by Gowaart Van Den Bossche
On a 15th of August, likely some time in the mid-1980s, the English historian P.M. Holt took a train from Oxford to London Paddington station. He lived in Oxford and was a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London until 1982, so I assume he took this train often at the end of his career. Even after 1982 I guess he continued to pay regular visits to his old stomping grounds in the Big Smoke. How do I know? I found a train ticket with that date (but unfortunately not the year) and that itinerary tucked away in a book once owned by him. (The ticket has the same format as the tickets pictured here from 1985 and 1986 http://thefirms.co.uk/retro-oldschool/ )
A few weeks ago, while working on Ibn al-Dawādārī’s chronicle Kanz al-Durar wa-Jāmiʿ al-Ghurar I decided on a whim to check whether I could find affordable copies of any of the nine volumes of this book online. I have in my years of working with the KITAB project grown used to working with digital files and the OpenITI file of Kanz al-Durar has been the main way through which I have been exploring this chronicle, but still nothing quite beats holding an actual book in your hands for reading and analysis. Unfortunately, medieval Arabic historiography is rather rare on the European book markets and the volumes of Kanz al-Durar are all out of print and can only be found second hand. The chronicle was published in somewhat random order between 1960 (vol. 9, closely followed by vol. 6 in 1961) and 1994 (vol. 4) by a minor academic publisher in Germany and none of the volumes seem to have been reprinted since. Here’s a little overview of the volume titles and their respective publication titles, dates and responsible editors.
| Vol. | Individual volume title | Publication |
| 1 | al-Durr al-ʿulyā fī akhbār badʾ al-dunyā = The Most Exalted Pearl: Reports on the creation of the world | Kosmographie, ed. Bernd Radtke (1982) |
| 2 | al-Durrat al-yatīma fī akhbār al-umam al-qadīma =
The Unequaled Pearl: Reports on the ancient societies |
Der Bericht über die alten Völker, ed. Edward Badeen (1994) |
| 3 | al-Durr al-thamīn fī akhbār sayyid al-mursalīn wa-l-khulafāʾ al-rāshidīn = The Precious Pearl: Reports about the Prophet and the righly guided caliphs | Der Bericht über den Propheten und die Rechtgeleiteten Chalifen, ed. Muḥammad as Saʿīd Ğamāl ad-Dīn (1981) |
| 4 | al-Durrat al-sāmiyya fī akhbār al-dawlat al-Umawiyya =
The Lofty Pearl: Reports about the Umayyad state |
Der Bericht über die Umayyadan, ed. Gunhild Graf & Erika Glassen (1994) |
| 5 | al-Durrat al-saniyya fī akhbār al-dawlat al-ʿAbbāsiyya =
The Sublime Pearl: reports about the Abbasid state |
Der Bericht über die ʿAbbasiden, ed. Dorothea Krawulsky (1992) |
| 6 | al-Durrat al-muḍiyya fī akhbār al-dawlat al-Fāṭimiyya =
The Pearl of Deeper Insight: Reports about the Fatimid state |
Der Bericht über die Fatimiden, ed. Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn al-Munağğid (1961)
(Also includes Saljuq history) |
| 7 | al-Durr al-maṭlūb fī akhbār mulūk Banī Ayyūb =
The Desirable Pearl: Reports about the Ayyubid family |
Der Bericht über die Ayyubiden, ed. Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿĀšūr (1972) |
| 8 | al-Durrat al-zakiyya fī akhbār al-dawlat al-Turkiyya
= The Pure Pearl: Reports about the Turkish state |
Der Bericht über die frühen Mamluken, ed. Ulrich Haarmann (1971) |
| 9 | al-Durr al-fākhir fī sīrat al-Malik al-Nāṣir = The Outstanding Pearl: The Biography of al-Malik al-Nāṣir | Der Bericht über den Sultan al-Malik an-Nāṣir Muḥammad ibn Qalaʾun, ed. Hans Robert Roemer (1960) |
Unlike previous forays into the world of second hand books to search for these volumes, this time I had some success: I found a British second hand bookseller who had the eighth and ninth volumes on offer for rather affordable prices. As a historian of the late medieval sultanate of Cairo, the final two volumes of the chronicle are especially interesting: they respectively chronicle the first decades of that sultanate and the second and third reign of its most powerful sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad. This is also where Ibn al-Dawādārī himself frequently appears in the narrative, often relying on the authority of his father who was an important amir and whom he accompanied regularly, as well as on a broad network of prominent informants.
