It is a commonly understood problem that, the odd newfound manuscript aside, those who conduct research based in the premodern Islamic textual tradition generally do not receive new material with which to engage. Western scholarship focused on questions of authenticity and historicity before some scholars turned to literary-analytical approaches that focused on how the past was represented, and how that representation of the past reflected the milieus and concerns of the writers and their societies. Other scholars focused (or focus) on literary networks, the genealogies of the texts, and the ideas contained therein, while still others are today exploring what digital analysis of the entire corpus can reveal to us. Where should the field go from here?
Seeking to explore, sometimes in an experimental fashion, what new approaches or analytical tools from other disciplines may reveal, this panel will discuss the impact diverse forms of literary and historiographical analysis can have on engaging with textual material. The first paper, “'This is what was related in the tash'?th': Muslim historians’ use(s) of Syriac hagiography" traces the appearance of Syriac hagiographical material in Islamic history writing, offering a nuanced understanding of its literary role beyond the generic and non-specific categories of "impact" and "influence." “Interpreting miracles in Muslim sacred texts” compares 10th C. CE Isma’ili interpretations of miraculous events to 20th C. C.E. modernist exegetical explanations, drawing thereby conclusions relating to the intellectual history of minorities in the Islamic tradition. “The theatrics of Islamic historiography: Getting into the heads of the historians” identifies the insights that may be gained by reading historical chronicles as performances of earlier versions of the same stories. “Narrating sultanship: the writing of sultanic biography as performance of social status” investigates the complex interplay between authorship and patronage in the act of narrating the life of a sultan, and points toward a literary, rather than legitimizing, goal. The panel's final paper, "Narrative strategies, state formation, and world-making in late medieval Egyptian chronicles," explores the light that may be shed on 9th/15th C. Cairo's political world-view through established historiographical methodologies.
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Ms. Reyhan Durmaz
Syriac hagiography constituted a significant literary source for Muslim historians in antiquity. Some referred to them as sources of historical information, while others utilized them as archives of rhetorical themes and topoi; and yet others embedded stories of Christian saints within their texts to redefine and expand the contours of the Muslim community. This paper revisits the writings of three Muslim authors, namely, Ibn Ishaq (8th c.), al-Tabari (10th c.) and Ibn al-Azraq (12th c.), with regard to the ways in which they appear to have made use of Christian saints’ stories and Syriac hagiography in general. The primary aim of my paper is to take the scholarly discussion out of the discourse of impact and influence, and bring a nuanced understanding of the various literary roles Syriac hagiography played in Islamic literature. Secondly, I would like to show, as a small number of scholars pointed out heretofore, the impact of Islamic literature on the expansion and transmission of Christian saints’ dossiers across time, languages and religious boundaries, through the active agency of Muslim authors.
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Dr. Nebil Husayn
Many early Muslim narratives about prophets and their disciples can be relegated to the realm of hagiography rather than history. The edifying and polemical purposes for which these texts were written complicate and sometimes obstruct any attempt to yield historical facts from such texts. This is most apparent in narratives about supernatural miracles ordinarily considered physically impossible by readers. Faithful Muslims generally assumed such miracles to be exceptions to a natural order of the world. However, a small number of Muslim thinkers, both medieval and modern, have denied the historicity of such miracles. The following study examines the work of exegetes of the Quran who viewed themselves as philosophers and modernists to document their attempts to explain miracles attributed to Israelite prophets mentioned in the Quran. Their alternative interpretations broke with medieval and Sunni orthodox views on the subject by interpreting miracles so they did not contradict accepted views of the natural, physical world.
Twentieth-century naturalist interpretations of miracles in the Quran seems to have followed identical attempts among nineteenth-century Christians to reinterpret the miracles of Christ as empirically plausible events. What parallels exist between exegetes of Christian and Muslim scripture who opted to interpret miracles with naturalist and allegorical interpretations? When these authors interpreted miracle narratives of the Quran as allegories, how did this affect their understanding of miracles that appear in other genre like hadith and military history (maghazi)? To answer these questions, I examine the work of two Ismailis, al-Qadi al-Nu‘man (d. 974) and Ja‘far b. Mansur al-Yaman (d. 990) and compare their views to those of modernist exegetes writing in the twentieth century. Such a study illuminates the intellectual history of minorities in the Islamic tradition who appear to share some of the same assumptions and sensibilities of contemporary historians about the world around them.
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Dr. Aaron Hagler
That medieval Muslim historians often copied episodes of early Islamic history from previous scholars is among the foundational (and incontrovertible) assumptions of the study of Islamic historiography. While this diachronic narrative stagnancy may often complicate efforts to utilize these stories as representatives of their times, our certainty that these writers were directly consulting and copying earlier versions allows us to read any alteration to the established source text as a conscious choice of the author. That choice may be motivated by any number of considerations, from transcription error, to style and brevity, to an attempt to alter the very meaning of the narrative itself.
This paper argues that we may consider earlier versions of the narrative as the "script" of later versions, and that we can use the method that stage actors commonly term "beat marking" to make sense of these changes. The fundamental premise of "beat marking" is that every word in a script has a purpose or "objective" that must be "performed" by the actors. In our context, when a later author omits, adds, or alters material from an obviously copied source, it can be understood as the author, as an actor, choosing to "perform" that moment of the script in a consciously different way. By examining the impact that change has on the narrative, we may then be able to: 1) determine how important the change was to the author (i.e., was it motivated by the desire to change a moment, a character, an episode, or the entirety of the early Islamic narrative); 2) understand the literary-narrative strategies a given author likes to employ (i.e., what are his preferred tactics for accomplishing his objectives); and, finally 3) establish by aggregate each author's "super-objective" (his primary thematic or narrative concerns).
Utilizing the ubiquitous al-Tabari as a "script" for later historians including Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Kathir, and others, this paper will 1) describe in detail this experimental methodology; and, 2) demonstrate the potential of this method to gain insight into the priorities, and perhaps the psychology, of the individual historians examined.
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Gowaart Van Den Bossche
Panegyric biographies from Late Medieval Syro-Egypt have generally been interpreted as legitimizing the reigns of sultans who usurped their way into power or whose position was politically contested. The role of the authors of these biographies is seen as little more than that of a propagandist paying lip service to an official state-induced interpretation of history. This paper argues that far more complex relations of authorship and patronage were at play in the act of narrating the life and times of a sultan. This was not in the first place directed by a supposed need for legitimacy, but by the authorial desire to construct a literary tour de force that displayed the specific mastery of the literary and rhetorical canon required of these authors in their official function as scribes in the d?w?n al-insh?’ (chancery bureau). These biographies often consist as much of praising the sultan’s actions as they do of performing a distinctive insh?’ identity. This paper will specifically look at the ways in which authors made use of such techniques to perform their own “literariness” and, as such, their social pre-eminence.
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Prof. Jo Van Steenbergen
A handful of high-profile annalistic chronicles of Egyptian history that were produced in the course of the ninth century AH/fifteenth century CE display a remarkably systematic shared concern for opening their annals with an update on the year’s ruling elites. These lists of elites refer mainly to local hierarchies of power, but they also regularly engage with the political landscapes of their wider world, occasionally even including references to rulers in regions as far apart as al-Hind, Ethiopia, and Europe.
Introductory lists such as these are certainly not without precedent in late medieval Arabic history writing. However, the increasingly structured nature and the literary and political functionalities of these lists appear as something of a novelty, signposting the distinctive nature of the rich historiographical production of courtiers, scholars, and historians in ninth-/fifteenth-century Cairo. This invites for further analysis from literary as well as from historical perspectives.
This paper will present these lists, looking especially at the chronicles of al-Maqr?z? (d. 845/1442), al-?Ayn? (d. 855/1450), and Ibn Taghr?bird? (d. 874/1470). Taking inspiration from analytical practices advocated by New Historicism and Social Semiotics this paper will consider the functions and meanings of these lists. How did these lists participate in the construction of these annalistic literary texts? How were they, as representations of a strict political order, meaningful in their authors’ and audiences’ engagements with the socio-political instabilities of their time?
As far as the latter issue is concerned, it will actually be argued that these lists participated actively in the construction of the idea of some global political geography revolving around the court in Cairo, meant to be instrumental in the complex local politics of that court first and foremost.
