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New Perspectives on Ibn ʿasākir in Islamic Historiography Islamic History and Civilization Studies and Texts New Perspectives on Ibn ʿAsākir in Islamic Historiography Islamic History and Civilization studies and texts Editorial Board Hinrich Biesterfeldt Sebastian Günther Honorary Editor Wadad Kadi VOLUME 145 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ihc New Perspectives on Ibn ʿAsākir in Islamic Historiography Edited by Steven Judd Jens Scheiner LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus in which Ibn ʿAsākir’s Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq was publicly read (view to the east). Photograph by WitR via Fotolia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Judd, Steven C., editor. | Scheiner, Jens J., 1976– editor. Title: New perspectives on Ibn ʿAsākir in Islamic historiography / edited by Steven Judd and Jens Scheiner. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2017] | Series: Islamic history and civilization ; v. 145 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009399 (print) | LCCN 2017010798 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004345201 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004345195 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Ibn ʿAsākir, ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥasan, 1105–1176. Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq. | Islamic Empire—Historiography. Classification: LCC DS35.67.I224 (ebook) | LCC DS35.67.I224 N49 2017 (print) | DDC 956.91/4402—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009399 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0929-2403 isbn 978-90-04-34519-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34520-1 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents List of Contributors vii Introduction 1 Steven Judd and Jens Scheiner Prologue: The Publication of the Dār al-Fikr Edition of Ibn ʿAsākir’s Ta ʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq 4 Nancy Khalek Nostalgia for the Future: A Comparison between the Introductions to Ibn ʿAsākir’s Ta ʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Ta ʾrīkh Baghdād 9 Zayde Antrim Ibn ʿAsākir’s Children: Monumental Representations of Damascus until the 12th/18th Century 30 Dana Sajdi Sunni Jihād Propaganda in Seventh/Thirteenth-Century Damascus: An Analysis of the Colophons (Samāʿāt) on Ibn ʿAsākir’s Forty Ḥadīths for Inciting Jihād 64 Suleiman A. Mourad and James E. Lindsay Female Presence in Biographical Dictionaries: Ibn ʿAsākir’s Selection Criteria for Women in his Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq 93 Monika Winet Ibn ʿAsākir’s Peculiar Biography of Khālid al-Qasrī 139 Steven Judd Ibn ʿAsākirʼs Virtual Library as Reflected in his Ta ʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq 156 Jens Scheiner vi CONTENTS Appendix 1: Biographical Works Used by Ibn ʿAsākir in His TMD and their Riwāyas (in Alphabetical Order) 258 Appendix 2: Unknown Biographical Works Used by Ibn ʿAsākir (in Alphabetical Order) 278 General Index 280 List of Contributors Zayde Antrim is associate professor of History and International Studies at Trinity College Connecticut. Her research focuses on geographical imagination in the early Islamic world. Among her most recent publications is Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (2012). Steven Judd is professor of Middle East History at the Southern Connecticut State University. His research focuses on Umayyad history and early Islamic law. Among his most recent publications is Religious Scholars and the Umayyads: Piety-minded Supporters of the Marwānid Caliphate (2014). Nancy Khalek is associate professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Her research focuses on late antique and Islamic history. Among her most recent publica- tions is Damascus after the Muslim Conquest: Text and Image in Early Islam (2011). James E. Lindsay is professor of History at Colorado State University. His research focuses on the history and historiography of the Islamic Near East in the Middle Ages. Among his most recent publications is The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsākir of Damascus (1105–1176) and His Age; with an edition and translation of Ibn ʿAsākir’s The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihād (2013, co-authored with Suleiman A. Mourad). Suleiman A. Mourad is professor of Religion at Smith College. His research focuses on Islamic his- tory and religious thought. Among his most recent publications is The Mosaic of Islam: A Conversation with Perry Anderson (2016). Dana Sajdi is associate professor of Middle Eastern History at Boston College. Her research focuses on pre-modern literary culture, book and reading history, and urban history. She is author of The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the 18th-Century Ottoman