CURRENTS THEXLIX/2 STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Journal of Semitic IN Studies Autumn 2004 © The University of Manchester 2004. All rights reserved RECENT CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY, WITH REMARKS ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE AVNER BEN-ZAKEN HARVARD SOCIETY OF FELLOWS Abstract The historiography of Ottoman Egypt is a largely uncharted field. This article traces the development and current state of the field and offers new directions for research. Since the fifties the field has been developed by scholars who have been interested in the corpus of texts which can be used as a source for the writing of political, economic and cultural histories of Ottoman Egypt. However, historians of Islamic science, who have focused on medieval technical texts have ignored this corpus. I propose that this corpus is a rich source for writing the cultural history of science in the early modern Islamic world. It sheds light on how natural phenomena and new European science and technologies were conceived by a great intellectual culture. Methodologically this allows not only for a cultural history of science but also for an all-encompassing approach that combines economic, political, cultural and natural histories into a mélange that represents the everyday practices of the intellectual culture of Ottoman Egypt. The purpose of this paper is to assess the current state of secondary studies of Ottoman Egyptian history and to propose areas and directions of research that might prove useful in the future. I argue that the field is relatively undeveloped, not only because of the late resurfacing of sources, but also because of certain ideological, theoretical, and professional constraints — namely, the ‘decline paradigm’ and its reaction, the ‘nationalist paradigm’, as they combined with notions of modernization and politics. Deductively and teleologically, historians have been drawing from these approaches and producing not so much histories of Ottoman Egypt as histories of its tension with Europe. Moreover, these historians confined their endeavors to prob303 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY lems in historiography and were not attuned to other matters that lay in the deeper context of Egyptian intellectual life. Although this paper mainly serves as a tool for historians of earlymodern Egypt, I also want to suggest possibly new, uncharted, directions. Historians of Ottoman Egypt who have focused on political history and the historians of Islamic science who scrutinize scientific writings in some sense are ignoring the rich knowledge to be retrieved from traditional historiographical texts on the role of nature and technologies in contemporary society. With keen readings of various texts, we may begin to build up a picture of the culture of science, about philosophies of nature (both cosmological and practical), attitudes toward precision, and generally some of the problems that scholars and others dealt with in their writing and ongoing thought processes. To do this will to some extent require a change of methodology. Instead of looking at texts as innately valuable items that carry embodied evidence of the past, we should begin to be more suspicious and to tease out the clues concerning broader areas of intellectual culture. I have chosen to follow a rough, chronological format, beginning with writers of the late 1950s, when interest in this field first started, up to the beginning of the 1990s. I analyse the general characteristics and aims of authors in the field based upon the type of history, the theoretical framework, and the sources used. This may also serve as an aid for intellectual, cultural and social historians of early-modern Egypt concerning the contents and relative worth of recent sourcetextual finds. * * * Early Muslim historiography arose in the milieu of classical Islam and was closely related to Islamic religious disciplines, particularly to that known as Tradition, or Îadith. More than just a close relationship, the two disciplines actually built upon the same source — that is, the histories of Muslim communities. Thus the work of some of the early historians of Islam is, at times, almost indistinguishable from Tradition. But Tradition became increasingly technical in the sense that it concentrated upon the sayings and doings of the Prophet, whereas historiography expanded its domain in both time and space. Although some of our few accounts of the history of Muslim historiography have taken in the entire range, from the earliest Jahiliyya to the sixteenth century, still there is an imbalance. Franz Rosenthal’s pioneering