The criminal underworld of medieval Damascus is certainly not my field of expertise. But as for the contemporary audience of Ibn Ṭūlūn’s chronicle Mufākahat al-Khillān, these stories also draw the attention of current readers. This short post relates one such instance from Damascus at the end of the Mamluk period.
Continue reading “A horrific crime—at an ominous time”Introducing: Khadija al-Qurashiyya al-Bakriyya
Returning to a recurrent segment but with a little twist this post’s subject is Khadija bt. Jamal al-Din Abd Allah al-Qurashiyya al-Bakriyya—and we could add here—al-Misriyya. She did not receive her own biography in Ibn Tulun’s biographical dictionary al-Dhakhaʾir but nonetheless has her voice heard in that same work.
Continue reading “Introducing: Khadija al-Qurashiyya al-Bakriyya”Into Ibn Tulun’s library
My project is mostly concerned with Ibn Tulun’s own body of work, his own corpus. This focus has partially emerged due to my fascination with his organization of knowledge and partly due to constraints exerted by the current state of cataloguing. It is rather easy to find the author of any given manuscript but much more time-consuming to identify former owners of a manuscript. Today, however, let us take a look at which other books Ibn Tulun called his own.
Continue reading “Into Ibn Tulun’s library”The Crustacean Returns: A possible context for Ibn Tulun’s observations
April 2018 saw the publication of a post on Ibn Ṭūlūn’s excursus on freshwater crustaceans indigenous to Syrian bodies of water. At the time, I could not give that much context on the meaning of this passage upon which I came in a biographical dictionary. Having recently ventured into some new literature for a course at Hamburg University, I will now try to give at least a bit more information as to the meaning of this zoological passage in a biographical work.
Continue reading “The Crustacean Returns: A possible context for Ibn Tulun’s observations”
Introducing: ʿAʾisha al-Salihiyya
This week we return to the final biography in the chapter on women in Ibn Tulun’s work al-Ghuraf (fol. 359a). The subject of the following short biography sheds light on some intriguing aspects of such transmission. It also poses somewhat of a riddle with regard to her own role within transmission.