Levant (2013). viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Jens Scheiner is professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. His research focuses on the political, social, and intellectual history of the early and classical Islamic period. Among his most recent publications is The Place to Go: Contexts of Learning in Baghdād, 750–1000 C.E. (2014, co-authored with Damien Janos). Monika Winet is an independent researcher of Islamic Studies. Her research focuses on Arabic literature and language (esp. travelogues, Christian-Arabic literature: Karshuni, Aljamiado literature and language contact in al-Andalus). Among her most recent publications is Gottesgedanken: Erkenntnis, Eschatologie und Ethik in Religionen der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters (2016, co-authored with Reinhard Feldmeier). Introduction Steven Judd and Jens Scheiner Scholars have long appreciated the importance of Ibn ʿAsākir’s Ta ʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq (TMD). Already in the 8th/14th century, Muḥammad Ibn Manẓūr (d. 710/1311) deemed the TMD worthy of less unwieldy abridgment in the form of his Mukhtaṣar ta ʾrīkh Dimashq li-bn ʿAsākir. By producing his abridgment, Ibn Manẓūr clearly recognized the great value of the work, but he also implic- itly acknowledged its tediousness. Even by virtually eliminating Ibn ʿAsākir’s voluminous, meticulous isnāds, Ibn Manẓūr was only able to whittle the mas- sive tome down to 29 volumes. These isnāds, repositories of a wealth of data and a source of awe for modern scholars, were apparently seen by Ibn Manẓūr and his contemporaries as disposable clutter that obscured the data they sought in the TMD. For them, Ibn ʿAsākir’s authority was sufficient. They did not need to record his sources; he was the source. Subsequent generations of Muslim scholars, particularly those associated with Syria, were heavily influenced by Ibn ʿAsākir, emulating elements of his methods, though never matching his obsession with proper isnāds, and min- ing the content of the TMD for their own works, though sometimes without properly acknowledging him. Much further research on Ibn ʿAsākir’s influence on later scholarship is needed. At first glance, though, it is clear, for instance, that Ibn al-ʿAdīm (d. 660/1262) modeled his Bughyat al-ṭalab fī taʾrīkh Ḥalab on the TMD, and it appears that al-Mizzī borrowed heavily from the TMD for his Tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl. A full assessment of the TMD’s impact on later Arabic scholarship remains to be written. Modern scholars have also recognized the significance of the TMD, and have grown to appreciate the challenges it presented to our medieval predecessors. At the beginning of the 14th/20th century, the first efforts were made to publish a scholarly edition of the work. Between 1911 and 1932, ʿAbd al-Qādir Badrān published an incomplete, abridged, poorly-edited collection of entries from the TMD in seven volumes. Beginning in the 1950s, additional efforts were made to produce a complete edition, but the first scholarly edition of the TMD was not completed until 2001, ninety years after Badrān’s first volume appeared. Prior to the publication of the Dār al-fikr edition of the TMD in 1995–2001, scholars working with the TMD were forced to rely on a blurry xerographic edition or to seek out the Ẓāhiriyya manuscript in Damascus, or to limit their work to those portions of the TMD that had been published in various snippets over the decades. Despite being a well-known, even revered source, for modern © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004345�0�_00� 2 Judd and Scheiner scholars, the TMD remained elusive and was essentially a new source when it became more available in the late 1410s/1990s. Early scholarship utilizing the TMD reflects the limitations of a source of enormous bulk and limited availability. Initial studies mined the TMD as a da- tabase for information about particular historical figures, often noting with interest citations of earlier sources embedded therein. Like their medieval pre- decessors, they felt the weight of Ibn ʿAsākir’s meticulous isnāds, often opting to skim over them rather than to investigate them. The wealth of data on early Islamic Syria, and on the Umayyad period in particular, was a welcome addi- tion to a spotty historical record. In the late 1990s, a group of early adopters of Ibn ʿAsākir as a new source began to look at the TMD not merely as a new database to be mined, but as an integrated work that should be the subject of more focused historiographical study. The result of this collaboration was the publication of Ibn ʿAsākir and Early Islamic History, edited by James E. Lindsay. This collection of studies by both established and aspiring scholars was the first historiographical analysis of Ibn ʿAsākir as a historian.
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