Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam

Muslim Horizons

Julia Bray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134171538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

With contributions from specialists in different areas of classical Islamic thought, this accessible volume explores the ways in which medieval Muslims saw, interpreted and represented the world around them in their writings.

Focusing mainly on the eighth to tenth centuries AD, known as the 'formative period of Islamic thought', the book examines historiography, literary prose and Arabic prose genres which do not fall neatly into either category.

Filling a gap in the literature by providing detailed discussions of both primary texts and recent scholarship, Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam will be welcomed by students and scholars of classical Arabic literature, Islamic history and medieval history.

Part I
Fact and fiction

1 Ibn Zunbul and the romance of history

Robert Irwin

Sir Lewis Namier, the prosopographic historian of Hanoverian Britain, once observed that ‘historians imagine the past and remember the future’.¹ By this he meant that our own version of history - Whig, Marxist, or whatever it may be - will constantly be rewritten in the light of what direction we perceive our culture and society to be taking. Although Namier intended his aphorism to apply to all historians in all periods, there can be few if any historians to whom it more closely applies than Shaykh Ahmad ibn Alī ibn Zunbul al-Rammāl al-Mahallī al-Shāfi’ī, a man who wrote about the past, but who earned a living by foretelling the future.

A case can be made for considering Ibn Zunbul as the Arab world’s first true historical novelist. The European historical novel is conventionally thought to have begun with the romances of Sir Walter Scott, while Jurjī Zaydān’s al-Mamluk al-Sharïd (‘The Fleeing Mamluk’), written under the influence of Sir Walter Scott and published in 1891, is generally held to be the first example of an historical novel written in Arabic. Nevertheless the production of historical novels in the Arab world has been pushed back centuries earlier by at least one scholar. In his History of Muslim Historiography Franz Rosenthal discussed such works as the popular epics Sïrat ‘Antar and Sïrat Banï Hilāl as if they were historical novels. He quoted the autobiography of a twelfth-century figure, al-Samaw’āl ibn Yahyā al-Maghribī, on how as a youth he had read the ‘big novels, such as the stories of Antar, Dū l-Himma and al-Battâl,² the story of Alexander Dū l-Qarnayn,³ of al-’Anqâ’ (the Phoenix), and Taraf b. Lūdân, and others’. Al-Samaw’āl moved on from such light and fanciful material to reading history in Arabic and, in the end, his reading persuaded him to convert from Judaism to Islam.⁴

However, it is questionable whether the fantastic sagas read by al-Samaw’āl, or similar later works such as the Sïrat al-zāhir Baybars and the pseudo-religious romances of al-Bakrī, should really be counted as historical novels.⁵ There may be history, or at least what pretends to be history, in all of such works, yet they fail to meet the criteria set out some decades ago by Georg Lukacs. In The Historical Novel (1937), he argued that, in genuine historical novels, the books’ protagonists take part in historical events and are changed by them. Moreover, in reading such fictions, one comes to a better understanding of the past and the processes of historical change. It is very doubtful whether those fantastic sagas composed in the Arab world in the medieval period do conform to Lukacs’s criteria. However, it will be argued in what follows that Ibn Zunbul’s narrative of the downfall of the Mamluk Sultanate at the hands of the Ottomans does at least come close to satisfying a discriminating judge of historical novels.⁶

Judging by the number of manuscripts of his Infisāl which have survived, Ibn Zunbul used to be a popular author.⁷ However, few people seem to read him nowadays. He does not even have an entry in the new (second) edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam or the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Ibn Zunbul’s current neglect may be the result of a category error. Western scholars have tended to treat his narrative masterpiece as a work of history rather than of historical fiction. According to David Ayalon in Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to a Medieval Society (1956), the ‘evidence gathered from Ibn Zunbul’s work shows beyond any shadow of a doubt that by far the most important cause of the Mamluk defeat was the Ottoman use of firearms’.⁸ In general, the arguments advanced in Ayalon’s monograph rely heavily on citations from Ibn Zunbul. More recently, Benjamin Lellouch has written of Ibn Zunbul as being in the employ of the penultimate Mamluk Sultan Qānsawh al-Ghawrī, and as a historian who was an eyewitness of the Mamluk defeats in 1516-17 and of the consequent Ottoman occupation of Egypt.⁹

