Mamluk Studies

The question of jihad is fundamental to Ibn Taymiyya since he is one of the theologians of the Mamluk period-and probably of the entire medieval period-who wrote the most on this subject. Jihad was an essential part of the life of the famous theologian of Damascus, who took part in the Mamluk war effort as a volunteer in various expeditions. Over the last decades, scholars have been interested in the issue of jihad in Ibn Taymiyya and have highlighted several elements. These works have helped us learn more about the ideology of jihad in Ibn Taymiyya. However, it should be noted that those works focus on the jihad against a particular enemy (Mongols, heretics of the Kisrawān, Shi'ites) in a particular context and do not deal much with Ibn Taymiyya's general conception of jihad, for which several grey areas remain. This article will discuss Ibn Taymiyya and his general conception of jihad. My method is broken down into two steps to provide new elements and research perspectives. In the first instance, I will identify the maximum of Ibn Taymiyya's writings and passages related to jihad, making the beginning of a type of inventory. Then I will analyze their content and cross-check them to bring to light general aspects of Ibn Taymiyya's conception of jihad.

Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri was a fourteenth-century Egyptian polymath and the author of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world―a thirty-one-volume work entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. A storehouse of knowledge, this enormous book brought together materials on nearly every conceivable subject, from cosmology, zoology, and botany to philosophy, poetry, ethics, statecraft, and history. Composed in Cairo during the golden age of Islamic encyclopedic activity, the Ultimate Ambition was one of hundreds of large-scale compendia, literary anthologies, dictionaries, and chronicles produced at this time―an effort that was instrumental in organizing the archive of medieval Islamic thought.

In the first study of this landmark work in a European language, Elias Muhanna explores its structure and contents, sources and influences, and reception and impact in the Islamic world and Europe. He sheds new light on the rise of encyclopedic literature in the learned cities of the Mamluk Empire and situates this intellectual movement alongside other encyclopedic traditions in the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. He also uncovers al-Nuwayri’s world: a scene of bustling colleges, imperial chanceries, crowded libraries, and religious politics.

Based on award-winning scholarship, The World in a Book opens up new areas in the comparative study of encyclopedic production and the transmission of knowledge.

The Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Bonn is advertising two RA/TA positions which are attached to the Alexander von Humboldt-Chair for Islamic Studies (Prof. Dr. Judith Pfeiffer). Applicants should work towards a Ph.D. in a relevant field. For more information please visit
https://www.uni-bonn.de/de/universitaet/medien-universitaet/medien-arbeiten-an-der-uni/medien-personalmanagement/pdfs-stellenausschreibungen-wiss.ma/07-22-3-202.pdf

'Proto-Salafist' 14th century theologian Ibn Taymiyya is recognised as the intellectual forefather of contemporary Salafism and Jihadism. This volume offers a unique approach to the study of Ibn Taymiyya, by offering an English translation of his fundamental political treatise, The Office of Islamic Government, and shorter collections from The Collected Fatwas and The Prophetic Way, and Islamic Governance in Reconciling between the Ruler and the Ruled. The volume not only sheds light on these primary sources through translation and annotation, but also offers a theoretical analysis of Ibn Taymiyya's thought and how his legal viewpoint can be reconciled with current trends in Islamic political theory. The analysis provides an overview of Ibn Taymiyya's geo-political context, and offers an original study of his normative political thought. In examining the contemporary implications of Ibn Taymiyya's political theology, the authors explore his doctrine of the Islamic state in the context of Islamic decolonial theory.

Islam and the State in Ibn Taymiyya will appeal to academics in the fields of political science and religious studies, particularly within the field of Islamic history.

A partir de l'étude du chapitre 38 de l'ouvrage du savant mecquois al-Fâsî (m. 1429), Shîfâ' al-gharâm bi-akhbâr al-balad al-harâm, consacré à l'histoire du hajj, cet article tente d'identifier les modes de représentation du pouvoir mecquois dans l'oeuvre d'al-Fâsî. Il suggère que le récit récurrent des fitnas qui déchirèrent la cité sainte au moment du pèlerinage était une manière de
mieux en neutraliser les effets et les traces, à un moment où s'affirmait un nouveau pouvoir local fort, autour du chérif Hasan b. 'Ajlân.

The Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Bonn is advertising two Research Assistant/Teaching Assistant Positions which are attached to the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Islamic Studies (Prof. Dr. Judith Pfeiffer). Applicants should work towards a Ph.D. in a relevant field (e.g., Islamicate intellectual history of the late medieval and/or early modern period, history of Oriental Studies, Islamic historiography, or similar subjects). For more information please visit https://www.uni-bonn.de/de/universitaet/medien-universitaet/medien-arbeiten-an-der-uni/medien-personalmanagement/pdfs-stellenausschreibungen-wiss.ma/07-22-3-202_en.pdf

Penultimate proofs
The twelfth to fourteenth centuries marked a period of cross-continental
exchange on an unprecedented scale between East, Central,
and West Asia. Textiles woven with script or script-like elements
shed some light on this cross-continental movement, as inscribed
textiles were produced across Asia. These woven inscriptions, likely
derived from the West Asian tradition of ṭirāz and connected to
practices of honorific robing, appear in both pseudo and readable
scripts. Their appearance in East Asia hints at the semiotic significance
ṭirāz-style inscriptions had, even outside the Islamic world.
The trend of employing foreign scripts as a decorative motif on
robes appears to have reached its apex during the Mongol period
(ca. 1206–1368). However, evidence for such decoration has been
unearthed from the centuries prior to the Mongol conquests as well.
Tracing the routes that inscribed textiles took across the continent
reveals the kinds of cultural, political, and technological exchange
occurring throughout Asia during these 300 years.

As the published outcome of Christ’s PhD research, Trading Conflicts formulates extremely valuable insights into the Venetian presence in Alexandria, into late medieval Alexandrian socio-economic practice, and into local actors’ mediation “on the ground” in the many flows that connected Venice and Cairo in the early decades of the fifteenth century.

This is the sixth of a series aimed at providing the existing details of the Madrasa al-Ashrafiyya built by Sultan Qaytbay in 887/1482 and referred to as the Third Jewel of al-Haram, the other jewels being the Qubbat as-Sakhra (Dome of the Rock) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.  The madrasa although badly damaged by an earthquake in 1545  still contains many interesting details that directly relate it to Sultan Qaytbay’s Cairo foundations.

My intention is to illustrate the architectural evidence with minimal text partly because I have previously described and detailed many of the features , but, and perhaps more importantly, I believe that it should be the norm to make one’s research notes available to enable others to see the details and make their own comparisons and conclusions .

The Mamluks, at various ocaasions, organized entertainments, festivals and ceremonies accompanied by the singers and musicians. The female slaves who were bought at early age and skillfuly practised with their male or female master musicians named ustat/reis and reise participated into the various entertainments and ceremonies or high officials’ weddings and circumcision feasts or religious and local holidays. In that era, there were salaried court singers and musical groups performing their duties at the palaces together with the public singers as well as musicians. The most famous concubine is Ittifaq who talented in playing common instruments such as the ud, tanbur, çenk, def, mizmar, santur and kanun. This concubine  with a dark skin mentioned in the sources played the ud realy well and enjoyed a life like fairy tale while marrying three different sultans. Except for anonymous ones, Zuhra and Hubi with their wonderful voices together with their beauties also became the most attractive singers in that era; and these two are also regarded as the well-known singers in the history of Mamluks. In this article, the information about the female singers and musicians in the palace and society of Mamluks will be given and the acquisition as well as training of the above-mentened concubines will be analyzed.

يركز هذا البحث على نشأة الدولة المملوكية في مصر. وبعكس النظرة السائدة التي تجعل المماليك حزبًا واحدًا متبنيًا للمشروع نفسه، فإنه يرى أن المماليك كانوا فرقًا يتبنى كل منهم مشروعًا مختلفًا لشكل الدولة الجديدة وأسلوب حكمها. ويرتكز أيضًا على أدلة من المصادر في تتبع الصراع ومراحله بين تلك الفرق.

