Texts, Documents, and Artefacts: Islamic Studies in Honour of D.S. Richards (Islamic History and Civilization)

431 Pages·2003·12.2 MB·English

by  D. S. Richards

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TEXTS, DOCUMENTS AND ARTEFACTS
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ISLAMIC HISTORY
AND CIVILIZATION
STUDIES AND TEXTS
edited by
WADAD KADI
AND
ROTRAUD WIELANDT
VOLUME 45
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TEXTS, DOCUMENTS
AND ARTEFACTS
Islamic Studies in Honour of D.S. Richards
EDITED BY
CHASE F. ROBINSON
BRILL
LEIDEN •BOSTON
2003
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Texts, documents, and artefacts : Islamic studies in honour of D.S. Richards / edited by
Chase F. Robinson.
p. cm. — (Islamic history and civilization. Studies and texts, ISSN 0929-2403 ; v. 45)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 90-04-12864-6
1. Islamic Empire—History. 2. Civilization, Islamic. 3. Richards, D.S. (Donald Sidney),
1935- I. Title: Islamic studies in honour of D.S. Richards. II. Richards, D.S. (Donald
Sidney), 1935- III. Robinson, Chase F. IV. Series.
DS35.63.T49 2003
909'09767101--dc21
2002044050
ISSN 0929-2403
ISBN 90 04 12864 6
© Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal
use is granted by Brill provided that
the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright
Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
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CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................ vii
Chase F. Robinson
Bibliography of D.S. Richards .................................................. xi
The word made visible: Arabic script and the
committing of the Qur"àn to writing .................................. 1
Alan Jones
Caliphs and their chroniclers in the Middle Abbasid
period (third/ninth century) .................................................. 17
Hugh Kennedy
A new text on Ismailism at the Samanid court ...................... 37
Patricia Crone and Luke Treadwell
A treatise on the Imamate of the Fatimid Caliph
al-Manßùr bi-Allàh .................................................................. 69
Wilferd Madelung
The imprisonment of Reynald of Châtillon ............................ 79
Carole Hillenbrand
A conversation on contemporary politics in the
twelfth century: ‘al-Maqàma al-Baghdàdiyya’
by al-Wahrànì (d. 575/1179) ................................................ 103
Geert Jan van Gelder
Les sources d’Ibn al-'Adìm sur le règne de Sayf
al-Dawla en Syrie du Nord (333–356/944–967) ................ 121
Anne-Marie Eddé
An original Arabic document from Crusader
Antioch (1213 AD) ................................................................ 157
Nadia Jamil and Jeremy Johns
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Yàqùt’s interviewing technique: ‘Sniffy’ .................................... 191
Julia Bray
“Sìrat al-Mu"ayyad Shaykh” by Ibn Nàhi∂ ............................ 211
Amalia Levanoni
Foot soldiers, militiamen and volunteers in the early
Mamluk army ........................................................................ 233
Reuven Amitai
Tribal feuding and Mamluk factions in medieval Syria ........ 251
Robert Irwin
The collapse of the Great Saljuqs ............................................ 265
Julie Scott Meisami
Mamluk Sgraffiato ware: the power of the new .................... 301
George T. Scanlon
De passage à Damas en 688/1286. Ibn al-Najìb et la
transmission du savoir ............................................................ 357
Jacqueline Sublet
When is a fake a fake and how much does it matter?
On the authenticity of the letter of the descendants
of Mu˙ammad b. Íàli˙ to the descendants of
Mu'àwiya b. Íàli˙ .................................................................. 385
David J. Wasserstein
Materials for the study of Arabic in the age of the
early printed book .................................................................. 405
David Morray
Selected Index of Persons .......................................................... 415
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INTRODUCTION
Chase F. Robinson (Oxford)
The following articles, all written by friends, colleagues or students
of D.S. Richards, are intended to serve as a token of our deep
respect for him as friend, colleague and teacher, and to bear wit-
ness to his long and distinguished career as a scholar.
Donald Sidney Richards was born in Bristol in 1935 and came
up to Oxford in 1953, reading Greats (Literae Humaniores) at Merton
College before turning to Arabic and Persian for his degree, which
he took in 1957. He then spent two years in the Navy, during which
time he added Russian to his Greek, Latin, Arabic and Persian, and
returned to Oxford in 1959 at the invitation of Professor A.F.L.
Beeston; with the encouragement of both Freddie Beeston and Albert
Hourani, he applied and was appointed to a Lectureship in Arabic
in the Faculty of Oriental Studies in 1960. (Research for the D.Phil.
was started but abandoned, which was hardly rare in those days;
besides, he had already proved himself to his teachers.) In 1967 he
was elected to an Official Fellowship at St Cross College, where he
served as Vice-Master from 1991–1995, by which time he had com-
pleted several sabbaticals, including one in 1983, when he was Senior
Research Fellow at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.
Most important, of course, he had married Pamela, with whom he
came to share not only an unflagging enthusiasm for Arabic, the
Middle East and local history, but a son (Martin) and a daughter
(Lucy). In 2000, Donald retired from the same Faculty and post to
which he had first been appointed—some 40 years of learning and
teaching. Were we to read it in a scholar’s tarjama, we would all be
tempted to reckon it a mere topos. Having learned from Donald that
texts are rarely that simple, however, we would think again.
What can one accomplish in 40 years? One can endure, which
is how many lecturers who first came to Oxford in the 50s and 60s
might choose to describe their experience in the 90s and 00s. The
Oxford of Donald’s early years could boast many of the greatest
Orientalists of the twentieth century, including H.A.R. Gibb, Samuel
Stern and Richard Walzer; it was also gloriously naïve of Teaching
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Quality Assessments, Research Assessment Exercises and the culture
of fetishized procedures they represent. I know that Donald does not
regret leaving these behind. But beyond enduring, one can leave a
legacy, and this Donald has done.
Generations of students have benefited from his gentle but sure-
handed guidance through Final Honours School options and con-
ventions as labyrinthine as the Mamluk Jerusalem that he, more than
any other scholar of his generation, has charted. (In the matter of
options and conventions, as in many other academic matters, Donald
sorted out the messes left by noisier Oxford colleagues; always affable
and unflappable, he quietly and efficiently got things done.) Nearly
as many students he taught how to read and write Arabic—under-
graduate and graduate alike, some willingly, others only under duress
(when they had failed to prepare translations, he would translate for
them—the text had to be gotten through). And insofar as the cur-
riculum accommodated it, he taught history too, in lectures and text-
reading classes; undergraduates and graduates broke their teeth on
Miskawayh and Ibn Athìr with Mr Richards. All of this said, it is
the smallest of his constituencies—his fellow scholars—who enjoy
what may be the richest of his legacies, and, now, liberated from
the academic schedule, the one into which he still makes regular
contributions. It is principally the scholarship of D.S. Richards that
the present volume celebrates.
Texts, Documents and Artefacts is the theme of this Festschrift because
they are the stuff of his scholarship. To many, Donald is known
either as the editor of two influential collections of economic and
social history (Islam and the Trade of Asia, Oxford, 1970; Islamic Civilisation
950–1150, Oxford, 1973) or as the historian behind the definitive
guide to the architecture of Mamluk Jerusalem (Mamluk Jerusalem: An
Architectural Study, London, 1987). But to those who know better,
Donald is an Arabist. Trained originally as a classicist, he devoted
most of his published scholarship to construing the meanings of
Arabic words. Anyone who knows Arabic well knows that this is not
as simple as it may sound, just as anyone in Oxford who has strug-
gled with palaeographic or epigraphic problems in Arabic knows
where the solutions were to be found. Art historians made a habit
of appearing in the Oriental Institute’s common room with blurry
photographs of inscribed Mamluk ewers and lamps, hoping to find
Donald at coffee: “I can see the làm, but what do you make of
that?” Or this very afternoon, when I invited him to examine a
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colophon on one of the Bodleian’s copies of al-Íafadì’s al-Wàfì bi’l-
wafayàt: “Yes, one sees bi-ishàrat al-amìr, but one would expect bi-
rasm because that’s what’s on the documents...” No one else around
the table knows these documents as he does, so we dunk our bis-
cuits in assent, while I pause before putting another question: “What
about this?”
Although Donald’s teaching career began and ended at Oxford,
and the influence of Oxford Oriental Studies upon his research inter-
ests is clear enough—after all, Gibb had worked on the biographers
of Saladin, and Stern on the Sinai documents—Donald made doc-
umentary Arabic a career-long specialty, devoting countless hours to
deciphering and discussing a range of documents, chiefly from Jeru-
salem, Fustat/Cairo and the Sinai, which throw light on the social,
political and religious history of the pre-modern Near East. A sec-
ond area of expertise, the historiography of the Ayyubid and Mamluk
periods, emerged in the 1980s. Like many Oxford scholars who had
the pleasure to begin his career when learning was assumed rather
than assigned a crude number value, he published at his own pace;
but unlike many of those Oxford scholars, his pace accelerated dur-
ing the latter part of his career: the last three years alone have seen
the appearance of his long-awaited edition of years 650–709 AH of
the Zubdat al-fikra fì ta"rìkh al-hijra and his translations of al-Nawàdir
al-sul†àniyya wa’l-ma˙àsin al-Yùsufiyya and the Saljuk section of Ibn al-
Athìr’s Kàmil.
The articles published in this Festschrift range nearly the length
and breadth of Islamic studies, but in their close engagement with
the written word, they all honour D.S. Richards and his scholarship.
Acknowledgements
The editor wishes to thank Elizabeth Will, Andrew Marsham and
Gail Dixon-Smith for their assistance, and the Board of the Faculty
of Oriental Studies for financial support.