Early Mamluk Syrian Historiography: Al-Yunini's Dhayl [Mir.sup.[contains]]at a1-zaman.

• Author: PETRY, CARL F.
• Position: Review

Early Mamluk Syrian Historiography: Al-Y[bar{u}]n[bar{i}]n[bar{i}]'s Dhayl [Mir.sup.[contains]][bar{a}]t al-zam[bar{a}]n. By LI GUO. Two volumes. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1998. Pp. vii + 241 and xv + 338. HFl 307, $181.

This meticulous edition, annotation, and translation of Qutb al-D[bar{i}]n M[bar{u}]s[bar{a}] al-Y[bar{u}]n[bar{i}]n[bar{i}]'s (642/1242-726/1326) supplement (Dhayl) to Sibt ibn al-Jawz[bar{i}]'s [Mir.sup.[contains]][bar{a}]t al-Zam[bar{a}]n f[bar{i}] [Ta.sup.[contains]]r[bar{i}]kh al-[A.sup.[subset]]y[bar{a}]n is the culmination of revisions to the author's doctoral dissertation. Li Guo has painstakingly collated no less than twenty-three surviving manuscripts that transmit this complicated text in whole or in part. He has traced the process of recension as it evolved over more than two hundred years after Y[bar{u}]n[bar{i}]n[bar{i}]'s original work, identifying several manuscript "sets" copied by one or more subsequent redactors. Guo has also speculated persuasively about the relationship between al-Y[bar{u}]n[bar{i}]n[bar{i}] and his close colleagues, al-Jazar[bar{i}] and al-Birz[bar{a}]l[bar{i}]. He accurately locates al-Y[bar{u}]n[bar{i}]n[bar{i}]'s borrowing from al-Jazar[bar{i}], and hypothesizes about the scholastic milieu in Damascus that encouraged these writers to quote each other profusely with no feeling of plagiarism. While not a "team" of collaborators in the modern tradition of collective scholarship, these authors borrowed from one another with no intent of unacknowledged theft of original ideas held by right of individual discovery that remained the domain of a single historian to transmit exclusively.

Guo's comments in chapter four, "The Dhayl and Early Mamluk Syrian Historiography" (v. 1, pp. 81-96), in which he reconstitutes this scholastic setting and contrasts the methodologies of its eminent representatives in Y[bar{u}]n[bar{i}]n[bar{i}]'s lifetime with those of his successors in Syria and Egypt (the latter who worked more independently of their colleagues), offer exceedingly perceptive insights into the development of Arabic historiography in the high Middle Ages. He discusses the blending of factual narrative with literary genres such as poetry (adab) and biography in the Dhayl, and a tendency to incorporate colloquial usages. This practice would strongly influence the styles of later historians in both Syria and Egypt. Precedents for the specialized works that appeared in the late fourteenth and...