This paper deals with the establishment of the Mamluk State in Egypt.  Contrary to the popular position which sees the Mamluks as a unified political party that had a common vision regarding the establishment of the new state, this paper relying on primary sources suggests they were divided into various groups which maintained individual interpretations of what the new state should be.  

The relations between the Mamluk State in Egypt and various Mongol states are discussed practically in any research, which deals either with the foreign policy of the Mamluk state or its comprehensive development. It is caused by the fact that in the discussed period it was the Mongols who represented the only competing force in the Middle East, while the Ilkhanate state was the Mamluks’s main enemy.

Recent work has shown that Islamicate philosophers engaged meaningfully with Ibn Sīnā's transformation of Aristotelian physics, particularly his new understanding of motion at an instant and his new category of positional motion. Although Ibn Sīnā considered medicine a derivative science of physics, little work has been done to determine the impact of the new Avicennan physics on medicine. In this paper, I shall examine the discussions on motion contained in the sections on pulse within seven medical commentaries produced between 1200 and 1520 CE. The examination will reveal that Ibn al-Nafīs's novel, non-Galenic application of the Avicennan category of * I would like to thank Asad Ahmed, Sonja Brentjes and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions.

An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogs everything known to exist from the perspective of a fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and thirty volumes—here abridged to one volume, and translated into English for the first time—it contains entries on everything from medieval moon-worshipping cults, sexual aphrodisiacs, and the substance of clouds, to how to get the smell of alcohol off one’s breath, the deliciousness of cheese made from buffalo milk, and the nesting habits of flamingos.

Similar works by Western authors, including Pliny’s Natural History, have been available in English for centuries. This groundbreaking translation of a remarkable Arabic text—expertly abridged and annotated—offers a look at the world through the highly literary and impressively knowledgeable societies of the classical Islamic world. Meticulously arranged and delightfully eclectic, it is a compendium to be treasured—a true monument of erudition.

Waqfs - charitable institution- were significant foundations in city life in regard, both, to social and economic aspects. Thanks to waqfs, the governments in Islamic States had not much obligations, in carrying
out the religious service, administrating and maintaining the religious foundations. Their benefits to state were not limited with these. They provide essential contributions to habitation and construction of
cities. The waqf institutions especially identified with külliye that was formed by a mosque in the center and religious, social and commercial buildings around it, constructions and habitation. The influence in the
fulfillment of public service necessitated for processing city life harmoniously cannot be ignored as the effect in organization of cities. Public services such as education, cultural, medical, security, transportation and cleaning were performed by waqf.
Ayntâb was a city that had old waqfs and religious, social and public services were done by them. The waqf that had existed before Ottomans maintained their existence, also, supplied the needs of people by continuing their services. In the first years of Ottoman sovereignty the new waqfs were founded and the old ones which carried on their legal entity preserved their status. The waqf institution, contributed not only development in physical structure of the city of Ayntâb but also improvement in social, economic and cultural area. Thus, their social contribution in Ayntâb were tried to be evaluated with regard to their functions.

The battle of ʿAyn Jālūt between the Mamlūks and Mongols in northern Palestine (3 September 1260) has received much attention among researchers and popular writers, and efforts have been made to explain the Mamlūk victory and its impact on the history of the region. This paper offers some new evidence for the conduct of the battle and its results, as well as looking again at its significance for both contemporaries and modern observers. It begins with a short rendition of what is already known about the battle, based mostly on the author’s previous studies. This is followed by three sections, each dealing with a passage that has hitherto not received the attention that it deserves. The first is from the recently published and translated short history of the Mongols in Iran attributed to the well-known scholar Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 1311). The second passage is from the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh by Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 1318) regarding some of the units that composed Kedbuqa’s army at the battle. The third passage is an exceptional anecdote in an otherwise banal account found in the chronicle by the famous al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442), showing that this author’s version of events may be a little more complicated than previously thought. The paper concludes with some considerations on the importance of the battle, suggesting that in spite of the relatively small numbers of the troops involved (certainly when compared to future battles between the two sides), it was indeed a crucial encounter, setting the stage for the history – military and otherwise – of the region for many subsequent decades.