Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives.

• Author: Liebrenz, Boris

Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives. By FOZIA BORA. The Early and Medieval Islamic World. London: I.B. TAURIS, 2019. Pp. xviii + 250. $115.

Few who have looked into the rich tradition of history writing in Arabic in the medieval period will be surprised to see it described as an archive. After all, many historical authors cited and reproduced documents that have not survived in a physical archive. Many also quote previous historians, some of them since lost, at length, and often name their sources. And Frédéric Bauden has shown that discarded original documents have been used for writing drafts of such works. But to Fozia Bora this is not enough; she calls for a "reconsideration of medieval Arabic historiography as a form of documentation, and a reading of resulting chronicles ... as archives" (p. 2). What is it that she believes we need to reconsider and realize beyond the above? Although her claims are repeated in so many words throughout her book, I am not quite sure.

Writing History has two objectives. It advocates for "archivality [as] the heuristic key to Mamluk historical writing" (p. 2), and it aims to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach through a micro-historical analysis of how the Mamluk historian Ibn al-Furat (d. 807/1405) used his sources to write the later history of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt within a universal chronicle. An appendix contains a transcribed edition (based on the single surviving copy) and a translation of passages in the chronicle that deal with the late Fatimids and that are not found in other sources.

The first part is the longer one by far. It consists of four chapters in which we learn about the scholar Ibn al-Furat and his major historical work Tarikh al-duwal wa-1-muluk, which has only partly survived in several autograph volumes; we learn where scholarship stands on the question of archival practices in medieval Islamic societies; and we learn about historiography during the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods. Much of this shows Bora's good command of scholarship and an ability to distill it into a compelling narrative.

In chapter four, Bora presents the sources Ibn al-Furat uses in his chronicle, which is generally helpful. But she claims that her "archival reading mode" (p. 75) enables her to explore Ibn al-Furat's decision-making process, none of which clearly materializes. Instead, she makes rather forced arguments: one is that, by incorporating passages from the Fatimid-Ayyubid author Ibn Tuwayr whom Ibn al-Furat did not cite, al-Maqrizi had independent access to this source (which is...