shed new light on al-Ḏahabī’s historical method
and agenda.

Panelist 2
Rihab Ben Othmen (Postdoc Researcher; Ghent University; Belgium)
Moving texts: a few remarks on textual brokerage, intertextuality andauthorial identity in the fifteenth century Mamluk Historiography
Abstract: The study of intertextual transactions and different forms of texts’interacting in Mamluk historical writings has been largely neglected. Informed bya literary approach and by Latour’s sociology of translation (Actor-NetworkTheory), the present study will attempt to fill the current knowledge gap in thefield. It will particularly observe the mobility of texts and their interactions throughan investigation of the different forms of textual transactions such as quotation,
literary allusion, and referencing in the 15th century Mamluk chronographies.
Based on comprehensive case studies drawn from Ibn Taġrībirdī’s (813874/1410-1470) chronicle al-Nujūm al-Zāhira and from Ibn al-Ṣayrafī’s (819900/1416-1494) chronicles Nuzhat al-Nufūs and Inbāʾ al-Haṣr, it will try to unravel50

the intricate strategies of “imitato” employed by Mamluk historians to constructtheir authorial identity and thus authority. The frequent resort of the 15th century
historians, especially during their early career, to quote their masters’ or theircompeers’ historical works, can be regarded indeed as a form of “textual
brokerage” through which the verbatim reproduction of anterior texts come to bea prosaic means for introducing oneself to the scholarly community at that time.

Panelist 3
Kenneth Goudie (Postdoctoral Research Fellow; Ghent University; Belgium)
A Tale of Two Dawādārs: al-Biqāʿī’s Narrative Construction of Īnāl’s Court
During his reign, Sultan Īnāl Ajrūd (d. 865/1461) founded his leadership andauthority on the relationships, wealth, and charisma of his family. Aside from his
wife, Zaynab bt. Ḥasan b. Khāṣṣ Bak (d. 884/1479) and son Aḥmad
(d. 893/1488), it was the husbands of his daughters, the dawādār kabīr Yūnus alAqbāʾī (d. 865/1461) and the dawādār thānī Birdibak al-Qubrusī (d. 868/1464),
who played an increasingly central role. Our understanding of the exact roles
played by Yūnus al-Aqbāʾī and Birdibak al-Qubrusī is, however, more limited. The
purpose of this paper is to remedy this, but not simply by pursuing a positive
reconstruction of their respective careers. Indeed, postmodernism has collapsed
the underlying certainty of positivist historiography: our historical narratives, bethey of events or the careers of people, are contingent because there are no any“givens”, no ready-made chronicles of events, with which we can confirm thehistoricity or otherwise of our historiographical sources. Consequently, this paper
will examine how Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480), a fifteenth-century
Qurʾān exegete and historian active in Cairo, presents the two dawādārs in his
chronicle, the Iẓhār al-ʿaṣr li-asrār ahl al-ʿaṣr. It will address the themes aroundwhich he constructed them, and what his narratives can reveal about therelational realities of Sultan Īnāl’s court, and how his narratives relate to thebroader fifteenth-century historiographical discourse.

Panelist 451

Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont (Postdoc Researcher; Ghent University;
Belgium)
The Inbāʾ al-ġumr bi-abnāʾ al-ʿumr and inter-maḏhab competition: a
network analysis case study
The competition between maḏhabs in historiographical works is a known topic
among the narratives of the late medieval Syro-Egyptian territory. If it obviously
rises from a concern regarding the legal, cultural and judiciary aspects of society,15th century historiographical works also underlined constantly this motif. Yet,
beyond the fierce social competition produced by the multiplication of scholarly
positions in the environment of the Cairo sultanate society, when it comes tomaḏhabs rivalry, we know very little about what was implied and at stake forhistoriographers.
By focusing on how Ibn Ḥağar al-ʿAsqalānī (773-852/1372-1449) shaped
various narratives regarding the question of inter-maḏhab competition in his main
historiographical work, the Inbāʾ al-ġumr bi-abnāʾ al-ʿumr, and gave account of
the relationships and gradual changes inside distinct networks of scholars, wewill try to determine how the author was able to bring about specific narratives
shaping various groups of discursive representation. These narrative mises enscène participated in erecting social and political boundaries, archetypal images
and documented dynamics of power inside the social order Ibn Ḥağar was bothproducing and giving account of, within which these groups were part and parcel.

