TY - JOUR
AU - Elbendary,, Amina
AB - There has been a revival in post-classical Arabic literary studies in recent years. The current state of research has come to reconsider many of the statements about a decline in Arabic literary production after the fall of the ʿAbbasids. Thanks to scholars like Thomas Bauer and others, Mamluk literary production in particular has also become a more recent subject of analysis. Elias Muhanna’s study of al-Nuwayri’s famous ‘encyclopedia’ Nihāyat al-arab (‘The Ultimate Ambition’), comes in this vein. As Muhanna himself remarks (p. 10), this is a small book (232 pages including appendices and notes) on a very big book (31 volumes in print). It is also more than that. The World in a Book is at once an essay on Mamluk literary production, on the history of encyclopedias and the place of Arabic encyclopedias within that, on the historical figure al-Nuwayrī as an author and bureaucrat, and on Nihāyat al-arab itself. It therefore touches on many interesting issues and sub-themes; but it does not exhaust any of them. The World in a Book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the phenomenon of encyclopedism in the Mamluk empire. The author discusses both the concept of encyclopedia and the different terms used to refer to the genre in various languages including in modern Arabic. This is obviously to situate al-Nuwayrī’s Nihāyat al-arab within both an Arabic and global genre. Muhanna argues against considering the popularity of the encyclopedic genre in the Mamluk period as a sign of fear following the threat of the Mongols and the Black Death. Here and in later chapters, the author links al-Nuwayrī and to an extent other Mamluk similar texts instead to the rise of bureaucratic scholar-scribes, their training and their worldview. Chapter 2 discusses the structure of the text, its size, arrangement and the hierarchies inherent within. One of the unique features of the text that Muhanna discovers is the thematic consistency of its chapters. It also includes significant cross-referencing that directs readers to other relevant sections of this sizeable work. Muhanna’s categorization of the text into hierarchies and sections described in tables helps the modern reader make sense of this structure. It also allows him and us to notice the sections that get the most attention and word count from al-Nuwayrī. Therefore, unsurprisingly, history appears clearly central to the project. This is in line with previous studies about post-classical Arabic literature. Muhanna also juxtaposes the arrangement of ‘The Ultimate Ambition’ to that of other classical Arabic encyclopedias which further highlights that al-Nuwayrī’s text stands out in matters of composition and structure and not in size alone. The comparison is especially apt and relevant in connection to the texts of al-Qalqashandī and Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī. This chapter also helps place the Ultimate Ambition and al-Nuwayrī’s contribution within the broader paradigm of Mamluk literary production. Chapter 3 reconstructs the sources that al-Nuwayrī depended on to produce his magnum opus. The diverse sources covering various disciplines are seen as reflective of the intellectual worldview of scholars at the Nāṣiriyya madrasa where al-Nuwayrī resided and the books available to them. Chapter 4, titled ‘Encyclopedism and Empire’, moves from studying the scholarly and intellectual milieus and sources for al-Nuwayrī’s text to the context of the imperial chanceries and government bureaus in which he worked. As such it is a succinct and elegant essay on the relationship between medieval scholarly production and power—a theme that continues to occupy historians of the Islamic tradition. Here Muhanna manages to relay the intricate connections between the intellectual and the bureaucratic in a way that subtly explains how they are both integral parts of medieval cultural production that cannot be divorced from each other. In Chapter 5, Muhanna gives a survey and overview of the existing autograph copies of Nihāyat al-arab. This will be very useful for further studies, as the manuscript notes, including certificates of reading and ownership, could reveal much more about the reception of the text than is touched upon here. It could be analysed in manners similar to what Konrad Hirschler, Stefan Leder and others have done with reading certificates and library catalogues. Muhanna was able to suggest several ideas about al-Nuwayrī’s working methods; almost like an investigative reporter he traces manuscripts known to be in al-Nuwayrī’s hand and compares them to other manuscripts of the work as well as information in biographical dictionaries that refer to his work as a copyist and to his rate of copying and dates of selling certain titles. That certain surviving quires have blanks where their dates should be, leave room for guesses regarding the author’s working methods including the very real possibility that the book was not written in the order in which it finally appears to us and that certain chapters could have been copied in a different order than the one in which they finally appear. Indeed, one can speculate whether some buyers requested only particular volumes. The different chapters follow different methodologies and approaches, including comparative ones in parts. This should make the book accessible to scholars beyond the field of Islamic and Arabic studies and therefore also help in further integrating the history of Arabic literature into world literature studies. This is particularly clear in the first chapter which discusses the definitions and history of encyclopedias as a literary genre as well as the last chapter (6) which discusses the discovery of al-Nuwayrī’s encyclopedias by various Orientalists and the early modern history and reception of the text. Other sections of the text are very close in methodology to history of literature and reading. The author also incorporates information from waqf records and architectural history of the urban spaces in which al-Nuwayrī lived and worked, which aids in understanding the text of the Ultimate Ambition in a context much wider than its words. The idea that medieval authors were simply rehashing or summarizing older material has long been debunked in the field. Muhanna’s research on al-Nuwayrī as a case study traces this misconception to the nineteenth century Orientalist ideas, at the same time demonstrating the uniqueness of the text in comparison to previous ones in its genre. Indeed, Muhanna’s study confirms and elucidates the link between the rise of the medieval bureaucracy and the historiographical production of the Mamluks discussed by various authors, including most famously Tarif Khalidi, without sufficient detail. Here Muhanna argues convincingly for the link between the recording and surveying instinct of the bureaucrat, along with the interest in contemporary material, and the production of the medieval encyclopedia. This book argues against the idea that encyclopedic production in the Mamluk period was borne out of a feeling of weakness and decline. Even though the sense of decline and doom is one that is reflected in medieval Arabic historiography, Muhanna argues that it was not the impetus that moved the compilers of the encyclopedias. The different approaches that Muhanna uses in each chapter work both to give a more holistic view of the text than it has often been used to before, as well as to serve as a model for studies of other canonical works in the Arabic tradition. It comes to complement the work of other scholars on these texts such as Maaike van Berkel’s on administrative manuals and al-Qalqashandī’s Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī sīnāʿat al-inshāʾ. Together these studies are revising many of the assumptions about medieval Arabic writing and the production of literary texts in the post-classical period and opening up avenues for new approaches and new discoveries. Finally, Muhanna writes here in a very accessible style that is different than much of the writing of classical Islamic studies and classical Arabic literature. It makes the study more accessible to a wider audience, including scholars of other literary and historical traditions as well as students newly entering the field. © The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition By Elias Muhanna
JF - Journal of Islamic Studies
DO - 10.1093/jis/etz033
DA - 2020-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-world-in-a-book-al-nuwayri-and-the-islamic-encyclopedic-tradition-YM17XR3o2I
SP - 113
VL - 31
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -