The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society.

• Author: TAYLOR, CHRISTOPHER S.
• Position: Review

The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society. Edited by THOMAS PHILIPP and ULRICH HAARMANN. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xiv + 306. $59.95.

This volume contains eighteen papers originally delivered at a 1994 conference held to assess "the state of the art of Mamluk studies." Since the past four decades have seen more scholarship on the Mamluks than did the previous four centuries, it is certainly appropriate that we pause and take stock of our knowledge about this important period of Islamic history. We are also now at a juncture where the generation of scholars who created the field of Mamluk studies after World War II is passing the torch to a new generation. At such moments of transition it is useful to pause and consider where we are and where we are going. Many of the important scholars of both generations are represented here, but it is regrettable that we find no final contribution by, or mote than a brief mention of the importance of the late David Ayalon, who, more than anyone else, was responsible for creating this field.

As might be anticipated in a volume of this sort, there is considerable discrepancy in the scope and quality of the essays. Some of the conference participants clearly took their charge to survey the "state of the art" seriously, while others seem to have merely contributed whatever they happened to be working on at the moment. It is also unfortunate that contributors did not revise their papers in light of the conference, or respond substantively to some of the comments in the papers of their colleagues. There is no sense of dialog among the conference participants reflected in the pages of this book, which is both a loss for those who were not present and results in distracting and confusing incongruity among a number of the essays included. For example, at the end of his chapter on the role of the sons of Mamluks in the army, Donald Richards states: "Throughout this piece I have used maml[bar{u}]k to denote an individual who has the legal and social status and distinguished it from the adjective Mamluk (with a capital 'M' and without italics), which is used to describe the totality of the state, society and culture etc. This distinction is frequently not observed, and its reality not borne in mind" (p. 40). Ironically this distinction is, without exception, ignored by all the other contributors, leaving the reader to wonder how significant the distinction is. A much more telling example of...