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Did Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Destroy the Fatimids' Books? An Historiographical Enquiry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2014
Abstract
A persistent myth featuring in some modern accounts of the transition from Fatimid to Ayyubid rule (1169–71) is that one of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn's (r. 1171–93) first actions upon attaining sovereignty over Egypt was to destroy the Fatimids’ book collections in their entirety. Medieval sources present a different, more nuanced depiction of books sold and dispersed over a decade or more, rather than extirpated and put out of circulation altogether. This article collects and examines medieval Arabic accounts of the episode, and finds further indications of the robust survival of Fatimid-era works in the composition of later chronicles, where native Fatimid-era accounts, which clearly did endure beyond the Fatimid age, are well-represented. The article also looks at the tendentious aspects of medieval accounts of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn's policies, and the difficulties they pose to a modern appraisal of the sultan's character and intellectual-ideological tendencies.
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References
1 I would like to express my thanks to Dr Konrad Hirschler for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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27 Sayyid, Nuzhat, pp. 126–127.
28 The others being his Bahā’ al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād and al-Qāḍī al-Fādil, his chief administrator in Egypt: for the latter's roles, alongside ‘Imād al-Dīn's, especially in the context of Salāḥ al-Dīn's building of the Citadel at Cairo and its inscriptions, including the new sultan's honorific titles as expressions of his relationship with the ‘Abbasid caliph, see Rabbat, N., The Citadel of Cairo: a New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture (Leiden, 1995), pp. 68–74 Google Scholar.
29 Abū Shāma, al-Rawḍatayn 1, p. 200; al-Bundārī, p. 116; cf. Eddé, p. 54.
30 See n. 25 above.
31 For more on his ouevre, see Singh, N. K. and Samiuddin, A. (eds.), Encyclopaedic Historiography of the Muslim World (Delhi, 2004), pp. 15–16Google Scholar.
32 Abū Shāma, al-Rawḍatayn 1, p. 200; Walker (1997), p. 31; Mackensen (1935), p. 97. The famous collection at al-Ḥākim's Dār al-Ḥikma, which included books of great value, was largely liquidated in these riots, though it survived in an attenuated form until the end of Fatimid rule: Elayyan, pp. 127–128; Mackensen, p. 100.
33 Mackensen, p. 97, p. 100.
34 Halm (1997), p. 92.
35 A portion of these fell into the hands of a broker named Ibn Sūra, who sold them on to individuals: Ibn Ṭuwayr, Nuzhat pp. 126–127; Halm, loc. cit, p. 92.
36 Walker (2002), Chapters 6–7; Bora, pp. 58–69; al-Maqrīzī, Ighāthat al-umma bi kashf al-ghumma, M. al-Ziyāda and J al-Shayyāl (eds.), Cairo, 1957, pp. 72–73. His classification of Cairo society into seven social strata is a useful heuristic tool, and the merchantile/scholarly classes mentioned here fall into sections 2, 3 and 5 of the following list: (1) the Mamluk political elite; (2) merchants; (3) lower-class merchants and tradesmen; (4) peasants; (5) professional scholars; (6) artisans and those who worked for a living (7) the urban poor, water-carriers, etc. Cf. Hirschler pp. 25–26 and passim on the reading practices and literary development of these groups.
37 Itti’āẓ, 3, p. 346; cf. the wide range of Fatamid-era and other sources listed in Guest, A. R., “A List of Writers, Books and other Authorities mentioned by El Maqrizi in his Khitat ”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1902), pp. 103–125 Google Scholar.
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39 For documentation of this predilection, see Bora, Chapters. 2, 6.
40 Gary Leiser, “The Restoration of Sunnism in Egypt: Madrasas and Mudarrisūn 495–647/1101–1249”, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1976, p. 336; idem, “The Madrasa and the Islamization of the Middle East: The Case of Egypt”, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 22 (1985), pp. 29–47; p. 44; Elayyan, p. 124; Hirschler (2012), p. 131.
41 Mackensen, p. 99; Elayyan, p. 121.
42 Hirschler (2012), chapter 4.
43 Although al-Maqrīzī is said to have availed himself of Isma‘ili theological writings, which would otherwise have been scarce in post-Fatimid Egypt: Walker (2003), pp. 85–87.
44 Al-Ṣuyūṭī (d. 1505), in characteristically polemical mode, stated that Qāḍī al-Fāḍil burned those books he regarded as heretical, though none of the early sources mention this: Dajani-Shakeel, p. 30. That he would have burned chronicles as opposed to Isma‘ili religious books is even less credible, and in fact he was involved in the commission of literary works while he served the Fatimids, Daftary (2004), p. 194.
45 Lev, Chapters. 1.2, 2.2, 2.3; Dajani-Shakeel.
46 For a discussion of various works left behind by Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, including his court and administrative ‘daily’ diaries, the Mutajaddidāt and Muyāwamāt, alongside his collected official correspondence, known as both the Mujalladāt and the Rasā’il, which were apparently available to his colleague ‘Imād al-Dīn and to the chronicler Abū Shāma, though not extant in themselves, see Singh & Samiuddin, pp. 782–785.
47 Eddé, p. 55.
48 ‘An Historiographical Study of al-Quḍā‘ī's Ta’rīkh’, MPhil Thesis (University of Oxford, 1998), the codices I was able to examine are Bodleian Pococke 270 and Marshall 37.
49 A stance that most famously took succour from the refutation of the Isma‘ili creed produced by al-Ghazali in the eleventh century, as the Fatimids’ power seemed firm and expanding: Abū Ḥamīd al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), al-Mustaẓhirī or Faḍā’iḥ al-Bāṭiniyya wa faḍā’il al-mutaẓhiriyya (Infamies of the Esoterics and the Renown of the Exoterics): for a variety of print and electronic editions, see <http://www.ghazali.org/site/oeuvre-t.htm; cf. Mitha, Farouk, Al-Ghazālī and the Ismailis: a debate on reason and authority in medieval Islam (London, 2001)Google Scholar.
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51 For example, Ta’rīkh al-duwal, IV, pp. 124–129.
52 Frenkel, 3; Lev (1999), p. 119.
53 Ta’rīkh al-duwal, IV, p. 124.
54 Bora, pp. 58–69.
55 Ta’rīkh al-duwal, MS Vienna Arab 814, vol. 3: ff. 14b-17b.
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61 The ‘three great contemporary witnesses of his career [were] Bahā’ al-Dīn, ‘Imād al-Dīn and al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil’; Scanlon, George T., review of Andrew Ehrenkreutz's, S. Saladin (1972); Journal of Semitic Studies 20 (1975), pp. 276–278 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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64 Holt (1983), p. 237.
65 Lev (1999), Chapters. 1.2, 1.3.
66 See n. 6 above.
67 For a sense of the stylistic and methodological variations in the biographies of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, including the presence - or lack - of hagiographic elements, see Richards (1980) and Holt (1983); cf. Lev (1999), Chapters 1.3.
68 Brett, (1982).
69 Lewis, (1990). Cf. Halm (1997, 2001), pp. 94–95 who cites al-Juwaynī's account of his destruction of Niẓārī heretical books, then admits they were not all lost: this sounds like the fate of Fatimid books, though Halm does not draw that analogy here.
70 See n. 29 above.
71 Hirschler (2012), pp. 131–132.
72 See n. 44 above.
73 Ibn Ṭuwayr, Nuzhat, p. 127; Walker (1997), p. 28.
74 Documentation of the relationship between al-Maqrīzī's Sulūk and Ibn al-Furāt's Ta’rīkh al-duwal for the year 694/1294–5 is provided by Little (1970); 73–5; for 778/1376–7 and 793/139–1 by Massoud (2007), Chapters. 1 and 2 (passim); further borrowings are indicated in: Reuven Amitai-Preiss Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Īlkhānid War, 1260–1281 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 43–59; Bacharach, Jere L., “Circassian Mamluk Historians and their Quantitative Economic Data”, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 12 (1975), pp. 75–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p.76, p.84.
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76 Ta’rīkh al-duwal, MS Vienna Arab 814, III:185a-190a.
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78 Frenkel (1999), pp. 1–2.