52

Panel 8: Versatile Approach to the Diplomatic Dialogue: Levels andStrategies of Interchange in the Mamluk Diplomacy
In the course of its history, the Mamluk Sultanate maintained diplomatic relations
with a wide range of political entities and interlocutors. These exchanges
developed both horizontally, through an extensive network of “international”
interchanges, and vertically, involving a multitude of actors from different levelsof the administrative apparatus. From a theoretical point of view, the managementof the relationships was based on a consolidated juridical tradition (principles ofsharī‘a, siyar), but the Mamluk chancery - or chanceries - was also able todevelop and implement new mechanisms for the diplomatic dialogue, adapting
itself to the circumstances and the nature of their correspondents.
In the last two decades, Mamlukists have shown a renewed interest in the
diplomatic practices, thanks to the exceptional richness and variety of primarysources (original documents, chronicles, chancery manuals) that have beenpreserved for the sultanate in comparison with other pre-modern Islamic states.
Building on the results of recent scholarship, this panel aims to open up new
perspectives in the field of Mamluk diplomacy, through the analysis of somespecific cases and strategies. Taking into account both Muslim and non-Muslim
interlocutors, the panel will focus on some theoretical and practical instruments
adopted by the actors of the diplomatic game. In this analysis, a particularattention will be given to the tools offered by the New Diplomatic History.
Organizer: Alessandro Rizzo
Chair: Stephan Conermann (Professor; University of Bonn; Germany)

PANEL MEMBERS AND PAPERS
Panelist 1
Georg Christ (Senior Lecturer; University of Manchester; England)"Alexander of our time": Was Venice part of the Mamluk Islamic Empire?
Mamluk-Venetian relations have traditionally been interpreted within the Dār alḤarb etc. framework as bilateral relations structured by treaties. These are often
53

seen as some sort of semi-institutionalized exception to the rule of hostile
Christian-Muslim relations in the wake of the Crusades. This paper argues that
Venice and the Venetians were integrated into the Mamluk realm and courtly
hierarchy as formally subordinate, tributary subjects thus side-stepping the
traditional Dār al-Ḥarb framework. Emphasizing universal, trans- and, quasi,
meta-confessional/religious rule while, perhaps, even cleverly implying Venetian
jihād contributions, the Cairo Sultanate created a flexible diplomatic frameworkthat allowed for an inclusion of Venice into the Mamluk realm conceived as auniversal, Islamic empire. This inclusion may be seen as ephemeral and a mere
formalism but it seems to have been robust enough as to facilitate an efficient
integration of the Venetian consul and community into the courtly Mamluk
taxonomy and the local Alexandrian community respectively.

Panelist 2
Frédéric Bauden (Professor; University of Liège; Belgium)
Brokering Power in Mecca: Rasulid-Mamluk Diplomatic Exchanges about
the Meccan Sharifate
If the control of Mecca (and of the Hijaz in general) represented for the Mamluks
a source of legitimation (notably by guaranteeing the yearly organization of thepilgrimage), it appears that their grip on the Holy City was characterized asseasonal. Once the pilgrimage ended, the Sharifs enjoyed political autonomy. In
the early ninth/fifteenth c., the Sharif Ḥasan b. ʿAjlān (r. 797–826/1395–1423)
was an emblematic example of the power that his family availed itself of. Ḥasan
particularly took advantage of the increase in trade between the Indian Ocean
and the Mediterranean Sea that passed through the Hijaz to extend his powerover the whole region. His exactions from pilgrims and merchants deeply
annoyed both the Mamluk and the Rasulid sultans who tried to affect the situation
by manipulating the local politics in Mecca.
Over the last decade, John Meloy and Eric Vallet have addressed
numerous issues linked to Ḥasan’s reign, respectively from the point of view ofthe Mamluks and the Rasulids. Their studies were largely based on literarysources, with a limited use of documents. In this paper, I propose to tackle theevents that took place between the years 816–20/1413–7, a period during which54Ḥasan was briefly replaced by his nephew Rumaytha (818/1416), through thelens of documents. Apart from copies of letters preserved in Ibn Ḥijja’s Qahwat
al-inshāʾ, I will also consider a unique Rasulid original letter dated 817/1415
reused as scrap paper by al-Maqrīzī. These documents offer a different insight
into the way both sultans tried to face the threat posed by Ḥasan by means of
diplomacy.

