Articles by Torsten Wollina
Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 9, 308-340, 2018
Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn is today fairly well known as a historian of Damascus. Yet, his numerous writi... more Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn is today fairly well known as a historian of Damascus. Yet, his numerous writings cover many more areas of contemporaneous knowledge produc- tion and some of those might have been more impactful for his reputation as a scholar. One area that has so far not received much attention is the scrutiny Ibn Ṭūlūn put into the organisation of knowledge within his library, his corpus, and even individual manuscripts. This article attempts one step at closing this lacuna by addressing the contents statements with which Ibn Ṭūlūn prefaced all his autograph manuscripts. It also proposes a methodology for utilising them as sources for manuscript history. Based on four primary case studies, the chapter uses a triad of extraction, recompilation, and reconstruction of manuscripts to assess the current state of multiple-text manuscripts vis-a-vis their original compilations. All four manuscripts ended up in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin by the 1930s. The chapter makes use of a wide array of sources within and without these manuscripts to elucidate their historical trajectories from Ibn Ṭūlūn’s endowed library until their acquisition by Chester Beatty. Specific attention will be paid to their peregrinations in the 19th and early-20th centuries. In particular, early 20th-century photographic reproductions of those manuscripts can shed light on the most recent recompilations and reconstructions of these manuscripts. No survey on the emergence of contents statements in the Arabic manuscript tradition has yet been made. A focus on one author’s autograph corpus thus seems a more promising approach which generates verifiable results. Thus, it appears that Ibn Ṭūlūn’s contents statements were already standardised and would even be expanded by at least one (near-)contemporary.
Religions 10, 2019
This contribution explores a peculiar kind of annotation in Arabic multiple-text manuscripts. The... more This contribution explores a peculiar kind of annotation in Arabic multiple-text manuscripts. These manuscripts were often compiled as a personal ‘one-volume library’, containing copies and excerpts of a unique selection of texts. Further, they were often used for less guided writing activities. The owners left notes, lists and sometimes even sketches in the margins or on blank pages between the texts. Among these, lists of life dates of relatives are a valuable source for studies on domestic devotion. On the one hand, they give glimpses on the composition of households. How many people lived together and who were they? These lists inform us about names regardless of gender. On the other hand, the penning of these list is in itself a trace of a practice intricately tied to the familial and domestic spheres. These lists are usually the only place, in which the memory of those people is preserved.
Mamlūk Studies Review, 2017
For an abstract, see here: https://thecamel.hypotheses.org/191
In: Weltweit vor Ort. Das Magazin der Max Weber Stiftung, no. 1/2016, pp. 10-11.
In: Mamluk Historiography Revisited: Narratological Perspectives. Edited by Stephan Conermann. Ma... more In: Mamluk Historiography Revisited: Narratological Perspectives. Edited by Stephan Conermann. Mamluk Studies. Göttingen, 2016.
The chapter discusses narrative discussion in Early Modern chronicles and biographical dictionaries from Damascus. It does so on the basis of a case study on one rather marginal Sufi shaykh of, probably, Abessinian origin, but nonetheless became a major figure in late 15th-century controversies over the alcohol trade. The chapter demonstrates, how the figure's relevance changed with growing temporal distance to these events.
The Mamluk-Ottoman Transition: Continuity and Change in Egypt and Bilād Al-Shām in the Sixteenth Century, Nov 2016
In: The Mamluk-Ottoman Transition: Continuity and Change in Egypt and Bilād Al-Shām in the Sixtee... more In: The Mamluk-Ottoman Transition: Continuity and Change in Egypt and Bilād Al-Shām in the Sixteenth Century. Edited by Stephan Conermann and Gül Şen. 2016, pp. 199-224.
The chapter discusses the earliest Ottoman architectural politics after their conquest of Damascus in 1516. It argues that even during the first two years, those caused a paradigmatic change in the sacred landscape of the city, which prepared a more thorough 'Ottomanization' during the remainder of the 16th century.
Everything i on the Move. The Mamluk Empire as a Node in (Trans-)Regional Networks (ed. by Stephan Conermann), 2014
Ubi Sumus? Quo vademus? Mamluk Studies State of the Art, 2013
Conference presentations by Torsten Wollina
Trinity College Dublin Medieval History Seminar (31 Oct), 2019
The talk investigates how appropriate it is to use the term 'Middle Ages' for the Middle East.
International Conference “What is Western about the West? Ideological chronologies and cartographies” (Erfurt, October 24-26, 2019), 2019
The 'Middle Ages' as a term of periodization has proven resilient despite constant reiterations a... more The 'Middle Ages' as a term of periodization has proven resilient despite constant reiterations and reconfigurations of its meaning and demarcation during the last decades. This holds true for most fields of global, transregional, and non-European history as well. Despite its any faults, the concept continues to prove useful as a 'shorthand' for these often smaller disciplines to get noticed in debates of the institutionally larger Europe centered field of history. The trend towards transregional history writing might even have become a stabilizing force in this regard, as the largest research funding institutions are both found in "the West" and rely in their decision-making processes on the expertise of historians of Europe more than on those of other word regions.
Against this background, the presentation aims to shed light on the genealogy of this discursive formation from an Ottoman History perspective, focused on Syria and Egypt in particular. First, I will briefly introduce which temporal categories of periodizations were used in history writing at around 1500 and how the spatial categories of 'East' and 'West' were employed in this respect.
Only with colonial rule did Egyptian and Syrian historians finally subscribe to the concept of the Middle Ages, partly because some of the most influential ones took their higher education at European universities, and partly because colonial governments decided on the syllabi in local schools. While the overarching periodization of antiquity – Middle Ages – Modernity was generally adopted, it was also changed and adapted to the specific vantage points. It was even used to challenge another dominant—European—conceptualization of the history their region: The 'Golden Age-' or "Decline-paradigm". By using the 'Western' concept of the 'Middle Ages', Egyptian and Syrian historians were able to reassert their own country's and culture's position within the 'history of world civilization', and in the process reconfigured the concept in time and meaning.
Workshop "The Early Modern Christian Cultural and Literary Heritage in the Eyes of Nahḍa Scholars" (26th -27th June 2019, Oxford, Balliol College), 2019
ʿAbd al-Salām al-Shaṭṭī (1840-1878) would probably not be deemed a proponent of the Naḥda by many... more ʿAbd al-Salām al-Shaṭṭī (1840-1878) would probably not be deemed a proponent of the Naḥda by many. Coming from a minor branch of an established Ḥanbalī family of Damascus, he was the first of his lineage to receive the post of Muftī in the Umayyad Mosque. Although an active book collector, he himself was not a prolific author. ZiriklĪ mentions only one "dīwān" under his name.
However, as a collector and as an author who published in print, in addition to being a 19th-century Damascene, he was certainly an actor in the intellectual environment that gave rise and informed the Naḥda. The presentation concentrates on his activities as a book collector and the profile of his collection to show in how far this peripheral figure employed early modern texts for his own purposes. In short, I argue that al-Shaṭṭī's collection endeavors were to a large part informed by his career goals in the Ḥanbalī milieu of Damascus.
Moreover, his own scribal interventions in the manuscripts he acquired and consulted support this notion that he built up a working library useful to a religious scholar. Lacking the hereditary prestige granted by a scholarly lineage, early modern authors served him as authorities to anchor his own set of transmissions and his scholarly authority more broadly.
The paper investigates meanings of ownership and reading notes in Arabic manuscripts. Beyond thei... more The paper investigates meanings of ownership and reading notes in Arabic manuscripts. Beyond their obvious function, the paper argues, these annotations served to certify a compilation of older manuscripts through the repeated inscription of the compiler's name throughout the manuscript. I demonstrate this on the basis of a manuscript that contains exclusively works from the 16th-century scholar Muhammad Ibn Tulun but was compiled in its present state by the 19th-century scholar Abd al-Salam al-Shatti.
Presented at the IHR Workshop ‘Colophons and Scribal Cultures across the Early Modern World’, organized by Christopher D. Bahl and Stefan Hanß, London, Institute of Historical Research, 2 July 2018.
Manuscripts are brought into different contexts of reading, perusal, and collection during their ... more Manuscripts are brought into different contexts of reading, perusal, and collection during their history. Often they are thereby also reshaped, with texts being extracted, added, or reordered. The paper explores how different understandings of 'book' and even manuscript can be correlated to such changes.
The talk was given at the Workshop "Social Codicology: The Multiple Lives of Manuscripts in Muslim Societies", organized by Olly Akkerman, Léon Buskens, Adrien Delmas, Rabat, NIMAR, 9 - 11 October 2018.
The paper was presented in a panel organized by Torsten Wollina and Christopher Bahl.
https://the... more The paper was presented in a panel organized by Torsten Wollina and Christopher Bahl.
https://thecamel.hypotheses.org/101
The present paper aims to make two points with regard to family history: First, the importance of... more The present paper aims to make two points with regard to family history: First, the importance of family connections will be addressed indirectly through a person lacking this resource to a large degree; second, it examines which alternative strategies could be followed if one did not have the benefit of a strong familial network. In particular, I will argue that extensive writing activities could serve as a ’social equalizer’ (Musawi 2008, 272) in that it created means both to gain access to salaried positions and to establish one’s legacy outside a lineage.
The benefits of the right familial background to a successful scholarly career are well-known and have been addressed by the concept paper for this workshop. While talent and determination are certainly necessary qualities to reach intellectual excellency, they are more than helped by an early nudging in the right directions and the opening of doors by one’s parents, grandparents, older siblings or other members of one’s wider family. The personal character of knowledge transmission assured an even higher impact of familial ties (cf. Perho 2011). By way of a certain habitus and almost class-specific etiquette, the great scholarly families established a quasi-monopoly over the large endowments (Goldziher 1874). The importance of familial ties was further realized through the institutionalization or transformation of teacher-student relations by way of marriage ties with female members of a teacher’s or patron’s household. On the other hand, several Mamluk Era polymaths were rather newcomers from hitherto obscure families. Although few of them were successful in establishing a scholarly dynasty as such, their works would shape intellectual life for generations to come.
The paper investigates how the 16th-century Damascene polymath Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn used specific textual and archival practices to stake his claims in the absence of wide familial support. From a dynastic perspective, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s position was precarious in two ways: only one family member supported his education and early career to a considerable degree, and he himself was the last survivor of his own household, if not family at large. As I will argue, he compensated for his (originally) peripheral position through practices of textual production. Through these, he did establish himself as an important authority on ḥadīth, law, history, and a number of other subjects. He also realized his ties to his teachers and earlier authorities. Although it seems that indirect, textual knowledge transmission played an important part in this, Ibn Ṭūlūn was careful to frame it in terms of direct or even “hereditary” transmission (D’Hulster 2013, 186). To these ends, he inserted multiple autobiographical notes throughout his extensive corpus.
While it is obvious even upon a superficial survey of his works that Ibn Ṭūlūn was widely read and knowledgeable in diverse fields of investigation (ḥadīth, law, grammar, medicine, history, biography), I would emphasize here rather the importance of those notes that are concerned with his pedigree and the (familial) connections he claimed to have to esteemed scholarly dynasties of his time. While he established these ties to a number of individual scholars from Damascus (independent of their madhhab), the attention he dedicates to the Meccan Banū Fahd family stands out. Although there is no mention of kinship or marriage ties as such, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s own writings indicate nonetheless that he drew on the prestige of this long-lived dynasty to an unrivaled degree.
The paper will explore how Ibn Ṭūlūn enacted these ties through ijāzas, biographies, citations and even his compiled correspondence with one member of the family, Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd. Judging from the intensity of his life-long contact with this Meccan family, I would argue that the phrase ‘my brother’ he uses for Jār Allāh might actually indicate more than a shared membership in a Sufi ṭarīqa.
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Articles by Torsten Wollina
The chapter discusses narrative discussion in Early Modern chronicles and biographical dictionaries from Damascus. It does so on the basis of a case study on one rather marginal Sufi shaykh of, probably, Abessinian origin, but nonetheless became a major figure in late 15th-century controversies over the alcohol trade. The chapter demonstrates, how the figure's relevance changed with growing temporal distance to these events.
The chapter discusses the earliest Ottoman architectural politics after their conquest of Damascus in 1516. It argues that even during the first two years, those caused a paradigmatic change in the sacred landscape of the city, which prepared a more thorough 'Ottomanization' during the remainder of the 16th century.
Conference presentations by Torsten Wollina
Against this background, the presentation aims to shed light on the genealogy of this discursive formation from an Ottoman History perspective, focused on Syria and Egypt in particular. First, I will briefly introduce which temporal categories of periodizations were used in history writing at around 1500 and how the spatial categories of 'East' and 'West' were employed in this respect.
Only with colonial rule did Egyptian and Syrian historians finally subscribe to the concept of the Middle Ages, partly because some of the most influential ones took their higher education at European universities, and partly because colonial governments decided on the syllabi in local schools. While the overarching periodization of antiquity – Middle Ages – Modernity was generally adopted, it was also changed and adapted to the specific vantage points. It was even used to challenge another dominant—European—conceptualization of the history their region: The 'Golden Age-' or "Decline-paradigm". By using the 'Western' concept of the 'Middle Ages', Egyptian and Syrian historians were able to reassert their own country's and culture's position within the 'history of world civilization', and in the process reconfigured the concept in time and meaning.
However, as a collector and as an author who published in print, in addition to being a 19th-century Damascene, he was certainly an actor in the intellectual environment that gave rise and informed the Naḥda. The presentation concentrates on his activities as a book collector and the profile of his collection to show in how far this peripheral figure employed early modern texts for his own purposes. In short, I argue that al-Shaṭṭī's collection endeavors were to a large part informed by his career goals in the Ḥanbalī milieu of Damascus.
Moreover, his own scribal interventions in the manuscripts he acquired and consulted support this notion that he built up a working library useful to a religious scholar. Lacking the hereditary prestige granted by a scholarly lineage, early modern authors served him as authorities to anchor his own set of transmissions and his scholarly authority more broadly.
Presented at the IHR Workshop ‘Colophons and Scribal Cultures across the Early Modern World’, organized by Christopher D. Bahl and Stefan Hanß, London, Institute of Historical Research, 2 July 2018.
The talk was given at the Workshop "Social Codicology: The Multiple Lives of Manuscripts in Muslim Societies", organized by Olly Akkerman, Léon Buskens, Adrien Delmas, Rabat, NIMAR, 9 - 11 October 2018.
https://thecamel.hypotheses.org/101
The benefits of the right familial background to a successful scholarly career are well-known and have been addressed by the concept paper for this workshop. While talent and determination are certainly necessary qualities to reach intellectual excellency, they are more than helped by an early nudging in the right directions and the opening of doors by one’s parents, grandparents, older siblings or other members of one’s wider family. The personal character of knowledge transmission assured an even higher impact of familial ties (cf. Perho 2011). By way of a certain habitus and almost class-specific etiquette, the great scholarly families established a quasi-monopoly over the large endowments (Goldziher 1874). The importance of familial ties was further realized through the institutionalization or transformation of teacher-student relations by way of marriage ties with female members of a teacher’s or patron’s household. On the other hand, several Mamluk Era polymaths were rather newcomers from hitherto obscure families. Although few of them were successful in establishing a scholarly dynasty as such, their works would shape intellectual life for generations to come.
The paper investigates how the 16th-century Damascene polymath Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn used specific textual and archival practices to stake his claims in the absence of wide familial support. From a dynastic perspective, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s position was precarious in two ways: only one family member supported his education and early career to a considerable degree, and he himself was the last survivor of his own household, if not family at large. As I will argue, he compensated for his (originally) peripheral position through practices of textual production. Through these, he did establish himself as an important authority on ḥadīth, law, history, and a number of other subjects. He also realized his ties to his teachers and earlier authorities. Although it seems that indirect, textual knowledge transmission played an important part in this, Ibn Ṭūlūn was careful to frame it in terms of direct or even “hereditary” transmission (D’Hulster 2013, 186). To these ends, he inserted multiple autobiographical notes throughout his extensive corpus.
While it is obvious even upon a superficial survey of his works that Ibn Ṭūlūn was widely read and knowledgeable in diverse fields of investigation (ḥadīth, law, grammar, medicine, history, biography), I would emphasize here rather the importance of those notes that are concerned with his pedigree and the (familial) connections he claimed to have to esteemed scholarly dynasties of his time. While he established these ties to a number of individual scholars from Damascus (independent of their madhhab), the attention he dedicates to the Meccan Banū Fahd family stands out. Although there is no mention of kinship or marriage ties as such, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s own writings indicate nonetheless that he drew on the prestige of this long-lived dynasty to an unrivaled degree.
The paper will explore how Ibn Ṭūlūn enacted these ties through ijāzas, biographies, citations and even his compiled correspondence with one member of the family, Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd. Judging from the intensity of his life-long contact with this Meccan family, I would argue that the phrase ‘my brother’ he uses for Jār Allāh might actually indicate more than a shared membership in a Sufi ṭarīqa.
The chapter discusses narrative discussion in Early Modern chronicles and biographical dictionaries from Damascus. It does so on the basis of a case study on one rather marginal Sufi shaykh of, probably, Abessinian origin, but nonetheless became a major figure in late 15th-century controversies over the alcohol trade. The chapter demonstrates, how the figure's relevance changed with growing temporal distance to these events.
The chapter discusses the earliest Ottoman architectural politics after their conquest of Damascus in 1516. It argues that even during the first two years, those caused a paradigmatic change in the sacred landscape of the city, which prepared a more thorough 'Ottomanization' during the remainder of the 16th century.
Against this background, the presentation aims to shed light on the genealogy of this discursive formation from an Ottoman History perspective, focused on Syria and Egypt in particular. First, I will briefly introduce which temporal categories of periodizations were used in history writing at around 1500 and how the spatial categories of 'East' and 'West' were employed in this respect.
Only with colonial rule did Egyptian and Syrian historians finally subscribe to the concept of the Middle Ages, partly because some of the most influential ones took their higher education at European universities, and partly because colonial governments decided on the syllabi in local schools. While the overarching periodization of antiquity – Middle Ages – Modernity was generally adopted, it was also changed and adapted to the specific vantage points. It was even used to challenge another dominant—European—conceptualization of the history their region: The 'Golden Age-' or "Decline-paradigm". By using the 'Western' concept of the 'Middle Ages', Egyptian and Syrian historians were able to reassert their own country's and culture's position within the 'history of world civilization', and in the process reconfigured the concept in time and meaning.
However, as a collector and as an author who published in print, in addition to being a 19th-century Damascene, he was certainly an actor in the intellectual environment that gave rise and informed the Naḥda. The presentation concentrates on his activities as a book collector and the profile of his collection to show in how far this peripheral figure employed early modern texts for his own purposes. In short, I argue that al-Shaṭṭī's collection endeavors were to a large part informed by his career goals in the Ḥanbalī milieu of Damascus.
Moreover, his own scribal interventions in the manuscripts he acquired and consulted support this notion that he built up a working library useful to a religious scholar. Lacking the hereditary prestige granted by a scholarly lineage, early modern authors served him as authorities to anchor his own set of transmissions and his scholarly authority more broadly.
Presented at the IHR Workshop ‘Colophons and Scribal Cultures across the Early Modern World’, organized by Christopher D. Bahl and Stefan Hanß, London, Institute of Historical Research, 2 July 2018.
The talk was given at the Workshop "Social Codicology: The Multiple Lives of Manuscripts in Muslim Societies", organized by Olly Akkerman, Léon Buskens, Adrien Delmas, Rabat, NIMAR, 9 - 11 October 2018.
https://thecamel.hypotheses.org/101
The benefits of the right familial background to a successful scholarly career are well-known and have been addressed by the concept paper for this workshop. While talent and determination are certainly necessary qualities to reach intellectual excellency, they are more than helped by an early nudging in the right directions and the opening of doors by one’s parents, grandparents, older siblings or other members of one’s wider family. The personal character of knowledge transmission assured an even higher impact of familial ties (cf. Perho 2011). By way of a certain habitus and almost class-specific etiquette, the great scholarly families established a quasi-monopoly over the large endowments (Goldziher 1874). The importance of familial ties was further realized through the institutionalization or transformation of teacher-student relations by way of marriage ties with female members of a teacher’s or patron’s household. On the other hand, several Mamluk Era polymaths were rather newcomers from hitherto obscure families. Although few of them were successful in establishing a scholarly dynasty as such, their works would shape intellectual life for generations to come.
