Towards a Cultural History of the Mamluk Era.

• Author: Varisco, Daniel Martin
• Position: Book review

Towards a Cultural History of the Mamluk Era. Edited by MAHMOUD HADDAD, ARNIM HEINEMANN. JOHN L. MELOY. and SOUAD SLIM. Beiruter Texte und Studien, vol. 118. Beirut: ORIENT-INSTITUT, 2010. [Distributed by Ergon Verlag Wurzburg.] Pp. xii + 164 + 152 (Arabic), illus. [euro]68.

Conference publications are notoriously difficult to review. It is rare that such volumes are of uniform quality, especially on a broad topic. In the present volume some papers are as short as five pages and others as long as thirty-six. The eighteen articles in this volume were originally presented at a conference held at the University of Balamand, cosponsored by the Orient-Institute in Beirut, on the theme "Towards a Cultural History of Bilad al-Sham during the Mamluk Era: Prosperity or Decline, Tolerance or Preservation.- Ten of the articles are in English, one in French, and seven in Arabic. The articles are arranged in five parts: (1) Religious Communities and Their Interaction; (2) Fields of Cultural Production: Arts; (3) Fields of Cultural Production: Literature; (4) Fields of Cultural Production: Science; and (5) Cultural Contexts of Political Practice and Social Relations. The English and the Arabic sections both contain a complete list of the contents, and topical indices are included for both sections.

True to its stated aim, this volume does provide a set of papers about the Mamluk period in Bilad al-Sham, an area that is not nearly as well studied, at least in English, as the Mamluk era in Egypt. Half of the articles deal with either Christian communities or relations between Christians and Muslims. Among the topics addressed are the responses to the early fourteenth-century Christian apologetic Letter from Cyprus by Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad ibn Abi Talib al-Dimashqi; Maronites and Druze in Mount Lebanon (in Arabic); Christians as a minority in Damascus and Aleppo (in Arabic); Christian martyrs in Tripoli; Christian art (two articles, one in Arabic); and crusader fortifications along the Lebanese coast. Other articles cover inscriptions and calligraphy in Mamluk Tripoli; Mamluk astronomy; the genre of al-tibb al-nabawi (in French); mental illness; the Manila military elite; and the role of the muhtasib (in Arabic). Four of the articles are about Mamluk Egypt--on the role of Copts (in Arabic); a brief survey of the historiography of al-Maqrizi (in Arabic); and of the chronicle of Ibn Iyas; and on craftsmen, most of whom were non-Mamluks.

The strength of...