Gowaart Van Den Bosssche is Post-doctoral Research Fellow, ERC Project “KITAB: Knowledge, Information Technology and the Arabic Book”, Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisation.
Abstract: Around the turn of the 8th/14th century there is a notable shift in historiographical production in Cairo. Whereas in the late 7th/13th century historiography was dominated by a small group of scribes writing regnal biographies, after the turn of the century, and especially after al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s third ascent of the throne, attention shifted to universal historiography. Massive chronicles were written by Ibn al-Dawādārī, Baybars al-Manṣūrī, and al-Nuwayrī. Further away in Syria Abū l-Fidāʾ also wrote a large scale chronicle, which participated in this same universal discourse of history. This paper argues that one can find reflected in these texts, as well as in those produced in the so-called Syrian school to an extent, a shared worldview centred on the Cairene court, which not only structured their geographic purview, but also their perception of time and history. I argue that al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s third ascension of the throne was appreciated as a millennial moment which cemented the idea of a distinctive Turkish political entity. The fact that historians composed large chronicles starting at creation or at the beginning of Islam and ending in the reign of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad was not just obvious because of the time and place of writing, but also a meaningful construction of history as culminating and seeing its grandest expression in the present. As I will argue, these perceptions are expressed in rhetoricised sections of these works, and can furthermore be gleaned from formal manuscript layout.
