Introduction

قالَ لي من رأى صباح مشيبي    عن شمال من لِمَّتي ويمين

أيُّ شيء هذا؟ فقلت مجيباً    لَيلُ شكٍّ محاهُ صُبحُ يقين

On the 17th of Shaʿbān of the year 730 AH / 5th of June 1330 CE an old man died in Cairo. Two years before his death he was visited by the biographer Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363). The pair engaged in a poetical exchange about the time-worn topic of old age—despite al-Ṣafadī being only 32 lunar years old at that point—to which the old man contributed the above quoted epigram. As a result of this meeting, al-Ṣafadī also received an ijāza (a permission to transmit information on the authority of a specific person) containing several more of his poems as well as a list of 25 books the man had written throughout his long life. He also collected books: al-Ṣafadī relates on the authority of a mutually acquainted bookseller that the deceased left behind 18 book cases (khazāʾin) filled with “literary gems” (nafāʾis adabiyya).2 Yet al-Ṣafadī also tells us that the old man had been blinded by an arrow during the Battle of Homs against the Mongols in the year 680/1281, when he was only 29 years old.3 Apparently, this blindness did not impede his appetite for books: al-Ṣafadī next recounts how the blind man was able to identify each book in detail when handed the manuscript. He could even recall the time he bought the book and the exact amount he paid for it. His wife, whose name has not been transmitted, is said to have known the value of each of these books as well and was able to secure a pension of sorts by selling them off one by one before leaving Cairo seven years after her husband’s death.

The protagonist of this anecdote is Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbbās b. Ismāʿīl b. ʿAsākir al-Kinānī al-ʿAsqalānī al-Miṣrī,4 commonly known as Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī. The bookish focus of the anecdote is not coincidental: Shāfiʿ spent a significant part of his life as a scribe (kātib, pl. kuttāb) in the elite composition bureau (dīwān al-­inshāʾ) of the chancery of the late medieval sultanate of Cairo.5 His career and that of his peers—including his visitor al-Ṣafadī—revolved around their command of the written word and thorough knowledge of the tenets of Arabic literary expression. Shāfiʿ and other scribes never missed an opportunity to display their literary prowess, both in rhyming cadenced prose (sajʿ) which they employed especially in epistolary writings, and poetry, which they also wrote a good deal of as in-house panegyrists and as a more general literary pursuit. These men of the pen harnessed the various media of courtly and state communication as elite forms of literary performance, both within and without chancery contexts. This is very much the case for Shāfiʿ: although al-Ṣafadī and all his other biographers imply that his official career in the chancery ended after he was blinded, in his own works Shāfiʿ would have his readers believe that he continued to work as a prominent scribe for several decades—his last known claim to having composed an official document is dated to 708/1309, nearly thirty years after the event that blinded him.6

The works in which Shāfiʿ informs his readers about his scribal activities are predominantly biographies (sīra, pl. siyar) he composed of sultans whom he either served directly or with whom he lived contemporaneously. Three of these survive whole or in part. They respectively depict the reigns of sultans al-Ẓāhir Baybars (r. 658–676/1260–1277), al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (r. 678–689/1279–1290), and the latter’s son and second successor al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (r. 693–694/1293–1294, 698–708/1299–1309, 709–741/1309–1341). These three biographies were written in direct conversation with the foundational biographies of sultans written by Shāfiʿ’s maternal uncle Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh b. Rashīd al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 692/1293), generally known as Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir.7 He was the leading chancery official under Baybars and remained in service in the higher echelons of the chancery until his death. His first and most widely circulated biography also deals with the sultanate of Baybars. A second and third biography deal with the reigns of Qalāwūn and his son al-Ashraf Khalīl (r. 689–693/1290–1293).8 It is this corpus of six sīras which will form the core focus of this book. These writings are generally considered some of the most authoritative sources for the political history of late 7th/13th century Egypt and Syria. The corpus covers about half a century of history, though unevenly: while the entire reign of Baybars is covered, as is most of Qalāwūn’s, for both al-Ashraf Khalīl and al-Nāṣir Muḥammad the corpus is fragmentary.

The close familial and professional links between these authors make this into an exceptionally close-knit corpus. Although only their biographies of Baybars are directly related—Shāfiʿ’s sīra of Baybars is explicitly presented as an abridgement (mukhtaṣar) of his uncle’s earlier sīra—their other texts also adhere to a consistent conceptualisation of sīra. Even though the regnal biography was a well-established genre in Arabic historiographical writing by the 7th/13th century, I argue that these two authors’ take on the genre constituted a unique iteration of a longer tradition. They built on the work of predecessors, especially the biographies devoted to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (r. 532–589/1174–1193) by his officials Bahāʾ al-Dīn b. Shaddād (d. 632/1234) and ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (d. 597/1201) about a century earlier, but they went further than them in using the basic framework of accounts about one sultan’s life and times as a central node in the preservation of historical memory.9 For Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir and Shāfiʿ b. ʿAlī, memorialising the reign of a particular sultan also presented the occasion to memorialise the particular form of his dawla, the household formation of the state around the power networks of the sultan, in which the authors were important participants as prominent chancery officials. Memorialising a sultan’s state also presented the opportunity to memorialise their own contribution to that state. It is notable in that sense that they applied the sīra format not just to a single paradigmatic sultan but to every major sultan they served. In most cases they also appear to have written large parts of their texts while the sultan was alive and not as retrospective memoirs. This indicates that the valence of sīra and the impulse to compose such a text was somewhat different in the late 7th/13th century than it had been for Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s biographers, both of whom wrote their texts retrospectively and only devoted biographies to a single sultan. For these earlier authors, writing biography was a way to safeguard the memory of a sultan whose reign they saw as ideal, especially in the face of changing conditions of rule by his successors.

That there was a boom of biographical writing in late 7th/13th century Cairo is confirmed by the existence of at least two other biographies of Baybars written by prominent cultural agents of the period. One was composed by the Syrian historian ʿIzz al-Dīn b. al-Shaddād (d. 684/1285). It is still extant in part and will feature regularly throughout this book.10 Of a second biography supposedly written by the well-known jurist and prosopographer Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282) we only know that Ibn Khallikān compared Baybars to Genghis Khān in it.11 This distinctive production of biographical writing did not continue into the early 8th/14th century, when several historians instead composed large scale works with a wider chronological focus: on the one hand voluminous universal histories, and on the other hand more regionally focussed chronicles with a strong presence of obituaries.12 I posit that this 8th/14th century development amounts to a shift of dominant historiographical paradigm and that the 7th/13th century form of sīra itself also constituted such a temporarily dominant paradigm. Studying such a corpus is thus not only relevant to understand the modalities of history writing in a particular time and place, but also to gain insights into why such shifts occur and how historians’ agency interacted with historically contingent events.

In this book I closely read the six texts in the sīra corpus alongside other available material written by their authors. I consider how their extant corpora straddle the domains of history, state communication and literary performance. In ­studying these books as deliberately conceived wholes, I react against decontextualised readings of Islamic historiography. Instead of cherry-picking anecdotes from the rich historical and other assorted materials they include, I look at the textual...