The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate II: historiography, political order and state formation in fifteenth-century Egypt and Syria

Project Information

MMS-II

Grant agreement ID: 681510

DOI

10.3030/681510

Project closed

EC signature date 11 March 2016

Start date 1 January 2017

End date 31 December 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 000 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 000 000,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - MMS-II (The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate II: historiography, political order and state formation in fifteenth-century Egypt and Syria)

Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2021-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The MMS-II project studies how political order and historical truth were jointly constructed in the late medieval Middle East. It looks in particular at how 15th-century Islamic scholars/historians and their Arabic texts contributed actively to a state formation process that is identified in the project as ‘the Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate’.
The fifteenth-century history of the Sultanate of Cairo, also known as the Syro-Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate, is traditionally considered a period of socio-economic and political decline following thirteenth- and fourteenth-century successes. In our recent research, however, this fifteenth-century history has been revalued as a highly creative era of transformation, of local and regional empowerment, and of state formation. This revaluation has been captured in the neologism of Mamlukisation. The MMS-II project builds on this revisionism, claiming that newly framed social memories of a glorious past of Muslim championship and mamlūk leadership were part and parcel of this Mamlukisation process, as were contemporary laments that things are not what they used to be.
The MMS-II project surveys and analyses the production and construction of these social memories in 15th-century texts, as important specimens of political ideologies and truth claims that until today fail to be properly understood. This will contribute to ongoing new appreciations of the surprisingly rich and eclectic fabric of late medieval and early modern Islamic imaginations of normative political order. This will above all shed entirely new light on the interaction between those imaginations and some of the major narrative sources for medieval Islamic history, written in the particular fifteenth-century context of Syro-Egyptian centrality on the Eurasian stage. This will finally also help to further reveal how most engagements with the historical narrative of Islam and of Islamic leadership in today’s academic, popular, and religious contexts alike —from the perspective of a simple trajectory of swift rise and long decline— remain oblivious of the highly intriguing ambiguities from which that narrative always has been, and continues to be, claimed as historical truth.
MMS-II’s three specific objectives represent the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of this revisionist and reflexive exercise; they consist of:
[1] a comprehensive database-survey of Arabic historical works produced in the period 1410-1470
[2] in-depth case studies of discrete sets of Arabic historical works from the period 1410-1470
[3] a discourse-analytical study of the political vocabularies of Arabic historiographical works from the period 1410-1470

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of period 4 (months 1-60/January 2017-December 2021) tackled MMS-II's three main objectives:

[1] the creation of a comprehensive database-survey of Arabic historical works produced in the period 1410-1470 (ihodp.ugent.be/bah)

[2] in-depth case studies of discrete sets of Arabic historical works from the period 1410-1470 (historiographical corpuses of al-ʿAynī, al-Biqāʿī, Ibn Ḥajar, Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba, Ibn Taghrībirdī and Ibn ʿArabshāh), which were questioned from the perspectives of contexts, texts, and meanings.
Workshops and conferences: four project workshops on ‘Fifteenth-Century Arabic Historiography’ (December 2017; December 2018; December 2019; December 2020; Gent and online); project panels and individual papers at the fifth, sixth and seventh conferences of the School of Mamluk Studies (July 2018, Gent; June 2019, Tokyo; July 2021, online); project panel at the International Medieval Congress (July 2019, Leeds); project panel at the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (October 2020, Washington/online); project papers at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg Conference ‘in Search for a Hidden Group’ (December 2020; Bonn/online); two project panels at Quatrième Congres des études sur le moyen-orient et les mondes musulmans (June-July 2021, Aix/online); postdoc monograph presentations at the project’s closing conference (November 2021; Cairo and online).
Main publications: Trajectories of State Formation across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia (ed. J. Van Steenbergen, Brill, 2020); New Readings in Arabic Historiography from late medieval Egypt and Syria (eds. J. Van Steenbergen, M. Termonia, Brill 2021); special journal issue Mamlūk Studies Review 23 (2020).
New series: Critical Approaches to Arabic Historiography (Edinburgh University Press; series editors K. Goudie & J. Van Steenbergen)

[3] a discourse-analytical study of the political vocabularies of Arabic historiographical works from the period 1410-1470, with a particular focus on identifying and explaining the semantics of signifiers of particular political discourses that informed these texts and that, at the same time, materialised through them. To this end, most of the corpus texts have been digitized via collaborative partnerships (OpenITI, Transkribus, Calfa, UGent central library) and our own pre- and postprocessing work, and an online platform (IHODP.ugent.be/corpus) has been developed (by Inuits) as a research tool for textual and semantic analysis.
Workshops and conferences: two project workshops on ‘Fifteenth-Century Arabic Historiography’ (December 2019; December 2020; Gent and online); project paper at the Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies conference (October 2020, London); project paper at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg Conference ‘in Search for a Hidden Group’ (December 2020; Bonn/online); paper at Quatrième Congrès des études sur le moyen orient et les mondes musulmans (June-July 2021, Aix/online); individual paper at the seventh conference of the School of Mamluk Studies (July 2021, online); monograph presentations at the MMS-II closing conference (November 2021; Cairo and online).
Main publications (all under review, in revision or in press): Van Steenbergen, “In Search of the Awlād al-Nās. Arabic Historiography, Mamlūkization, and the Semantics and Discursive Politics of a Polysemous Concept.” In Where are the Awlad al-Nas?, ed. A. Kollatz, Bonn: Bonn UP; Termonia & Van Steenbergen, “Historiography, and the Making of the Sultan’s Court in Fifteenth Century Cairo. The Case of the Court Office of ‘the Chief Head of the Guards’ (ra’s nawbat al-nuwab).” Annales Islamologiques 56 (2022); Van Steenbergen, “From Warfare in Cyprus to State-making in Cairo: Narrative and Semantic Strategies in the Contemporary Chronicle of al-Maqrīzī (c. 1365-1442).” In The Mamluk Empire and Cyprus, ed. G. Christ, Leuven: Peeters Publishers.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Overall research achievements:
- establishment of ‘mamlukisation’ as a central research paradigm in Mamluk studies and premodern Islamic history
- identification of both the specificity and the diversity of Arabic historiographical production in the period 1410-70 CE
- validation of the necessity of contextualist, semantic, and discursive analyses in any engagements with late medieval Arabic texts of history
- 'Bibliography of Arabic Historiography' on Islamic History Open Data Platform
- 'Corpus of texts from late medieval Egypt and Syria' on Islamic History Open Data Platform

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