Kaori Otsuya is PhD student, Service de langue arabe, études islamiques et histoire de l’art musulman, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Université de Liège, Belgium (Doctoral fellow, Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique)
Abstract: Recently, historiographical traditions of the ‘Mamluk’ Sultanate in Egypt and Syria have attracted considerable attention. However, since texts written in its frontier zones including the Hijaz have not yet been closely studied, production of works under the influence of several traditions remains unclear. To fill this gap, this paper focuses on the famous Meccan historian Taqī al-Dīn al-Fāsī (d. 832/1429) and investigates the way he described Syro-Egyptian and Yemeni sultans. This paper explores how al-Fāsī adopted Syro-Egyptian and Yemeni perspectives in his famous biographical dictionary, al-ʿIqd al-Thamīn.
Taqī al-Dīn al-Fāsī traveled to Egypt, Syria, and Yemen and was intertwined with historiographical traditions of both the ‘Mamluk’ Sultanate of Cairo and the Rasulid Sultanate. His attitude towards Syro-Egyptian and Yemeni sultans is twofold. On the one hand, he explained that the Syro-Egyptian sultans ruled Mecca since al-Nāṣir Muḥammad and mentioned their endowments and donations in Mecca. In particular, he praised his contemporary sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy. On the other hand, in general, al-Fāsī wrote longer biographies for the Rasulid sultans than for their Syro-Egyptian counterparts. He described their endowments in Mecca as well as their academic interests. In the biography of Sultan al-Mujāhid ʿAlī, he took a sympathetic attitude to this sultan when he explained about this sultan’s capture by the Mamluk army in Mecca. Thus, al-Fāsī combined the two different discursive strategies employed by Syro-Egyptian and Yemeni historians. This paper sheds light on a way of writing a history in a frontier zone.