79 Leiser (1976), p. 403.
80 This historiographical treatise, North Syrian in origin, has been attributed by two of its modern editors, Cahen (1937–8) and Tadmuri (2002), to ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī; the latter of the two offers a more definite ascription than the former. Cahen's reservations about the ascription, despite the near-identification of the two sets of author names (in which he is followed by A. F. Sayyid, Chronique d’Égypte, Cairo, غ, 1981) based on the fact that the biographies of ‘Imād al-Dīn do not list this work within his corpus, that he was not a qāḍī, as the manuscript's attribution to him states, and that the writing style of the Bustān differs considerably from his other, more ‘flowery’ works, are not decisive, so I have preferred to accept the ascription of the single surviving manuscript in Istanbul (Saray 2959) to Imād al-Dīn, as Hillenbrand (2000), 618, has done, and as al-Jazarī, (d. 1338), a fellow Damascene and a specialist on Syrian scholars and authors, did (cf. Sayyid, op. cit., با, n. 4). Hartmann (1995), p. 92, suggests that the author was another ‘Imād al-Dīn from Hamah. ‘Imād al- Dīn was, however, ideally placed to collect the Syria-led reports that predominate in that work, though Egypt's history also has strong presence in it. It was, as I mention above, very probably an historiographical outline to be expanded upon later, styling itself a mukhtaṣar or summary (p. 137); the narrative reads like a prototype, with too much of either unique information or perspective to be a mere re-write of previous accounts, as mukhtaṣars usually were. Claude Cahen, ‘Une chronique syrienne du VIe/XIIe siècle: le Bustān al-Jāmi‘’, Bulletin d’études orientales de l’Institut français de Damas vii-viii (1937–8); ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Salam Tadmuri, al-Bustān al-jāmi‘ li-jami‘ tawārīkh ahl al-zamān/al-manṣūb ilā ‘Imād al-Dīn Abī Ḥamīd Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Aṣfahānī (2002); Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (London and New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Hartmann, A, ‘A unique manuscript in the Asian Museum, St Petersburg: the Syrian chronicle at-Ta`riḥ al-Manṣūrī by Ibn Naẓīf al-Ḥamawī from the 7th ah/13th century’, Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras, Vermeulen, I. U. and Smet, D. De (eds.) (Leuven, 1995), pp. 89–100 Google Scholar.
81 For a description, see Lev (1999), Chapter 2.1.
82 Leiser (1976), pp. 430–431.
83 Lewis (1953), p. 239.
84 Frenkel (1999), 1, pp. 8–9.
85 Ibid.
86 Chamberlain, Michael, ‘The Crusader Era and the Ayyubid Dynasty’ in The Cambridge History of Egypt Vol. I, (ed.) Petry, Carl F. (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 198–242 Google Scholar; p. 216; cf. Richards (1980). For an alternative view, see, for example, Humphreys, R. Stephen, “Egypt in the world system of the later Middle Ages” in Petry, Carl F. (ed), The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol 1, (as above), pp. 445–466 Google Scholar, pp. 450–451.
87 For a sense of the stylistic and methodological variations in the biography of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, including the presence - or lack - of hagiographic elements, see Richards (1980).
88 Munqidh, Usāma b., Memoirs of an Arab-Syrian Gentleman or An Arab Knight in the Crusades. Memoirs of Usamah Ibn-Munqidh (Kitāb al-I‘tibār), trans. Hitti, P. K., (Beirut, 1964), p. 14 Google Scholar.
89 See William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, XX, pp. 5–10, Patrologia Latina p. 201, pp. 788–789, in The Crusades: A Documentary History (Milwaukee, 1962), (trans. J. Brundage), pp. 139–140. Other non-Arab sources consulted for comparison, viz. Nicetas Choniates, Chronicles, translated as O city of Byzantium: annals of Niketas Choniatēs by H. J. Magoulias, (Detroit, 1984) and the European/Byzantine sources collected by Hannes Möhring in Saladin und der Dritte Kreuzzug, (Wiesbaden, 1980), appear to be focused on events subsequent to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn's earliest years as the Ayyubid ruler.
90 Goitein, S. D., A Mediterranean Society, (Berkeley, 1967), five vols, 1, p. 38 Google Scholar.