An Ayyubid Notable and His World: Ibn al-'Adim and Aleppo as Portrayed in His Biographical Dictionary of People Associated with the City.

• Author: Robinson, Chase F.

The great biographical dictionaries of the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods have generally served historians of Islam in one of two ways. Because they preserve so much material otherwise lost to us, they have proven very fertile ground for Quellenforschung; and although this kind of work has a very long tradition,(1) there are no signs of its end: as long as new material continues to become available, the approach will almost certainly remain profitable.(2) In North America this type of scholarship has shallower roots; there a second approach has predominated. If, for students of historiography, the principal value of the rijal works lies in their preservation of earlier sources, for social historians such as R. Bulliet. C. Petry, and others, it lies in their recording of prosopographical data, and, to a varying degree, their reflection of the social and political milieu in which the ulama operated.(3) Now with all of this work going on, one might suppose that the genre was well understood, that the rijal compilers' "technique and approach," to borrow Rosenthal's phrase, are sufficiently well described that we can use the sources with confidence. But this kind of work is surprisingly under-represented in the field, and much of what passes for research on the genre is really about its origins (e.g., of the tabaqat literature), or about its organization.(4) In D. Morray's new book we therefore have a very welcome attempt to address squarely the thorny issues of genre, technique, and authorship, as well as the intellectual and political context in which one great rijal work was composed.

Morray's book is about the surviving parts of the voluminous Bughyat al-talab fi tarikh Halab of Kamal al-Din Ibn al-Adim (d. 660/1262), whose principal work, like that of his contemporary Ibn Shaddad, has made a slow journey from the copyist's desk to the printing press. The Bughya has only recently been edited by Zakkar in eleven volumes (Damascus, 1988), but Morray seems to have worked primarily from Sezgin's facsimile of the Istanbul MS, which appeared two years earlier. Aside from the editor then, Morray probably has an unparalleled knowledge of the MS and the work in general. Of Zakkar's edition Morray unfortunately says very little, but his criticisms of Zakkar are infrequent.(5) Morray thoughtfully cites both the facsimile and the Zakkar edition, so moving from his book to either of the two is easy enough.

The book has eight chapters. After introducing Ibn...