Medieval Arabic Historiography

Authors as Actors

Konrad Hirschler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415665469
• eBook ISBN: 9781134175949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in seventh and thirteenth-century Syria and Eygpt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, this extraordinary study combines approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies, with a particular focus on two well-known texts: Abu Shama's The Book of the Two Gardens, and Ibn Wasil's The Dissipater of Anxieties. These texts describe events during the life of the sultans Nur-al-Din and Salah al-Din, who are primarily known in modern times as the champions of the anti-Crusade movement. Hirschler shows that these two authors were active interpreters of their society and has considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social environment and the shaping of their texts.

Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies.

1
INTRODUCTION

This study reflects on the room for manoeuvre – or the agency – that medieval authors of Arabic historical narratives disposed of in composing their texts. It will therefore ask what the authors’ degree of agency was in composing the works in terms of the social context in which they acted, the learned tradition in which they stood, and the textual environment in which they composed their works. Agency here means:

the capacity of socially embedded actors to appropriate, reproduce, and, potentially, to innovate upon received cultural categories and conditions of action in accordance with their personal and collective ideals, interests, and commitments.

(Emirbayer/Goodwin (1994), 1442–3)

Reflecting on the room for manoeuvre in these different fields requires a detailed analysis of the authors’ social and intellectual contexts and their narratives. As the approach chosen here for studying medieval Arabic historical writing precludes a broad survey of a large number of authors and their texts, I offer a comparative case study by considering two specific examples in depth: Abū Shāma (d. 665/1268) and his Kitāb al-rawḍatayn fi akhbār al-dawlatayn al-Nūrīya wa-al-Salāhīya (The Book of the Two Gardens on the Reports of the Two Reigns [of Nūr al-Dīn and Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn]) as well as Ibn Wāṣil (d. 697/1298) and his Mufarrij al-kurūb fīakhbār banīAyyūb (The Dissipater of Anxieties on the Reports of the Ayyubids).¹

Although the narratives chosen here are important to the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries, they are rather minor texts compared with the ‘grand’ authors generally discussed in surveys of Arabic or Islamic historical writing. Two considerations informed the decision to focus on these two authors and their texts. First, Ibn Wāṣil and Abū Shāma are particularly suitable for comparison, as they both lived in the same period and in the same region. And as their texts also partly deal with the same events, it is possible to analyse how these two Shāfiʿiteʿālims developed, in their outwardly quite similar texts, distinctive versions of their immediate past. In this sense, they are ideal examples of the diversity and complexity of premodern Arabic historical writing. Second, although a study of grand historians and their texts, such as al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk or Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 808/1406) Kitāb al-ʿibar, might have reinforced the notion of these authors’ exceptionality, it is one of the central contentions of this study that even texts of ‘minor’ authors appear as more multi-faceted than previously assumed.

The rationale for proposing yet another study of pre-modern Arabic historical writing is that narrative texts still provide the main sources for studying this period: despite increasing diversity in the sources consulted (e.g. architecture and numismatics),² the relative scarcity of documentary material³ leaves the present-day historian with little choice but to consult narrative texts. In contrast to long periods of European medieval history, these texts are often the only way a given age can be accessed.⁴ Because narrative texts are so significant to our understanding of the past, it is essential to reflect on how they were produced and what different layers of meaning they contain.

The choice of the specific issue treated here – agency – is chiefly a reaction to previous evaluations of medieval Arabic historical writing. In addition to the texts of many other medieval historians, Abū Shāma’s and Ibn Wāṣil’s narratives have been seen as being largely determined by ‘external’ factors: the circumscribed social environment (e.g. Ibn Wāṣil’s dependency on his royal patron), the stagnating intellectual context of the ‘post-classical’ age (in Abū Shāma’s case his immersion in the ‘barren’ field of religious sciences), and the authors’ close reliance on previous historical narratives, which they supposedly merely reproduced in more or less elaborate ways.

This perspective on authors of medieval Arabic narratives is closely connected to the Rise – Golden Age – Decline paradigm,⁵ which to some extent influenced twentieth-century scholarship of Arabic historical writing, for instance Rosenthal’s (1968) monumental A History of Muslim Historiography. In his view, all crucial developments had their source in the early ‘ideal’ periods of Islam, that is the texts ‘written in the second half of the first century [. . .] contained already all the formal elements of later Muslim historiography’.⁶ Due to this assumption that each later phenomenon can be explained by the genre’s inherent origins or genealogy, he traces the texts back to their origins in the Rise and Golden Age of the civilization and considers them to be quasi-independent of later developments within society.⁷ History writing is conceptualized here in terms of encapsulated civilizations with underlying schemes of comprehensive ‘genetic’ interconnections. The early Islamic origins of this genre, not its respective contexts, were the determinants for most of its later developments. Rosenthal’s notion of time is not one of change, but rather one of endless repetition.⁸ Within this analytical framework, the only possible major development is the genre’s decay parallel to the general decline of the civilization.⁹