The listing for these two second hand volumes noted that they were former library books and that they contained annotations, which explains the relatively modest asking prices. Some readers might be put off by such a description, but I’ve been collecting second hand vinyl LPs and books for almost two decades now and have grown to love any trace of the social lives of things: random poems, marginal musings, airplane tickets, doodles, drawings, shopping lists. I’m always pleased to find such things crammed between or scribbled on the pages of books and have mused about them elsewhere. I am glad that the academic study of such debris of history has also come to be more prominent in recent decades, notably in Geniza studies and the analysis of manuscript notes. I have grown increasingly interested in the material study of manuscripts, where exactly these signs of use can tell you something about the historical reception of a text.
When I received the volumes in the post I noted that these were not in fact library books. They had been rebound in neat hardcovers — the original publication was in a somewhat flimsy paperback — but they were missing all the other tell-tale signs of a previous life on a library’s shelves: stamps, a shelf mark on the side, sign out sheets with expected return dates, scribblings in different hands, etc. (One of the other books I bought had most of these features — I was pleased to learn that at least one person in North Wales had been interested in Islamic astrology in the late 1990s) I noted instead that the annotations were all by a single hand, very neat and non-invasive, keeping strictly to the margins. Of course I went to look for an ex-libris and found them on the German title pages of each volume, where it was noted, by now no surprise to the reader who has not forgotten the first paragraph of this meandering blog: “P.M. Holt, 4 Dec. 1971” (same date on both vols.)
Figure 1: Holt’s ex-libris in vol. 8 of Kanz al-durar
The field of Islamic history is small, so it’s not unusual to come across traces of our colleagues in old books. I am told that the Edinburgh University library for example holds several volumes full of annotations by William Montgomery Watt. Nevertheless, coming across two volumes once owned by Holt was a very nice coincidence. Of all the modern historians I cite in the bibliography of my dissertation and my forthcoming first book, P.M. Holt leads the charts by far: I cite no less than 11 different articles, reviews and books written by him between 1976 and 1995 and have PDFs of 22 publications of his in a folder on my computer. This is not only because he was a prolific scholar, but also because he wrote extensively on the corpus of regnal biographies written by Ibn ʿAbd al-Zahir (d. 1293) and Shafiʿ b. ʿAli (d. 1330) in 13th-century Egypt and Syria to which I devoted my PhD dissertation. And now, as I finally move on from working on these texts for some seven years it seems I continue to tread in Holt’s footsteps. Once more unsurprising: the universal histories I now work on were all well known to him as well. He even published a translation of (part of) the shortest of them, Abū al-Fidāʾ’s al-Mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar, as The Memoirs of a Syrian Prince. (To any second-hand book dealers reading this blog: I’m in the market for a copy of this translation and of an Arabic edition of this text. Call me maybe?)
Traces of Holt’s reading are all over the pages of these volumes and betray his scholarly interests. On the first page of Arabic text in vol. 8 — one of nine rhetorically dense introductions Ibn al-Dawādārī wrote for each volume of the chronicle — he simply noted that a particular phrase was evidence for “Qalawunid legitimisation.” Legitimacy indeed. The idea that legitimisation was the driving forces behind much Mamluk historiography, and especially the regnal biographies of the early period, was one of Holt’s great contributions to the field. The idea is that slave soldiers who turned sultans, often via usurpation, with no Arab or even Islamic genealogy, were in dire need of legitimisation of their status. The legitimisation argument has been widely received and has not been substantially problematised. Some of Holt’s articles for example figure prominently in the notes of Chase Robinson’s textbook Islamic Historiography and informed much of Robinson’s thinking about historiography in the later Middle Period. In my book I argue that this focus on legitimisation has run its course and that we need to move towards a broader assessment of the literary, historiographical, political and social concerns reflected in these pages. Historiography should not be seen as the product of state propaganda — an anachronism if ever there was one — but as a complex interaction between an able-penned historian and a powerful sultan.
