At the very start of doing this blog, I provided two posts on certain thematic clusters within Ibn Tulun’s oeuvre: one on plants and one on animals. There, I mentioned a first cluster in which he heavily relies on Prophetic traditions, food and food consumption. It is time to take a look at this cluster.
How the Ottomans won over Damascus: A graphic short story
A while back, a book chapter of mine was published in the volume The Mamluk-Ottoman Transition. Continuity and Change in Egypt and Bilād al-Shām in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Stephan Conermann and Gül Şen. In this I investigated architectural policies of the Ottoman sultan Selim immediately following his occupation of Damascus.
I still stand by most of the points I made in this publication. But I was unhappy that the illustrations into which I had put so much work were printed rather small. Thus, this post brings them back and, on their basis, retells the story of how the Ottomans not only conquered but won over Damascus.
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Teaching and transmission in 16th-century Damascus
The importance of any scholar can be justified with either of three arguments: They wrote many and important works, furthering one or even several disciplines; they taught many students who went on to become themselves important scholars; or people more generally benefited from their dispensation of helpful information. Ideally, a scholar would combine all of the above, which should reflect in them being appointed to influential positions in educational institutions. However, as today, so in the 16th century politics played a role in appointment processes, and often enough the person skillful in those could overcome someone more knowledgeable in the discipline to be taught.
Continue reading “Teaching and transmission in 16th-century Damascus”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”Towards a History of Ibn Tulun’s corpus
While much of what has been published here, has been more or less concerned with the topic of this post’s title, today it will get much more “personal”. More concretely, this post gives a list of all those people I could identify as having engaged with the corpus at one time or another.
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