No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2016
In a memorial lecture for Charles Beckingham, David Morgan1 evoked one of this prolific travel literature scholar's astute observations: “[T]he study of travel narratives, especially travel narratives about a culture quite different from the traveller's own, can be very revealing, not only about the culture he observed, but about the culture to which he belonged”.2 This insight indeed undergirds my own approach to the descriptions of cities by both insiders and outsiders. Narratives of cities, indeed of any landscape, are but interpretative and hermeneutics texts which can be surely used to narrate the very landscape, but also as texts which may be used to understand the culture and perceptions of the narrator. Over the course of this paper, I examine two accounts (texts) of residents of Mamlūk provincial cities in al-Shām. These texts will be placed under the scrutiny of the data and the existing literature of those cities. In other words, the ‘conceptualised city’ as narrated by the sources will be compared with the ‘tangible city’. The latter we may unearth from various other sources (mostly texts) as well as the city's built environment. Thus, this chapter examines the ways in which Mamlūk cities of al-Shām were scripted and narrated by two local ‘storytellers’ and ‘image-makers’ of the city.3 In this context, ‘storyteller’ is an umbrella term for those who left us with a narrated legacy of their city. I decided to call them storytellers for the purpose of accentuating their inherent subjectivity. Informed and accurate as some of these narrators may have been, all of their experiences with and accounts of the urban landscape were guided by a personal understanding and their own cultural background. Since each of these texts is about spatial practices and spatial arrangement (landscape) of the city, the argument can be made that they all fall under the heading of travel writing.4 What is more, any narrative with a spatial dimension (Michel de Certeau would argue that there is no such thing as a narrative without one) is a story that organises space. Against this backdrop, the objective of this chapter, above and beyond presenting ‘spatial stories’ of cities of Syria, is to demonstrate the complexity of the reading landscape and particularly the ways landscape descriptions need always be taken as subjective, culture-based, culturally constructed, and a constant negotiation between the traveller/story-teller/source narration, the ‘actual’ built environment and the political context.
1 Indeed, it is such an honour and a privilege to be one of David's well-wishers here. Like so many others I have always found him not only the first-rate scholar that he is, witty and insightful but, and more importantly, a wonderful friend. And as for so many others, David was instrumental and helpful throughout my academic career. In his long-term role as the editor of JRAS David facilitated the publication of my first peer-reviewed paper and completed the cycle when, at the very end of his twenty two years as general editor of the Cambridge Studies of Islamic Civilization series, he oversaw the publication of my first book with Cambridge University Press.
2 Beckingham, C. F., “In search of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa”, Asian Affairs 8 (1978), pp. 263–277 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (at p. 263); cited in Morgan, D. O., “Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Mongols”, JRAS, 3rd series, 11/1 (April 2001), pp. 1–2 Google Scholar, n. 4.
3 For more on the concept of urban image makers, see Olds, K., Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-Project (Oxford, 2001), p. 141 Google Scholar.
4 de Certeau, M., “Spatial stories”, in Ballantyne, A. (ed.), What is Architecture? (New York, 2002), pp. 72 Google Scholar-73.
5 Olwig, K., “Sexual cosmology: Nation and landscape at the conceptual interstices of nature and culture; or What does landscape really mean?”, in Bender, B. (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford, 1993), p. 311 Google Scholar.
6 Mitchell, D., “Landscape”, in Atkinson, D., Jackson, P., Sibley, D. and Washbourne, N. (eds.), Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London, 2005), p. 49 Google Scholar.
7 Tuan, Y., “Thought and landscape”, in Meinig, D. (ed.), Interpretations of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographic Essays (New York, 1979), pp. 89–102 Google Scholar.
8 Harvey, D. C., “Landscape organization, identity and change: Territoriality and hagiography in medieval West Cornwall”, Landscape Research 25/3, (2000), pp. 201–202 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Calvino, I., Invisible Cities, translated by W. Weaver (New York, 1974), p. 19 Google Scholar.