In the footnotes of my book I here and there give Holt a little slap on the fingers for too much license in his translations and for being a little too old school in his reconstructions of treaties. But looking now at his annotations in these two volumes I cannot accuse him of laziness. I see him diligently working through hundreds of pages, summarising the contents of the paragraphs so that he can easily retrieve the relevant information contained within — I admit that this might come in handy to me as well in the future. For that is what Holt was interested in foremost: information. He seems to me a fairly old school positivist, even if his theory of legitimisation also drove him to consider the meaning of falsified historical accounts and the reasons behind evolving narratives.
But this is where we diverge: Holt’s single note on that first page of volume 8 distills Ibn al-Dawādārī’s rich literary frame of reference down to only two words: “Qalawunid legitimisation.” Even worse, it seems like he deliberately ignored the entirety of the first five pages of volume 9 where I find one of the most interesting muqaddimas written in the entire period: a fireworks of literary allusions, including a taḥmīd reimagined as an unmetered muwashshaḥa. Holt doesn’t even note legitimacy here, although the pages are brimming with Ibn al-Dawādārī’s fawning praise of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad. Instead, Holt’s first annotation in this volume makes note of a date and its notable event: “5 JI [Jumādā al-awwal] 698 / Arrival of al-Nāṣir in Cairo.” Next page: “6 JI 689 / Appointments” and “16 JI / state ride”. That is, the ascent of the sultan to the throne at the start of his second sultanate, followed by the appointment of elite figures to leading state positions and the ritual procession with the emblems of the sultanate. To be fair, he also underlines a few phrases showing his interest in discourse: for two phrases he writes “universal sultan” (malik al-arḍ and al-sulṭān al-aʿẓam). But he remains a classic historian: on the bottom of page 7 he underlines a date given by Ibn al-Dawādārī — the eighteenth of the month — and notes that in Nujūm (al-zāhira fī mulūk Miṣr waʾl-Qāhira, the great regnal history compiled by Ibn Taghrī-Birdī) this date is given as the second of the month.
Figure 2: a sample of Holt’s annotations
Comparing these books to my own chaotic spreadsheets, photocopies where I’ve colourfully marked the rhyme words, files filled with half-formed arguments and notebooks with (even to me) barely legible scribbles, I am a little envious of Holt’s systematic approach and his neat readable handwriting. I imagine how alongside these notes he might have had a whole filing cabinet of organised notes which he could turn to when writing one of his short but always clearly argued articles — I’ve long suspected older scholars to have such well-organised filing systems from which they can pull relevant information at a moment’s notice. In these second hand pages the scholar I reprimanded in my footnotes becomes a real person, someone who clearly spent a lot of time with these volumes before they ended up in my hands, where they will be read in very different ways. It’s unlikely I will read them as systematically as he did. Seeing his system outlined so beautifully, I will probably refrain from adding my own annotations in the margins. It would feel like disturbing an artefact with some archival value.
P.M. Holt died in 2006, when I was in my final year of high school. It would be another two years before I heard for the first time about Ayyubids and Mamluks at Ghent University, and even more years before I came across any of the historians Holt read so closely. I met Holt only when I wrote my PhD funding application, and arguably only really got to know him when I read through his articles and books during the following years of research. Actually, no, I never met Holt. I only had one-sided conversations with him on the pages of my book, an easy target for my challenges because he couldn’t reply anyway. I know very little of Holt’s life otherwise, but these two volumes have brought me a little closer to him as a fellow historian and as a fellow human being: I note that he appears to have enjoyed going to the theatre, volume 8 contains two tickets to shows in Oxford, one dated to 1994, both of them inserted between pages 195 and 196. I can’t help but notice that, like me and probably many others, he used train and theatre tickets as book markers. Perhaps he didn’t think much of it and he was just being economical — coming of age during the Second World War will do that to you, I guess — or perhaps, like me, he liked these little remnants of one’s own past mingling with the pages providing accounts of long gone times. Perhaps he deliberately left these little stray pieces of the past in books he read in a particular times and space, only to stumble on these half-forgotten personal memories later on when consulting the books for some reference. Maybe, I don’t know. But I do feel like I know Peter Malcolm Holt a little better now, and I look forward to acquainting myself further with our common friend Ibn al-Dawādārī.
