The Middle Bahri Mamluks in medieval Syrian historiography. The years 1297-1302 in the 'Dhayl Mir'at al-Zaman,' attributed to Qutb al-Din Musa al-Yunini: A critical edition with introduction, annotated translation, and source criticism. (Volumes I and II).

摘要

This is a study and partial critical edition of al-Yunini's (d. 726/1326) Dhayl Mir'at al-zaman, one of the most important sources for the history of Mamluk Syria and Egypt. The dissertation consists of three parts. In Part One (Introduction), an overview of the author's life and works (chapter 1) is followed by a discussion of the formation and transmission of the text on the basis of a survey of all nineteen extant manuscripts (chapter 2). Considerable attention is also given to source criticism (chapter 3) wherein issues like the place of the work in the Mamluk historiography and the textual and working relationship between the author and contemporary Syrian scholars are discussed in detail. The major argument is that the second part of the text (covering the years 690-711 H) is essentially al-Jazari's (d. 739/1338) Hawadith al-zaman re-edited by al-Yunini; the textual and historical evidence also suggests that the last "volume" (covering 702-711 H) was plausibly al-Jazari's work wrongly attributed to al-Yunini, and that al-Birzali (d. 739/1339) played certain role in this enterprise. Part One concludes with the observations that this kind of cooperation among a group of historians and Hadith scholars at the time in Damascus was very common, and that the significance of this "Syrian School of historical writing" for medieval Muslim scholarship goes beyond the originality of the information its representative authors provided; it extends to technical matters: the labor of generations of these Syrian historians (from Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi, via al-Yunini, al-Jazari, and al-Birzali, to al-Dhahabi) has delivered such a message: a good ta'rikh (history) is not only a record of factual events, but a register of Muslim religious learning and a selective anthology of Arabic cultural heritage. In Part Two, an annotated English translation of the edited text (covering the years 697/1297-701/1302) is re-arranged according to subject. The textual materials concerning political, military and administrative systems in the early Mamluk sultanate are presented in Appendices. Pan Three is a critical edition of the Arabic text. It is collated with fragmentary extant portions (697-698 H) of al-Jazari's Hawadith al-zaman. A glossary of rare words and usages is aimed at presenting first-hand materials of the written Arabic of the period.