New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria pdf

New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria

NEW READINGS IN ARABIC HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM LATE MEDIEVAL EGYPT AND SYRIA

History Writing, Adab, and Intertextuality in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria: Old and New Readings

Jo Van Steenbergen

Fifty years ago, in 1969, the Islamicist, historian, and pioneer of so-called Mamluk studies Ulrich Haarmann (1942–99) submitted his PhD dissertation on his- tory writing in Egypt and Syria in the period 1260–1340 ce.1

Haarmann transformed the text of his dissertation almost immediately into a monograph, which was published in 1970 and entitled Source studies for the early Mamluk period (Quellenstudien zur frühen Mamlukenzeit).2 Its main findings were soon also communicated in the summarized format of an article that was published in 1971.3

In the same period, almost simultaneously with the young Haar- mann’s Quellenstudien, another dissertation on exactly the same topic was published in a monograph format.

This was the work of the American historian and “Mamlukist” Donald Little (1932–2017), entitled Introduction to Mamlūk historiography: Analysis of Arabic annalistic and biographical sources for the reign of al-Malik al-Nāṣir Muḥammadibn Qalāʾūn.4

Both Haarmann’s and Little’s dissertations were published in two newly established German series, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen and Freiburger Islamstudien respectively, each closely related to the invigorating scholarship and academic leadership of Haarmann’s PhD supervisor in Freiburg, Hans Robert Roemer (1915–97).

Ever since the early 1970s, these publications of Haarmann and Little have had a substantial impact on the relatively small field of the study of late medieval Arabic historiography. With that field’s relative growth from the late 1990s onwards, they have continued to retain referential status, even when some of the methods and assumptions that had informed Haarmann’s and Little’s PhD research in the 1960s came under increasing scrutiny.

In fact, as will be further detailed in this introduction, the work they began and the insights they brought to the field have e, and even define, the study of Arabic history writing in Egypt and Syria between the 13th and 16th centuries.