Panelist 3
Malika Dekkiche (Assistant Professor; University of Antwerp; Belgium)
Like Father Like Son? Timurid Parallel Diplomacy with the Mamluk
Sultanate
The exchanges of embassies are usually understood to have taken place
between independent entities, recognised as being sovereign in nature. This is acommon assumption now, but a look at past examples shows that premodern
diplomacy also seems to follow that trend. This is especially the case of
premodern Islamic diplomacy, for which many sources describe diplomacy as
being an attribute of sovereignty. Furthermore rulers in the Islamic world are
known to be hierarchically ordered: their status (low or high) being the basic tenet
setting the rules of exchanges. The case of the Mamluk sultanate represents a
prime example in the genre. But, while scholars have so far devoted much of theirattention to the study of diplomatic relationship between the Sultans and theirforeign counterparts among the kings, this paper aims to investigate cases ofparallel diplomacy initiated by members of these rulers’ family.
It seems indeed that in the fifteenth century, members of rulers’ family(sons and grand-sons) also took part in the diplomatic games, and were accepted
as diplomatic participants by the Mamluks. This is particularly the case of the
Timurid and Turkmen (Qara Qoyunlu) dynasties in their contacts with the Mamluk
sultanate. In this presentation, I intend to present an original sample ofcorrespondences exchanged between the Mamluks and the TimuridsMuḥammad Jūkī and ʿAlāʾ al-Dawlah (son and grand-son of Shāh Rukh). While
those contacts were taking place in the name of their father, a close reading of
the documents and their context show stronger ambitions from those sons that
aimed at international recognition and support.
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Panelist 4
Alessandro Rizzo (Postdoctoral researcher; Milá y Fontanals Institute, CSIC;
Spain)
Beyond the dār al Islām/dār al-ḥarb paradigm: the Multiform Dialogue
between Mamluks and Christian Powers through a Diplomatic Approach
For a long time scholarship on the relations between the Mamluks and theChristian powers have interpreted sultans’ diplomatic dialogue with European
interlocutors on the basis of the traditional dichotomy dār al Islām/dār al-ḥarb.
This paradigm starts from the assumption – often based on the juridical evolutionof the notion of jihād - that a permanent state of war exists between the Muslim
and the non-Muslim territories. According to this conception, the interaction
between the two parties could only be possible by a temporary suspension of the“natural” conflict through a truce. In the field of Diplomatics, this idea has heavily
influenced the interpretation of the nature of the chancery documents concerning
Mamluk diplomacy with the Christian States. Indeed, historians have often
described these sources as tools regulating a transitory and even exceptional
interruption of hostilities for commercial purposes. Only recently, the scholars
have reinterpreted this paradigm, calling into question the concept of “offensive
jihād” as the central principle regulating the relations between the Islamic world
and the non-Muslim external communities.
Taking into account these new perspectives, my paper aims to highlightthe multiform character of the peaceful diplomatic interaction between the
Mamluk and the European States. The strategies adopted by the respective
chanceries will be studied by a re-examination of the concrete function of theMamluk documents kept in the European Archives (truces, decrees, safeconducts, letters, etc.). The discipline of Diplomatics – through the analysis of theextrinsic and the intrinsic characteristics of the conserved testimonies – offer us
the most direct approach to reconsider some historiographical narratives and tounderstand the specific nature of the several diplomatic interchanges.

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