As we shall see, there are many reasons for doubting Ibn Zunbul’s reliability as a historian, and there are strong grounds for doubting that he was ever in the service of Qānsawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501-16). Relying on a passage early on in the chronicle (if indeed the text in question should be termed a ‘chronicle’), Lellouch has deduced that Ibn Zunbul was the Sultan’s geomancer. However, Ibn Zunbul does not actually identify himself as being that geomancer.¹⁰ The pattern of Ibn Zunbul’s real life can be deduced only from occasional references in his own works. As we shall see, the Infisāl’s narrative runs up to 1559. In his Qānun, a treatise on geography and astronomy, Ibn Zunbul refers to a dream which prefigured the assassination of the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Mahmud Pasha (which took place in 1567).¹¹ In his cosmography, the Tuhfa, he not only refers to himself as having been in Abūkir in 1544, but he also makes mention of a conversation that he had with a Spaniard in AH 981/AD 1573-4.¹² It follows that he would have had to have been improbably long-lived to have served Qānsawh al-Ghawrī in any capacity.

I have not been able to determine when Ibn Zunbul was born, but it seems probable that he was born in Mahalla in the Delta c.1500. Mahalla’s many excellences are duly celebrated in Ibn Zunbul’s Tuhfa.¹³ He could well have witnessed the entry of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I (‘the Grim’) into Cairo in 1517, for his account of this is vivid, detailed and realistic.¹⁴ He claims to have been an eyewitness of the arrival of the defeated rebel Pasha Ahmad al-Khā’in (Ahmad ‘the Traitor’) in Mahalla in 1524.¹⁵ Much of his subsequent life seems to have been spent in the employ of Mahmud Pasha, whom he served as a dream interpreter and, presumably, geomancer (whence his title of ‘al-Rammāl’).¹⁶ However, he probably earned extra money by writing books.

Ibn Zunbul wrote several treatises on geomancy, most notably Kitāb al-Maqālāt f ï Hall al-Mushkilāt f ï ‘Ilm al-Raml (‘Treatise on the Solution of Problems in the Science of Geomancy’), a highly sophisticated work in which, incidentally, Ibn Zunbul reveals a strong interest in mnemonics (fann taqwiyat al-hāfiζã).¹⁷ His treatise on cosmography, Tuhfat al-Muluk wa al-Raghā’ib li mā fi al-Barr wa al-Bahr min al-’Ajā’ib wa al-Gharā’ib (‘Gift of Kings and Object of Desires for what is on Land and Sea of the Marvellous and Strange’) is a compendium of marvels indeed, dealing with buried treasures, talismanic statues, monsters, bogus Pharaonic lore and cosmic speculations. His al-Qānūn wa al-Dunyā (‘Law and the World’) is devoted to astronomy and geography and quotes heavily from apocryphal prophecies of Daniel.¹⁸ He also wrote several works which have not survived, including a treatise on the zā’irja (a fortune-telling device whose use the great philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406) had once studied inten- sively),¹⁹ and another treatise on the Mahdī, the leader who will come to guide the faithful at the End of Time, and eschatological malāhim prophecies. The sixteenth- century Near East was more than usually preoccupied with apocalyptic prophecy. The wars between great empires and the successive falls of the Kingdom of Granada, the Aqqoyunlu empire²⁰ and the Mamluk Sultanate were part of the background to the production of handbooks of prophecy attributed to the mystic Ibn al-’Arabī (560-638/1165-1241) and others.²¹

Ibn Zunbul’s historical novel exists in several versions, including two variant printed editions, and it can be considered as constituting a family of closely related versions rather than a single text. The numerous surviving manuscripts bear various titles, but in the Tuhfa Ibn Zunbul himself referred to his historical work as Kitāb Infisāl Dawlat al-Awān wa Ittisāl Dawlat Banï ‘Uthmān (‘The Departure of the Temporal Dynasty and the Coming of the Ottomans’).²² Ibn Zunbul’s combination of the profession of novelist and occultist is not quite unique. In Mamluk Egypt a member of the low-life Fa’alātī clan doubled as a seller of astrological prognostications and a street-corner storyteller.²³ In the West in modern times novelists like Bulwer Lytton and Gustav Meyrink dabbled in occultism, while occultists such as Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune also turned their hands to writing novels.²⁴

The Infişāl begins with the advance of the penultimate Mamluk Sultan Qānsawh al-Ghawrī out of Egypt to encounter defeat at the hand of Selim on the battlefield of Marj Dābiq. However, there are numerous flashbacks in the narrative. One of the most interesting of these is the - surely apocryphal - story of a Maghribi - a Muslim from North Africa - who arrived with a gun at the court of Qānsawh al-Ghawrī and argued before the Sultan that the Mamluks would be doomed unless they adopted the weapon. But the Sultan allegedly rejected the monstrous device as Christian and declared that he would continue to follow the sunna (or custom) of the Prophet.²⁵ Ibn Zunbul goes on to tell the story of Selim’s occupation of Syria and his invasion of Egypt, the Battle of Raydāniyya, the hunting down of the last Mamluk Sultan, Tumānbāy, in 1517, and the history of the early Ottoman Pashas of Egypt. Different manuscripts of the Infisāl end at different points. The modern editor ‘Amir’s text ends with the governorship of Alī Pasha al-Tawāshī (‘the eunuch’), who arrived in Egypt in 1559.²⁶

Ibn Zunbul’s novel is dedicated to the melancholy themes of the passing of chivalry and the doom of dynasties. The author’s emotional sympathies clearly lie with the doomed Mamluk chivalry. However, he also stresses the justice of the Ottoman cause and Selim’s strong piety. To borrow and paraphrase from Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (on Cavaliers and Roundheads), the Mamluks were ‘wrong but romantic’, while the Ottomans were ‘right but repulsive’. The Infisāl possesses a strong cast of individually drawn characters. The saintly and chivalrous Tumānbāy is the hero. The real villains are not so much the Ottomans, but rather those Mamluks, such as Khayrbak and Jānbirdī al-Ghazālī, who collaborated with them. Ahmad, the traitor Pasha who in 1523 sought to rally disaffected Mamluks against the Ottomans, is another villain in Ibn Zunbul’s book. Betrayal of trust is the ultimate sin. The Ottoman Sultan Selim is portrayed as grim and mean-minded, yet he respects his Mamluk adversaries and he possesses skill in firāsa (divination on the basis of physiognomy) which allows him to descry what is truly in men’s souls.²⁷

Compared with conventional historians of the Mamluk period, Ibn Zunbul shows an unusual interest in the motivations of the protagonists, and he goes to great pains to make those motivations clear, often resorting to invented dialogue to do so. The fact that the narrative makes frequent use of dialogue suggests that Ibn Zunbul composed his work with oral delivery in mind. The dialogue is vigorous, even (as we shall see) occasionally obscene. The encounters between protagonists are often agonistic and boastful. The frequent recapitulations of the story so far and the care in signalling scene changes suggest that the Infisāl was designed to be performed in public rather than read in private. (In much the same way, in the nineteenth century, Dickens designed his novels to be read aloud.) The Infisāl also shares many of its stock themes - the council, the gathering of the army, the challenge, and the despoiling of the vanquished - with the Iliad,²⁸ and of course with heroic accounts of the early Islamic conquests.²⁹

Granted all this, why, nevertheless, should the Infisāl be described as a ‘novel’ rather than as inaccurate history - or, to be less pejorative, literary history? The literarization of history writing is, after all, a striking and well-studied aspect of the Mamluk period. In a series of seminal studies, Ulrich Haarmann has pointed to a number of literary features in the chronicles of Ibn al-Dawādārī and others, including the insertion of anecdotes, resort to direct speech, the inclusion of ‘ajā’ib (marvels and marvellous happenings) and, more specifically, the use of occult materials and Turkish legends, as well as borrowings from Volksroman and the employment of dialect and popular idioms.³⁰ Qirtāy al-’Izzī al-Khāzindārī, a thirteenth-century chronicler, inserted wholly fictitious episodes in what is otherwise an averagely dull chronicle. His inventions included battles, embassies and descriptions of foreign lands. There appears to be no obvious motive for his fabrications.³¹ Ibn Şasrā, the author of a fourteenth-century local chronicle of Damascus, glossed his narrative of warfare and local politics with fable...