Nevertheless, during the past decade there have been two important trends in the study of Arabic historical writing, which are best represented by the studies of Khalidi (1994) and el-Hibri (1999). Khalidi considers Arabic historical writing from the point of view of the social historian by taking into account the respective social and political developments, which influenced the production of historical texts. Despite some shortcomings, such as the absence of a discussion of what he understands by the crucial term ‘historical thought’,¹⁰his inquiry represents a substantial re-orientation towards taking social contexts into account, and focusing less on the issue of ‘origins’.¹¹

El-Hibri’s (1999) work on ʿAbbasid historical writing reflects the second trend, namely the increasing influence of literary approaches in the field of history. His main argument is that the ‘historical accounts of the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs were originally intended to be read not for facts, but for their allusive power’.¹² Although he refrains from formulating a specific framework, his study is, for the moment, the most comprehensive and far-reaching examination of pre-modern Arabic historiography, which includes ideas from the field of literary studies.¹³

In this way Khalidi and el-Hibri have advanced the field by applying a specific set of approaches, respectively drawn from social studies and literary studies. However, both studies stand rather isolated from one another and largely exclude other concerns. Thus Khalidi is barely concerned with the texts themselves, while the social context of the texts rarely appears in el-Hibri’s work.

It is in the study of European medieval historical writing that Spiegel has proposed a fruitful combination of the concerns of social history and literary studies.¹⁴ In her study on thirteenth-century vernacular prose historical writing in France she stresses that the meaning of those texts can only be grasped in relation to their social context, in this case, essentially, the development of the societal position of the aristocratic patrons.¹⁵ At the same time, she strives to deal with the complex relationship between text and context, since in her approach texts both reflect and produce social reality. She applies elements of literary analysis, for example when the transformation of vernacular historical writing from poetry to prose is not seen as a move towards accuracy, but as a discursive means in order to ‘appropriate [. . .] the inherent authority of Latin texts’.¹⁶ Spiegel has striven to conceptualize her approach on a more general level by aiming at a Theory of the Middle Ground.¹⁷ In this discussion she deals mainly with the paradox of simultaneously applying literary approaches based on the assumption of the non-referentiality of texts and approaches of social history based on the referentiality of texts.¹⁸

The approach of this study

The present study aims to use this combination of approaches to the field of Arabic medieval historical writing to bridge the gap between recent trends in the field as represented by Khalidi and el-Hibri. It assumes that medieval Arabic historians were active interpreters of their society, and that these authors sought to make sense out of the past, which they presented in (relatively) coherent narratives by employing the right to speak. In this regard the central question will therefore be how they produced meaningful narratives within their societal context. But before turning to the sources, the three axes of inquiry set out in the question – ‘meaning’, ‘narrative’ and ‘societal context’ – need to be conceptualized.

In recent decades ‘meaning’ has become an increasingly important concern in historical studies.¹⁹ Geertz is one of the influential writers who consider culture to be a system of symbols and meanings. Texts (in a very comprehensive sense) are mainly interesting as a part of this system: they have not so much to be explained as interpreted in order to grasp both their symbolic content and meaning,²⁰ and are not seen as merely the direct outcome of material reality or of social processes.²¹ However, under the influence of structuralism, Geertz considers culture in sharp contrast to a societal system (norms and institutions) or a personality system (motivations). In that way he endows culture with rather static and coherent characteristics and with a very high degree of autonomy vis-à-vis these other systems.

In reaction to this, the approach to culture has been further developed by considering it as a sphere of practical activity, where wilful action, power relations, contradiction and change play a significant part.²² Sewell, amongst others, proposes culture as an indissoluble duality of system and practice: in order to act, a system of symbols is required, but this system of symbols exists merely through practice.²³ Human practice has been structured by elements by meaning, but also by power relations or resource distribution. Although these fields have a certain degree of autonomy vis-àvis one another, they also shape and constrain each other. Thus, in discussing the texts under consideration in this study I will ask how they produced meaning by considering other relevant spheres. The linked assumption is that the criterion for inclusion of information was not necessarily their truth-value but possibly their significance within a specific context.