10 Tuan, Y., “Image and mental maps”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65/2 (1975), pp. 209–211 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Lynch, K., The Image of the City (Cambridge MA, 1960), p. 46.Google Scholar
12 Ibid ., p. 9.
13 Ibid , pp. 2-3.
14 Bernard Lewis was the first to publish excerpts from al-‛Uthmānī s manuscript which he found at the Library of Istanbul University (Arabic MS 4525). See Lewis, B., “An Arabic account of the province of Safed”, BSOAS 15 (1953), pp. 477–488 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This ms was recently published as Muḥammad b. ‛Abd al-Raḥmān al-‛Uthmānī, Ta᾽rīkh Ṣafad, (ed.) S. Zakkār (Damascus, 2009). For the purpose of this Chapter I would refer to the early edition of this ms as published by Lewis. For an in-depth discussion of Ta᾽rīkh Ṣafad with particular reference to local Sufis and their relations with the Mamlūk Sultanate elite, see O. Amir, “Sufis and Mamlūks: A chapter in Islamization in Palestine”, MA Thesis, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 2013) [unpublished, Hebrew]. I wish to thank Mr. Amir for assisting me with certain issues regarding the new edition of Ta᾽rīkh Ṣafad by al-‛Uthmānī.
15 At a later phase in his career, al-‛Uthmānī was transferred to Damascus to serve as a qādῑ.
16 Lewis, “Arabic account of Safed”, p. 477, n. 3.
17 Ibid ., pp. 478-479.
18 Lovell, N., “Introduction”, in idem (ed.), Locality and Belonging (London and New York, 1998), pp. 1–2 Google Scholar.
19 Lewis, “Arabic account of Safed”, p. 479.
20 Ibid ., p. 480.
21 Ibid ., p. 481.
22 On ‛Alamdār, see Ibn Taghrībirdī, al-Nujūm al-ẓāhira fī mulūk Miṣr wa'l-Qāhira, (ed.) W. Popper (Cairo, 1934), pp. 5, 273, 296.
23 Mujīr al-Dīn ‛Abd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad al-Ḥanbalī al-‛Ulaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl bi-ta'rīkh al-Quds wa'l-Khalīl, 2 vols (‛Ammān, 1973), I, p. 5.
24 Faḍā’il Bayt al-Maqdis has received ample attention in the literature. On the importance of this genre to the study of early Islam and Jerusalem in particular, see, for example, Kister, M. J., “‘You Shall Only Set Out for Three Mosques’. A study of an early Tradition”, Le Muséon 82 (1969), pp. 173–196 Google Scholar; also Elad, A., Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage (Leiden, New York and Köln, 1995)Google Scholar.
25 Little also scrutinises this work in Little, D. P., “Mujīr al-Dīn al-ʿUlaymῑ’s vision of Jerusalem in the ninth-fifteenth century” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115/2 (1995), pp. 237–2347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Mujīr al-Dīn, al-Uns, I, p. 4.
27 Ibid ., I, p. 5.
28 Ibid ., II, p. 55.
29 Luz, N., The Mamluk City in the Middle East. History, Culture and the Urban Landscape (New York, 2014), pp. 69–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Mujīr al-Dīn, al-Uns, I, p. 56.
31 Ibid ., pp. 2, 51.
32 This denigrating attitude towards this church is frequently echoed in Christian travel accounts. For an in-depth discussion on this topic, see French, D. R., “Pilgrimage, ritual, and power strategies: Felix Fabri's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1483”, in Le Beau, B. F. and Mor, M. (eds.), Pilgrims and Travellers to the Holy Land, Studies in Jewish Civilization series 7 (Omaha, 1996), pp. 169–179 Google Scholar.
33 Little, D. P., “Communal strife in late Mamlūk Jerusalem”, Islamic Law and Society 6/1 (1999), pp. 69–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Mujīr al-Dīn, al-Uns, II, pp. 300-340.
35 Lynch, The Image of the City, p. 47.
36 C. F. Beckingham, “In search of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa”, p. 263; cited in Morgan, “Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Mongols”, pp. 1-2, n. 4.