Volume 94, Issue 1

Abstract: This article offers a revised history of the iconoclastic edict of the Umayyad caliph Yazīd II, which was promulgated in 104/723. This edict is often interpreted as a precursor of Byzantine iconoclasm and as a forerunner of the Islamic doctrine of images. Yet this focus on later developments has obscured the law’s original purpose and meaning. This essay attempts to examine the issue anew by analyzing the written and archaeological evidence for the edict. In addition to presenting new sources and a revised dating, it situates Yazīd’s actions in the context of early dhimmī legislation; apocalyptic anxieties at the Umayyad court; concerns about social mixing between Muslims and Christians; the caliph’s sphere of activity in Transjordan; the emergence of a prohibition on images in Islamic thought; and the practice of Muslim prayer in churches.

Abstract: This paper studies two hitherto unpublished Arabic papyrus documents related to house leases from 3rd–4th/9th–10th-centuries Egypt. The two documents, P.Cam.Michaelides B 720 and P.Gen.inv. 610, are currently kept at the Michaelides papyrus collection at Cambridge University Library and the papyrus collection at Geneva University Library.

Abstract: Following the discovery of a Mamlūk public bath and a vaulted hall to the south of the Cotton Market in the Old City of Jerusalem, this article proposes a new evaluation of the urban fabric in close proximity to the focal point of the Islamic area ‒ the Ḥaram al-Sharīf. We argue here that what once was considered a project constructed under the supervision of the district governor Saif al-Dīn Tankiz, and financed by the Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn, was in fact initiated by Tankiz. He first erected a double ḥammām, and then a Khān, which was presumably connected to a market street. In its final incarnation, the Sūq was monumental in scale, extending all the way to the Ḥaram. The final product, a market street connecting the Ḥaram with one of the main streets of the city, providing facilities to believers in the form of a double ḥammām and a Khān that served merchants and also pilgrims, was by far the most ambitious project of the Mamlūk era in Jerusalem.

Abstract: During the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk eras, several desastrous earthquakes happened in the Near East and in Egypt. These catatrophes met their echo in Arabic poetry. The poets described not only the earthquakes and the devastations they caused. They also mourned the victims and took up the theological aspects of the theme: the omnipotence, justice and mercy of God, the earthquakes as a punishment for sins and as an exhortation to repent. The article exemplifies this with 25 poetical pieces, mostly taken from historical sources as well as from the Dīwān of Usāmah Ibn Munqidh, and points to the rhetorical devices by which some poets adorned their verses.

Abstract: In this paper I will analyze and trace samples of a tribal dialect that thrived in medieval Islam and has survived into the modern period. It is a mixed language or para-language that takes the form of embedding a substitutive vocabulary into the grammatical structure of other languages and it has historically been spoken within communities of peripatetics and commercial nomads, or Gypsy 1 groups. In 10th-century Arabic sources produced in Būyid Iraq and Iran, non-speakers named this language lughat al-mukaddīn (the language of the beggars), another demonstration of an outsider’s perspective. However, speakers of this language called it lughat Banī Sāsān (the language of the Sāsān clan) or lughat al-shaykh Sāsān (the language of the Master Sāsān). The language, in name and application, was not identified with a territory or an ethnicity, but rather with a peripatetic tribal group, the Banū Sāsān, whose members worked as beggars and entertainers. As early as the 13th century, speakers of this language referred to it as al-sīn and non-speakers named it lughat/lisān al-ghurabāʾ (the language of the Gypsies). Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Arabic and Persian writers composed texts explaining various Sāsānī words to their Arabicand Persian-speaking audiences. Texts also survive from this period with snippets of sīn prose and poetry.

Abstract: Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī (r. 1524‒1576) patronized the translation of Arabic works into Persian in an effort to convert society to the Twelver Shīʿī outlook. According to modern Iranian literary history, one of the works that came to his attention for translation was Risālah-i Ḥusnīyah (Ḥusnīyah’s Treatise ( Ḥusnīyah )), the story of a scholarly Shīʿī slave-girl and former student of the sixth imām Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765), who debates the Sunnī scholars of the fifth ʿAbbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 805) on religious law, and roundly defeats them all. The date of this narrative’s appearance in Iran is 958/1551, according to the manuscript introduction. A link between Ḥusnīyah and the “Tale of Tawaddud,” the story preserved in One Thousand and One Nights ( Arabian Nights ), and in independent form, which tells of a scholarly Sunnī slave-girl who debates the scholars of al-Rashīd’s court, had gone unnoticed in Iranian scholarship until recently, and was known to western scholars only through the summary and partial translation of Sir John Malcolm in his 1815 The History of Persia. From the Early Period to the Present Time . The comparison of a portion of the two tales illustrates not only a shared frame story but also the ideological common ground between the two. Since no Arabic original of Ḥusnīyah has been found, however, nor has scholarship located a sixteenth-century manuscript to date, the appearance of this story in Iran poses more questions than it provides answers. Ḥusnīyah is both an obvious artifact of the Ṣafavid legitimization project and a story linked to an earlier polemical narrative, and these two characteristics raise its importance for further study of its transmission as well as for the ideological intents of both stories.

Abstract: Cet article se donne pour but d’étudier un certain nombre de peintures de l’artiste safavide ʿAli Qoli Jebādār, actif dans la deuxième moitié du XVII e siècle en Iran. Ces oeuvres, communément connues sous l’expression de farangi sāzi, représentent les rois safavides tels que Shāh ʿAbbās II (1642‒1666), son fils Shāh Soleymān (1666‒1694), et leur entourage masculin (les nobles, courtisans, eunuques, etc.). En analysant ces peintures, nous essayons de trouver les éventuels points d’appui de l’artiste, et l’ambiance sous laquelle elles ont été créées. Nous nous référons donc souvent aux sources écrites safavides et les récits des voyageurs européens de l’époque. Ainsi, nous tentons de présenter l’oeil explorateur des artistes iraniens qui s’étaient peut-être inspirés de l’art occidental, mais qui se laissaient probablement aussi inspirer de leur propre entourage vivant, et du quotidien de la vie royale. Ce qui aboutirait à une sorte d’enregistrement des faits réels aussi bien pour les personnages que pour les objets, principalement dans les peintures de ʿAli Qoli Jebādār, mais aussi dans celles de Moḥammad Zamān, Moḥammad Soltāni, et Moḥammad ʿAli, d’autres artistes de l’époque.

Abstract: At the beginning of the Mamluk period, the Damascene historian Abū Šāma and some of his successors invented a new but somehow short-lived genre of chronicles and biographical dictionaries, focusing on contemporary events and persons. Together with Ibn Rāfiʿ, Ibn Kaṯīr, Ibn Ḥiğğī and Ibn Qāḍī Šuhba, they formed a group of scholars whose texts interacted with each other, one author pursuing the narrative of his predecessor. In this article, we analyze these intertextual relations through the concept of “family of texts”.

Abstract: This article presents a new analytical reading of one of the most popular genres in medieval Arabic historiography, biographical dictionaries, in order to address broader questions of historical change in transregional movements and scholarly group cultures. It builds on recent scholarship that focuses on shifting trade patterns across the Western Indian Ocean and in particular the intensification of commercial connections between the Red Sea region and South Asia during the 15th century to advance an argument on the sociocultural dimensions of a concomitant migration of South Asians (al-Hindīyūn, sg. al-Hindī) from the subcontinent to the Hijaz. The case study is empirically grounded in the reading of prosopographical sources, biographical entries ( tarājim , sg. tarjama ) of South Asians as they appear in biographical dictionaries by the famous Mamlūk historians al-Fāsī (d. 832/1429), al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) and al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497) from the late medieval period. Most importantly, Pierre Bourdieu ’s (d. 2002) theoretical concepts of “field”, “capital” and “habitus” will provide the heuristic tools to detect social and cultural significances within the narrative fabric of the historiographical texts. Interrelating these significances on an analytical level will allow the study of historical transformations on the basis of traces in the prosopographical archive. I argue that the appearance of these South Asian tarājim in the biographical works can be read as a recording of an increased migration of South Asians during the late medieval period, bringing about a social broadening and cultural diversification of the South Asian community in the Hijaz.