The historiography of pre-modern Arabic autobiography has centered on the works of elite male Sunni scholars, like al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505), Ibn Ṭawq (d. 1505), and Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546).  Historians have yet to find pre-1600 autobiographical writings of nomads, slaves, women, or peasants, but the diary of one 16th-century Aleppan weaver named Kamāl al-Dīn offers new insights into the daily life of a Syrian craftsman. He recorded political gossip, ethnographic details, and notes about his professional life, but significantly for this presentation, also long passages about his personal friendships, including a list of friends who died in the plague of late 997/early 998, descriptions of visits to friends’ homes, his attendance at weddings, and samples of poetry that he composed on the occasion of his friends’ weddings or even their deaths.  This diarist’s tributes to his friendships typically functioned as excurses about his social, communal self. Although this diary stands as the earliest known craftsman’s Arabic self-narrative, there are many indications that Kamāl al-Dīn was deeply familiar with autobiographical works and certainly understood the discursive conventions of this historically elite genre of writing. He appears to have composed this text with the expectation that his narrative would have a public audience: of his peers during his lifetime and, after his death, readers of his text bequeathed to a local library. Such considerations of a public audience and practices affecting the afterlife of one’s writings were normally reserved for elite thinkers and writers. Merchants’ and craftsmen’s letters, receipts, and account books were incidental and rarely conceptualized as writings for prosperity, so his environment created no expectations of self-narrative. These elite practices through which a writer like Kamāl al-Dīn developed his interiority and constituted his private self also had a consciously public dimension. In this presentation I want to investigate the social practices and cultures of literacy into which Kamāl al-Dīn inscribed himself and his closest friends in early Ottoman Aleppo.

Within the vast tradition of pre-modern Arabic literature, merchants rarely made their voices heard by authoring works of prose or poetry. Neither have they left us with many diaries or autobiographical accounts. Nonetheless, writing was for many of them part of their work routine and an indispensable tool to manage their businesses and networks. This contribution will explore a unique collection of roughly 1.600 letters exchanged between merchants based in the Egyptian port of Damietta and their partners throughout the Levant at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. These traders were of mostly Syrian origin and used Arabic which sets this corpus apart from other similar collections of letters from the period available to scholarship, such as the Armenian letters of the New Julfa trading network. The letters are meant to convey news, not only about their trade but their families and social life as well. They are also a textual vehicle for the expression of love, trust, and friendship. While a staggering amount of Arabic letters from the pre-Ottoman Levant have been discovered, edited, and researched, this corpus is the first to expand the research on Arabic epistolography into the Ottoman era. Additionally, other alternative strategies of self-narration were used by the merchants to convey their image to the public. Most importantly, literary patronage and the collection of libraries can be understood as such strategies. Some of the protagonists of this letter corpus are at the same time central figures in a vibrant but mostly overlooked translation movement at the outset of what was to become the nahḍa.

This paper investigates the methodological use of Ottoman-era literary works in Arabic, with comparative discussion of Ottoman Turkish and Classical Malay literary works, as historiographical sources for an analysis of transimperial notions of selfhood and difference. The 15th and 16th centuries saw the rise of global networks of trade in spices and silk commodities connecting Central America and the Mediterranean to Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. The archival evidence in centers such as Venice, and Istanbul, and the Netherlands reveals a complex political history of imperial administrators formulating key legal strategies that fostered the global economic activity of multiconfessional networks of merchants and diplomats. While certain archival documents are conducive of a specifically cultural analysis of these transimperial encounters and exchanges, these documents can be contextualized further through a careful examination of often-overlooked literary sources that offer narrative representations of early modern trade routes. Drawing on selections of key literary works, including the Arabic navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid’s (d. 1500) surviving corpus of Arabic poetry and prose, the merchant ‘Ali Akbar’s Ottoman Turkish Ḵeṭāy-nāma on China, and the Classical Malay Sejarah Melayu, this paper asks whether the globalizing trends of transimperial commerce and subjecthood in the 15th and 16th centuries allow historians to speak of changing notions of self and difference along the trade routes connecting the Mediterranean with Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.

This paper presents an outline for the meaning of library or reading registers as autobiographical historical index. Long before Safi al-Din al-Hilli’s systematic listing of his reading catalog, traditional transmission and reporting as ways of verification held a presence as manifestations of autobiographical deference and allegiance. In pre-modern and modern times, this proclamation recognizes the influence of forbears in matters of reading, company, and authorized audition. Among the religious and secularists, quotation, adaptation, appropriation, and direct mention suggest a cultural script where knowledge takes a written form or a library of some sort. Along with biographical constellations with their scattered autobiographic gleanings, snippets and references to libraries and books or authorities hold a special presence in cultural history. Especially among Sufis, antecedent or contemporaneous authority holds sway. On the other hand, eyewitness accounts, authorial testimonials are no less important as windows into intellectual growth and development. Thus, sayings, treatises, and practices shed light not only on the belated autobiographer, but also on a strong predecessor who usually functions in this script as the strong or unvanquished authority. Almost every autobiographical narrative works within a genealogy of knowledge, a library that significantly inspires modernists and generates a reading script or a complementary library register. Whether we speak of al-Qushayri, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Qurrat al-Ayn al-Hamadhani (in Shakwa al-gharib), ibn Maʿsum al-Madini, or ibn Ajiba, there is this exhaustive mention of readings that enforce an autobiographical pact, in Philippe Lejeune’s term, which is the staple of modern autobiography in the Arab world. Modernists’ works including Taha Husayn’s Al-Ayyam, Sayyid Qutb’s A Child from a Village, Hanna Mina’s Fragments, Jurji Zaydan’s Life, or Fadwa Tuqan’s Journey, convey and also transmit a library register that explains not only a boyhood and a future career, but also a wide cultural script that forms a central part in intellectual and social history. As each self-narrative, especially in the modern period, lays down his/her readings and contacts, we come across a wide autobiographical spectrum where readings and education become demarcating signs in an intellectual and cultural history. Salama Musa’s readings and intellectual affiliations for example are presented as the dynamic in the stride for modernity. He concludes by claiming his autobiography as meant to “to settle … [his] account with history,” a claim that others subscribe to in their intellectual maps.