work traced Muslim historiography from clas304 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY sical historians to the sixteenth-century historian Tashkopruzadeh.1 In contrast to Rosenthal, who divided his work according to the activities of the individual historians, a recent account by Tarif alKhalidi deals with the cultural and intellectual movements within historiography. According to Khalidi, historiography evolved along intellectual and cultural movements. At first historiography was evolving with the religious tradition of Ìadith and later with the educational tradition of adab. For the third phase of development, alKhalidi made an important connection between the literature of Ìikma (philosophy and natural philosophy) and historiography. As a last phase he showed how historiography was nourished and shaped by the intellectual tradition of the siyasa, through which arose the historiographical genre of political biographies and political history. As a result, Khalidi’s account ends when intellectual movements ceased to exist, more or less at the fifteenth century.2 The latest account of Muslim historiography has been the work of Tayeb elHibri; but it focuses mostly on the ‘Abbasid empire.3 None of these accounts mentioned early-modern Islamic historiography. Early Islamic empires were concerned to create a collective consciousness for the purposes of state formation and legitimacy. Because by the thirteenth century Muslim polities had already solidified political and cultural self-perceptions, the need for historiography weakened. In part, this explains why classical Muslim historiography has come to overshadow early-modern Muslim and, in particular, Ottoman-Egyptian historiography. The uneven treatment arises from the perception that vibrant Islamic intellectual culture existed only in the classical era, after which the engagement of intellectuals with non-religious disciplines declined. Concomitantly, historiographical writing is seen to have slowed down almost to extinction. Moreover, early-modern Muslim historiography was not only seen as a temporal antipode to the glorified days of medieval Islam, but also spatially it became subsumed under early-modern European culture. The Renaissance, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment made Europeans the important carriers of the Greek-Islamic traditions of philosophy and science. In this context, early-modern Muslim intellectual activity was regarded as depleted and as a discontinuation of human progress. 1 Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden 1968), 530. Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge 1994), 182. 3 Tayeb el-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the {Abbasid Caliphate (Cambridge 1999). 2 305 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY This argument led Bernard Lewis to ask, teleologically, what went wrong with Arab history and historiography and to regard its ‘poor existence’ in early-modern times as a result of an inherent decline that Islamic culture has experienced since the sixteenth century.4 Naturally, since the post-classical era mostly overlapped with the Ottoman period, the ‘decline’ could be ascribed to a specific historical actor — the Ottomans. In this context, the neglect by scholars of the field of Ottoman-Egypt historiography, since the Ottoman occupation in 1517 until the eighteenth century, can be perceived as part of a tendency to inscribe the Ottomans with inner flaws that led to the deterioration of Islamic civilization. Recent endeavours to subvert and undermine this ‘decline thesis’ have been undertaken by the new social historians who seek to explain through Marxist lenses the Ottoman loss of power. The search is not for inner flaws but for the relationships with the discovery of the Atlantic markets and the rise of capitalism in Europe. Yet, by showing how vivacious, dynamic, and alert the Ottoman Empire and its society were until the end of the eighteenth century, they have emphasized and perpetuated the prejudice that depicts Ottomans as fascinated with bureaucracy and contemptuous of the intellect.5 To balance this view and to present a social-cultural intellectual history, and a history of science and technology, I have suggested, in another writing, that one cannot blame some sort of Ottoman ‘contempt toward intellectualism’ for their lack of interest in the radical scientific developments in Europe, but we must see it instead as a result of the economic crisis of the waqfs, which supported the Madrasa system.6 But the more important question is: was Egyptian historiography during Ottoman rule so poor, elusive, or absent? It is true that basically two early historiographers created a temporal boundary — IbnIyas of the late-fifteenth century (late-Mamluk period), who before his death recorded an account of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, and al-Jabarti (1753–1825), who witnessed the French occupation of Egypt. They towered above other historians in early-modern Egypt 4 Bernard Lewis, ‘What Went Wrong?: Some Reflections on Arab History’, The American Scholar 62:4 (1993), 601–5. 