by the PI, Jo Van Steenbergen
In the autumn of 2015 my application for an ERC Consolidator Grant project was successful. After another year of grant agreement negotiations and (attempts of) finishing ongoing publication projects (including from the previous ERC project MMS, which ran between 2009 and 2014), the project began in January 2017. It will run until December 2021. In this first project-blogpost I will try to briefly explain what the project is all about.
The project title is meant to capture the gist of its focus, goals and ambitions. It goes as follows: The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate—II (MMS-II): Historiography, Political Order and State Formation in 15th-Century Egypt and Syria.
MMS-II engages with the main results of the Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate project (MMS). Hence the first part of its title. But it will do so in very different ways. Instead of the focus on social ties and networks of power that were at the heart of our MMS research, MMS-II engages with the complex relationship between social and cultural history. MMS-II is actually studying how political order and historical truth were jointly constructed in the late medieval Middle East. It looks in particular at how premodern Islamic scholars /historians and their Arabic texts contributed actively to a particular state formation process that has been defined by us as a ‘Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate’.
The fifteenth-century history of the Sultanate of Cairo, also known as the Mamluk Sultanate, is traditionally considered a period of socio-economic and political decline in Syria and Egypt, following thirteenth and fourteenth century successes. In a lot of recent research (including the MMS project), however, this fifteenth-century history has been revalued as a highly creative era of transformation, and even of local and regional empowerment and of state formation. This revaluation has been captured by us in the neologism of Mamlukisation. The MMS-II project builds on this revisionism. It claims that newly framed social memories of a glorious past of Muslim championship and leadership by military slaves (mamluks) were part and parcel of this Mamlukisation process, as were contemporary laments that things aren’t what they used to be.
The MMS-II project surveys and analyses the production and construction of these social memories in fifteenth-century Arabic texts from, especially, Syria and Egypt. It considers these memories as important specimens of political ideologies and truth claims that until today fail to be properly understood. This contributes to ongoing new appreciations of the surprisingly rich, sophisticated and eclectic fabric of late medieval and early modern Islamic imaginations of normative social order. This also sheds entirely new light on the interaction between those imaginations and some of the major narrative sources for current knowledge of medieval Islamic history, as quite a few of these were written in the particular fifteenth century context of Syro-Egyptian centrality on the Eurasian stage. This finally also helps 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 early Islamic rise and long medieval decline, remain oblivious to the highly intriguing particular agendas for which that narrative always has been, and continues to be, claimed as historical truth.