The paper investigates how the 16th-century Damascene polymath Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn used specific textual and archival practices to stake his claims in the absence of wide familial support. From a dynastic perspective, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s position was precarious in two ways: only one family member supported his education and early career to a considerable degree, and he himself was the last survivor of his own household, if not family at large. As I will argue, he compensated for his (originally) peripheral position through practices of textual production. Through these, he did establish himself as an important authority on ḥadīth, law, history, and a number of other subjects. He also realized his ties to his teachers and earlier authorities. Although it seems that indirect, textual knowledge transmission played an important part in this, Ibn Ṭūlūn was careful to frame it in terms of direct or even “hereditary” transmission (D’Hulster 2013, 186). To these ends, he inserted multiple autobiographical notes throughout his extensive corpus.
While it is obvious even upon a superficial survey of his works that Ibn Ṭūlūn was widely read and knowledgeable in diverse fields of investigation (ḥadīth, law, grammar, medicine, history, biography), I would emphasize here rather the importance of those notes that are concerned with his pedigree and the (familial) connections he claimed to have to esteemed scholarly dynasties of his time. While he established these ties to a number of individual scholars from Damascus (independent of their madhhab), the attention he dedicates to the Meccan Banū Fahd family stands out. Although there is no mention of kinship or marriage ties as such, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s own writings indicate nonetheless that he drew on the prestige of this long-lived dynasty to an unrivaled degree.
The paper will explore how Ibn Ṭūlūn enacted these ties through ijāzas, biographies, citations and even his compiled correspondence with one member of the family, Jār Allāh Ibn Fahd. Judging from the intensity of his life-long contact with this Meccan family, I would argue that the phrase ‘my brother’ he uses for Jār Allāh might actually indicate more than a shared membership in a Sufi ṭarīqa.
The paper presents a micro-historical study of the very earliest Ottoman policies of architectural patronage—and Damascene reactions to them. The temporal scope of this study is restricted to those one-and-a-half years between Selīm's conquest of Damascus and his return to Istanbul (Ramaḍān 922–Rabīʿ I 924/Sept. 1516–Mar. 1518).
The Mamluks and Ottomans had quite different approaches to religion, which could be summarized as decentralized and centralized respectively. Whereas the Mamluks acknowledged and supported an equality between the four Sunni law schools (Shāfiʿī, Ḥanafī, Ḥanbalī, Mālikī) – with certain beneficial treatment of the first two –, the Ottomans decisively allied themselves with the Ḥanafī law school and shaped it into a bureaucratic institution.
As I will demonstrate, already even during Selīm's two short-term stays the Ottomans set to implement their own vision and restructured both the legal status quo and the sacred landscape of the city in such a profound way that the governor Jānbirdī al-Ghazālī could do nothing to undo them during his revolt following the sultan's death. They did so by administrative changes but also by a deliberate visual appropriation of the city through means of Ottoman dress, Ottoman coins, the public distribution of Ottoman food, and, most importantly, an architectural re-organization of the built landscape of Damascus.
First, I will give a summary of the city's transition from Mamluk to Ottoman rule following the battle at Marj Dābiq. Then, I will elaborate on Selīm's visual policies with regard to three aspects: 1) dress, 2) the ottoman appropriation of the Damascene cityscape through architectural activity, and 3) the role of ostentatious charity within this appropriation, focussing on the newly constructed religious complex above the grave of the controversial Sufi Ibn al-ʿArabī.
The new availability of source texts is greeted with as much enthusiasm in Middle Eastern History as it is elsewhere. In the light of current events, a digital copy might sometimes be all that is left of a historical document or work of literature. The efforts, many libraries and other actors have made in the digitalization of sources has made a return to manuscripts possible on a large scale. Moreover, methods of encoding or distant reading offer new approaches to open up sources and render them more understandable for students and non-specialists. Once OCR for the Arabic script has been perfected and analyses of large corpora of texts are possible, this might cause tremendous changes in our knowledge about the cultures and literatures we research.
As one current discussion on the German academic platform www.HSOZKULT.de attests to, the digitally available sources are also a challenge for the humanities and social sciences. The new tools (such as Maktaba Shamila) seem to work almost like a magic wand, summoning 'data' from myriad sources at one stroke of the keyboard. They enable 'data mining' on an even larger scale and shroud peculiarities of the sources of this data. It is in this context, as all participants in said discussion agreed, that we need the ancillary sciences more than ever to assure a true assessment of the sources we intend to work with.
The present paper addresses these chances and pitfalls with particular recurrence to the author's research with Arabic chronicles an biographical dictionaries from the Mamluk and Ottoman periods.
To these ends, I have selected two case studies which deal with 'scholarly dynasties' of comparable importance within the Damascene society of their times, but with quite different trajectories of 'rise and fall'. The first is the Ibn Qāḍī ʿAjlūn family which had since the 14th century risen from obscurity to prominence. From its ranks, several individuals rose to the ranks of chief and deputy judge. The family was reaching its pinnacle shortly before the Ottoman conquest, but disappears from the sources soon after. The second case is that of rather short-lived ‘scholarly dynasty’ of the Ibn Ṭūlūns. From this family, only the famous historian Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn and his paternal uncle receive attention in our sources. I will argue that these two families can stand in as archetypes for how the Ottoman conquest could influence the fate of a dynasty to the worse or better, and what agency local families had to react to the political-adminsitrative reorganisation by the Ottomans. Both dynasties experienced their crisis of dynastic transmission and reacted in different ways to negotiate the survival of its legacy.
Despite considerable scholarly attention in recent years, this is the first monograph dedicated to the Taʿlīq, not as a source but as the subject of inquiry. To these ends, Torsten Wollina discusses it as an ego-document shedding new light on the interdependence of text form and presented information.
The first of four chapters frames the study by introducing the author and placing the Taʿlīq within the arabic diary tradition, which conformed both to the needs of historians (as primary sources) and to those of the author (as a pragmatic text for everyday use). The following two chapters give attention to the portrayal of Ibn Ṭawq’s household and of his views about the wider world, respectively. The fourth chapter concludes the study with an analysis of the author’s self image as conveyed in his text.
On this basis Wollina addresses questions of both literary studies and social history. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate Ibn Ṭawq’s depiction of the social as well as the physical world he lived in. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the author’s household with individual subchapters on his women and children, as well as on the physical space of his house. Chapter 3 approaches the author’s perception of the wider world he lived in („Lebenswelt“). To this end, Wollina analyzes how his line of work as a notary and position in a cadi’s faction, the ritual of tashrīf (the robing of officials and others), and his taking part of the contemporary food culture influenced his views on and attitudes towards society.
Chapter 4 scrutinizes the text for the self image it conveys. Starting from a typology developed by Astrid Meier in an article on Dimensions and Crises of the Self, Wollina tries to unearth Ibn Ṭawq’s personality and self-consciousness from his journal and re-addresses the question how the text form influences or even restricts the author in expressing himself. However, although Ibn Ṭawq’s self representation in general conforms to the literary model of a stable personality prevalent in his times, the journal also offers glimpses to the contrary, demonstrating the complex relationships between an author, his text and the world he lived in.
Damascus Anecdotes is furthermore a product of my own research project on Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546) and the role his historiographical oeuvre had for his wider work and legacy. Posts will deal with short descriptions of his works (and the manuscripts we have of them), biographical sketches of his contemporaries, friends, and antagonists. They will also inform about the progress of the project itself, in the form of bibliographies, announcements for new publications, and new findings in the archives.
Most of all, Damascus Anecdotes shall be about the fun of reading these materials, the exploration and treasure hunts that are a large part of research. All too often, exciting finds have to be discarded in publications for sake of the argument. Here, however, they shall receive their due place, one they deserve as much as in those texts, where they stem from.
Link to the publisher:
http://www.v-r.de/de/the_mamluk_ottoman_transition/t-0/1087084/
Der Vortrag beleuchtet Ibn Tuluns Korpus und seine interne Organisation, bevor er zeigt, wie sich dieser Korpus räumlich verteilte, ausgehend von der ursprünglichen Bücherstiftung durch den Autor zunächst über eine lokale und regionale Verteilung, die selten über die Grenzen seiner Heimatstadt Damaskus hinausging, bis hin zu einer globalen Verteilung, die zwischen der Mitte des 19. bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts Gestalt annahm. Der Vortrag argumentiert, dass Ibn Tuluns Organisation seines geschriebenen Werkes ebenso wichtig für das Überdauern seiner Werke war wie der Inhalt und die Argumentation der individuellen Werke.
Writing Space in the Early Modern Period.