With regard to narrativity, the basic concern comes down to the question of how medieval authors fashioned originally isolated and disparate facts and events into a literary narrative. One of the starting points for the analysis of the narratives in Chapters 5 and 6 will be the concept of ‘modes of emplotment’. Here, I will draw on the writings of Hayden White in order to propose an alternative reading of seventh-/thirteenth-century historical writing.

White’s main argument is that historical writing is as fictional as other forms of literary expression, being ‘a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse’.²⁴ Individual events, persons and institutions are formed into a coherent story based on a tropological strategy: the narrative is prefigured by the author’s decision to use one of the four main tropes (Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche and Irony). Although White’s concept of historical writing has been widely criticized,²⁵ his crucial point has proved to be influential: the consideration of historical writings less as unproblematic and directly mediated reality, and more as literary narratives endowing events with meaning. Kellner formulates this as ‘the tendency of late 20th century thought to look at rather than through a telescope’, the telescope being language.²⁶

However, the principal aim in this study is not to apply a given concept to the field under consideration deductively: rather, the analysis is supplemented by criteria developed inductively from the historical narratives. In this regard, authors such as Frye and Auerbach²⁷ offer a broad framework for the inquiry. The main question is how the authors ascribed different meanings to their immediate past, although they largely drew on a common textual basis. Here, three themes will reappear frequently in the course of the textual analysis of Ibn Wāṣil’s and Abū Shāma’s narratives: exclusion/inclusion, arrangement and different literary elements.

The theme of exclusion/inclusion is an important one, as Abū Shāma produced hardly any ‘original’ material in his text and Ibn Wāṣil only as the narrative reaches the author’s maturity. Contrary to studies focusing on factual concerns, in the following discussion these citations are not considered to be irrelevant if a more ‘original’ text exists. Rather, these citations might gain a different meaning in different textual context or by very slight changes. Medieval Arabic texts seem at first glance to be chaotically arranged and to contain a number of different elements: narrative sections, disconnected anecdotes, direct quotations, poetry, letters, etc. However, it might be better to understand these texts (as has been recently suggested for the genre of pre-modern autobiographies) ‘not [as] a chaotic jumble devoid of personalities, but [as] a discourse of multiple texts’.²⁸

Despite its non-originality, Abū Shāma’s work gained considerable popularity from its ‘publication’ in the seventh/thirteenth century onwards.²⁹ This development arguably demonstrates that it was not only the material included, which decided a work’s popularity but also the specific outlook, with which the author framed his narrative. Beyond doubt, historical writing in the pre-printing era also served to preserve existing information or to display literary refinement. However, a comparative analysis between the Mufarrij and the Rawḍatayn will show to what degree quite similar texts drawing on the same textual basis might acquire different meanings.

Inclusion is thus understood here as the author’s conscious choice to shape his text. By taking one or more texts as models on which to base his narrative, a specific vision of the past emerges. Passages from the model texts can be reproduced verbatim, changed slightly and/or set into a different textual context.³⁰ For example, while Abū Shāma tended to cite reports verbatim, Ibn Wāṣil mostly integrated the different sources into an ‘original’ narrative. I will generally cite the two works without necessarily indicating whether it is an ‘original’ or ‘copied’ passage.

However, the assumption of authorial control over the texts should not be taken too far. While the authors were, in my opinion, able to shape the narratives to a greater degree than previously assumed, this control clearly had its limits. For example, on the one hand Abū Shāma was able to provide his text with a clear profile with regard to arrangement by including citations from previous texts. However, on the other hand by doing it that way he lost some control over such literary elements as ‘motifs’, since the inclusion of fragments derived from a variety of texts precluded here the development of a distinctive profile.

The second main theme is the question of arrangement. Even where Abū Shāma and Ibn Wāṣil both used the same material, the question remains as to how it is positioned in their respective texts, and how the texts are internally structured. In my textual analysis I refer to the two possibilities as ‘macro-arrangement’ and ‘microarrangement’. ‘Macro-arrangement’ is to do with why specific reports, included in both texts, are differently placed within the narratives. A prominent example of this is Nūr al-Dīn’s biography: although it appeared in both texts, its different positions (in Ibn Wāṣil’s text at the usual place, after his death; in Abū Shāma’s text as the opening scene of the whole narrative) give it quite distinct meanings (a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• MEDIEVAL ARABIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTES ON ROMANIZATION AND TERMINOLOGY
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: HISTORICAL AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
• 3: SOCIAL CONTEXTS
• 4: INTELLECTUAL CONTEXTS
• 5: TEXTUAL AGENCY I: Titles, final sections and historicization
• 6: TEXTUAL AGENCY II: Micro-arrangement, motifs and political thought
• 7: RECEPTION AFTER THE SEVENTH/THIRTEENTH CENTURY
• 8: CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY