Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i
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we see here: even women who are slaves, if in favor, can dispose of treasure as they wish. This contradiction is one of myriad social details that raise further questions about the nature of women’s subjugation in the oriental, and specifically Abbasid, past.
This volume is the sixteenth title in the Library of Arabic Literature, and a most valuable addition to an invaluable series that is revolutionizing access to the corpus for non-Arabic readers like myself as well as establishing meticulous editions for those who can read the works in the original language. Ibn al-Sāʿī’s gallery of women poets, wits, singers, chess players, teachers, benefactors, and builders (of waterways, libraries, and law schools) transcends the collective, stereotypical character of great ladies as femmes fatales, wives, mothers, or concubines; his report lifts a veil of silence and allows us to overhear the hum of lyric, argument, wit, and elegy from women’s voices in the past. Its rich retrievals will prove marvelously inspiring, both for scholarship and for other creative work. One might dream of a new opera—about ʿInān? about Faḍl? about Būrān?—to do justice to the women who sing out from Ibn al-Sāʿī’s revelatory and enjoyable archive.
Marina Warner
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SHAWKAT M. TOORAWA
We are grateful to the members of the collaborative academic alliance Radical Reassessment of Arabic Arts, Language, and Literature (RRAALL) for passing the Consorts of the Caliphs translation project on to the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL), and in particular to Joseph Lowry, the project’s spiritus auctor, who has been tirelessly committed to it.
We would like to thank Ian Stevens for early encouragement; Muhammet Günaydın of Istanbul University for obtaining a copy of the manuscript; and Gila Waels, along with Nora Yousif, Manal Demaghlatrous, Antoine El Khayat, and Farhana Goha, for cheerful and expert assistance in Abu Dhabi. The feedback we received from audience members at the public panel discussion “Caliphs and their Consorts: Translating Anecdotes and Poetry in Ibn al-Sāʿī’s Nisāʾ al-Khulafāʾ” in December 2012 in Abu Dhabi was immensely helpful—especially as we were reminded how important it is to translate for readers, not just for ourselves. The expert feedback of Richard Sieburth was invaluable, as were the participation of Maurice Pomerantz and Justin Stearns in an intensive translation workshop in Abu Dhabi in December 2013. Everyone at NYU Abu Dhabi and at NYU Press has been unfailingly supportive of us and of LAL.
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I am grateful to RRAALL for nurturing in me a love of collaboration in scholarship and to Philip Kennedy for turning the fantasy of the Library of Arabic Literature into reality and including me in that fantasy/reality. I know I must have done something right for so much of my “work” now to involve spending time in the superlative company of Philip Kennedy and James Montgomery. When you add Devin Stewart, Tahera Qutbuddin, Joseph Lowry, Michael Cooperson, and Julia Bray to the mix, the company becomes unmatchable.
I must single out Julia. Not only did she save me from all manner of goofs and gaffes as I prepared the Arabic edition, and not only did her meticulous attention to every single word in this volume make it vastly superior—she also provided me with the opportunity to collaborate, on a daily basis, with a consummate scholar and a dear friend. For this I am truly grateful.
It has also been an honor to work with the outstanding scholar-translator-manager-editor-gentleman Chip Rossetti, the wonderful and resourceful LAL aide and assistant editor Gemma Juan-Simó, and our magician of a digital production manager, Stuart Brown. Martin Grosch’s and Jennifer Ilius’s maps adorn the volume beautifully, and Rana Siblini, Wiam El-Tamami, Marie Deer, and Elias Saba contributed invisibly but crucially. And Nicole Hayward’s design of the LAL paperbacks is simply gorgeous.
My new homes, the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Yale University, have been welcoming and supportive.
As for my family—Parvine, Maryam, Asiya (and Cotomili)—they are spectacular in indulging my obsessions and provide a constant and welcome reminder of what is truly important.
Shawkat M. Toorawa
INTRODUCTION
JULIA BRAY
Tāj al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Anjab Ibn al-Sāʿī (593–674/1197–1276) was a Baghdadi man of letters and historian. As the librarian of two great law colleges, the Niẓāmiyyah and later the Munstanṣiriyyah, and a protégé of highly placed members of the regime, Ibn al-Sāʿī enjoyed privileged access to the ruling circles and official archives of the caliphate4 and contributed to the great cultural resurgence that took place under the last rulers of the Abbasid dynasty. This was an age of historians, and most of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s works were histories of one sort or another, but only fragments survive. The only one of his works that has come down to us complete is Consorts of the Caliphs. This too is a history insofar as it follows a rough chronological order, but in other respects it is more like a sub-genre of the biographical dictionary. It consists of brief life sketches, with no narrative interconnection, of concubines and wives of the Abbasid caliphs and, in an appendix, consorts of “viziers and military commanders.” This last section, however, is slightly muddled; it includes some concubines of caliphs and wives of two Saljūq sultans, as well as one woman who was neither;5 has a duplicate entry; and is not chronological, all of which suggests that it is a draft.6
For the later Abbasid ladies of Consorts of the Caliphs, Ibn al-Sāʿī uses his own sources and insider knowledge, but for the earlier ones, he quotes well-known literary materials, drawing especially on the supreme historian of early Abbasid court literature, Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (284–ca. 363/897–ca. 972), author of the Book of Songs (Kitāb al-Aghānī). In this way, two quite different formats are juxtaposed in Consorts of the Caliphs: the later entries follow the obituary format of the chronicles of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s period; the earlier ones are adapted from the classical anecdote format of several centuries before, which combined narrative and verse in dramatic scenes. Many of the entries from both periods are framed by isnāds—the names of the people who originally recorded the anecdotes and of the people who then transmitted them, either by word of mouth or by reading from an authorized text. The names of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s own informants give an indication of what interested scholars and litterateurs in the Baghdad of his day. The meticulousness of the isnāds signals that Consorts of the Caliphs is a work of serious scholarship, as does the fact that Ibn al-Sāʿī’s personal informants are men of considerable standing.7
Ibn al-Sāʿī survived the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 656/1258 and lived on unmolested under Ilkhanid rule. Consorts of the Caliphs, which was written shortly before 1258,8 survives in a single late-fifteenth-century manuscript.9 This one small work is unique in affording multiple perspectives on things that have, over the centuries, been felt to be fundamental and durable in the Arabic literary and cultural imagination: the poetry of the heroines of early Abbasid culture; the mid-Abbasid casting of their careers and love lives into legend; a reimagining of the court life of the Abbasid period, along with the idealization of the court life of their own times, by Ibn al-Sāʿī and his contemporaries; and finally, the perspective of some two hundred years later in which the stories retold by Ibn al-Sāʿī were still valued, but lumped together in a single manuscript with an unrelated and unauthored miscellany of wit, wisdom, poems, and anecdotes.10
IBN AL-SĀʿĪ’S LIFE AND TIMES: POST- AND PRE-MONGOL
What is it like to live through a cataclysm? When Ibn al-Sāʿī finished writing his Brief Lives of the Caliphs (Mukhtaṣar akhbār al-khulafāʾ) in 666/1267–68 (as he notes on the last page),11 it was as a survivor of the Mongol sack of Baghdad ten years earlier, in which the thirty-seventh and last ruling Abbasid caliph, al-Mustaʿṣim, had been killed. With al-Mustaʿṣim’s death came the end of the caliphate, an institution that had lasted more than half a millennium. Although the caliphate had shrunk by the end from an empire to a rump, the Abbasid caliphs, as descendants of the Prophet’s uncle, still claimed to be the lawful rulers of all Muslims.