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A City between the Pen and the Grave: The Geographical Imagination of Ibn Tulun's History of al-Salihiya
Abstract
“Local histories” and “city histories” have long been historical sources for the study of medieval Islamic societies yet rarely are these texts approached as coherent arguments for local sanctity. Analyzing a 16th century history of a Damascus neighborhood written by the scholar Ibn ??l?n (d. 1546), this paper considers how this local history is not merely a repository for historical data but is itself an attempt to “spatialize” memory and cultivate in the reader a particular relationship with his or her local space. The work, entitled al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya f? T?r?kh al-??li??ya, includes not only brief accounts of local institutions and descriptions of their architecture but also miraculous reports of the neighborhood’s origins and numerous biographies of the saints, scholars, and notables whose graves fill the ??li??ya neighborhood. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, this paper suggests that Ibn ??l?n’s text goes beyond simple evocation of an Islamic geography. In both its structure and its content, al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya actively works to imagine the ??li??ya as the very epitome of Islamic notions of blessedness. Towards this end, Ibn ??l?n presents the ??li??ya as the location where the prophet H?b?l’s blood was spilt and continues to be seen into the 16th century. While H?b?l’s blood is the most vivid manifestation of prophetic time and space spilling into Ibn ??l?n’s account of the ??li??ya, the presence of the blood is but one articulation of an argument woven throughout al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya: the Salihiya is a place of refuge, a place where prayers are met, and a place not on the periphery of an Islamic cosmos but at its very center. The intersection of memory, text, space, and religious imagination found in al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya holds important implications for scholarly conceptualizations of “Muslim cities” and “Muslim spaces.” Rather than determining a place to be a “Muslim city” based upon formal criteria such as the proximity of mosque and bazaar, Ibn ??l?n’s work reveals that the ??li??ya becomes a “Muslim space” through his textual effort and his willingness to consistently reconfigure center-periphery dynamics. In conclusion, this paper argues that ignoring the imaginative work of local histories in creating Muslim space results in essentialized and reified understandings of medieval Muslims’ envisioned geography.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
Medieval