5 See for instance, Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914 (Cambridge 1994); Kenneth Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasents (Cambridge 1992); Rizak Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540-1834 (Cambridge 1997); Haim Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (London, 1987). 6 Avner Ben-Zaken, ‘Political Economy and Scientific Activity in the Ottoman Empire’, The Turks (Ankara 2002), vol. 3 (The Ottomans), 776–94. 306 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY and created the unfortunate impression that in the period between the two of them nothing happened. However, the ‘black hole’ of history has become enlightened. Old historical accounts, which lay abandoned in miscellaneous libraries all over the world, resurfaced in the late 1950s. As a result, a re-evaluation of the state of Egyptian historiography in early-modern times was necessitated. Ayalon and Holt: Breaking Through the al-Jabarti Wall and the Identification of Primary Sources The re-evaluation took place in a series of articles published in the late-1950s and early-1960s. The reputation of al-Jabarti and the immense interest in him came to a climax with the publication of articles by the late David Ayalon.7 Ayalon, a Hebrew University scholar who was particularly interested in the Mamluks, (and made an important contribution to our understanding of the Mamluk reception of firearms technology8) may be situated on the cusp of the new trend. On the one hand, Ayalon elevated al-Jabarti so that the latter overshadowed and obscured his predecessors. Ayalon stressed a supposed contradiction between the rich, earlier, Mamluk historiographical traditions and the ‘poor’ Ottoman one that was due to a general decline of intellectualism. But on the other hand, he attributed a pivotal historical role to al-Jabarti for having carried on the Mamluk historiographical traditions; he claimed that historical writing of the tarajim (biographical) type ‘died out completely in Egypt under the Ottomans until it was revived by al-Jabarti alone, as a result of Syrian influence.’9 Thus Ayalon made a direct connection between the Mamluk historiographers and al-Jabarti, who was to be seen as transmitting it them to the neo-Mamluk era. Ayalon’s al-Jabarti represents the continuation of a Mamluk tradition as superior to the Ottoman. 7 David Ayalon, ‘Studies on al-Jabarti I: Notes on the Transformation of Mamluk Society in Egypt Under the Ottomans’, Journal of the Economic and Social History on the Orient III (1960), 148–74, 275–325; ‘Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, XV (1953), 448–76, XVI (1954), 57–90: ‘The Historian al-Jabarti and His Background’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies XXIII (1960), 217–50. 8 See David Ayalon, Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to a Mediaeval Society (London 1956); ‘The Mamluks and Naval Power’ (1965); ‘The Muslim City and the Mamluk Military Aristocracy’ (1967); ‘The Impact of Firearms on the Muslim World’ (1975) all published in Princeton Near East Papers, No. 20. 9 David Ayalon, ‘The Historian al-Jabarti and His Background’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies XXIII (1960), 225. 307 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Like other scholars of his generation,10 Ayalon stressed that during the Ottoman era, and as part of the Ottoman decline, Egypt was outside of history. Only the cessation of Ottoman rule brought Egypt back into history in the form of al-Jabarti’s work. Of course the distinct advantage of this project was that al-Jabarti’s own sources became the subject of exploration. Ayalon himself was the first to look for traces of Mamluk precursor historians in al-Jabarti’s work. By careful investigation, he determined that al-Jabarti had examined only one historical account of the Ottoman period and had done so by using mainly Mamluk sources, for example, that of al-Maqrizi. Ayalon argued that for al-Jabarti’s history of the early part of the period he used only a few pamphlets ‘compiled by soldiers of humble origin and written in a very bad style’.11 These pamphlets were attributed to AÌmad Shalabi b. {Abd al-Ghani (whom I take up, below). Around the time of Ayalon’s work, another scholar started to explore Ottoman Egypt’s historiography, but, this time, with a different take. P.M. Holt of the School of Oriental and African Studies published a series of articles predominantly during the 1960s. Based on new sources, Holt explored the political history of Ottoman Egypt during the seventeenth century. A 1959 article examined the genealogy of Ri∂wan Bey, a neo-Mamluk lord of the late-seventeenth century.12 Very early on, the Bey lineage was the subject of a small work entitled Qahr al-wujah al-{abisa bi-dhikr nasab umara’ al-Jarakisa wa-ttiÒalihi bi Quraysh, which might be translated ‘A cogent demonstration of the lineage of the Amirs of the Circassians and its connection with Quraysh.’ In the 1959 article, Holt crosschecked his sources with other contemporaneous sources in order to show how the lineage was forged for political purposes. By handling topics of the seventeenth century using contemporary and corresponding sources, Holt took the historians of the seventeenth century out of the dark shadow cast by al-Jabarti. Although he perceived Ottoman Egypt as an era and a space with deep enough intellectual roots to produce historiography and possibly other fields of literature, philosophy and natural philosophy, he nonetheless accepted the perception of his generation that the Ottomans were in decline. Qahr alwujah was for Holt a historiographical document of local production that aimed to challenge the Ottoman hegemony. It attributed to 10 In the same vein, {Izzat {Abd al-Karim, an Egyptian historian, focused his scholarly interest on Ibn Iyas and al-Jabarti. Whatever existed in between these two historians was not of interest. See his edited volume Ibn Iyas: dirasat wa-buÌuth (Cairo 1977). 11 Op. cit., 222. 308 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Ri∂wan Bey two important sources of legitimacy: the last Mamluk Sultan and the Prophet’s tribe — Quraysh.13 It also gave us pointers for further exploration of the connection between political culture and natural phenomena. This document was, indeed, a source of legitimacy (constructed by genealogy and divine signs of nature) to dissociate Egypt from the Ottomans and its direct control by neoMamluk lords. Interestingly, Holt’s article, which was supposed to recover the lost history of Ottoman Egypt, emphasized the disengagement of Egypt from the Ottomans. Other articles by Holt early in the 1960s followed the same line of argument. For example, in 1961 he took as subject the Beylicate in Ottoman Egypt during the seventeenth century.14 Again, based on three contemporary accounts,15 he portrayed the political history of Egypt or, more accurately, of the neo-Mamluk, during that century. Through the same approach, he argued that these chronicles depicted the decline of the Ottomans and their political authority in Egypt.16 A few years later, in an inaugural lecture he delivered at SOAS in 1965, Holt consolidated his argument in favour of exploring Ottoman Egypt instead of only focusing on the Mamluk and neo- Mamluk eras.17 Accordingly, the Ottoman empire was in full decline in the seventeenth century, which gave rise to the establishment of new regimes in the Arab provinces. Therefore, history and historiography, which, so to speak, did not exist during the Ottoman rule, revived and flourished again. Indeed, Holt conceived the Ottoman era as the disappearance of Egypt from history, the rise of local despotic regimes, and then her return to history. Moreover, in an article of 1962, Holt, like Ayalon, analysed alJabarti’s {Aja’ib al-Athar and explored his historiographical sources.18 12 P.M. Holt, ‘The Exalted of Lineage of Ridwan Bey: Some Observation on a Seventeenth-Century Mamluk Genealogy’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol XXII (1959). 13 Op. cit., 230. 14 P.M. Holt, ‘The Beylicate in Ottoman Egypt During the Seventeenth Century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. XXIV (1961). 15 The first manuscript is of MuÌammad Abi al-Surur al-Bakri al-∑iddiqi, alRaw∂a al-zahiyya fi wulat MiÒr al-Qahira al-Mu’izziyya (1632); al-Kawakib al-sa’ira fi akhbar MiÒr wa ’l-Qahira (1652). The second chronicle is anonymous entitled Zubdat ikhtiÒar tarikh Muluk MiÒr al-maÌrusa (1699–1701). The third one anonymous as well from 1708. 16 Holt, op. cit. (1961), 219. 17 P.M. Holt, The Study of Modern Arab History (London 1965), 10–11. 18 P.M. Holt, ‘Al-Jabarti Introduction to the History of Ottoman Egypt’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. XXV (1962). 309 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY However, unlike Ayalon, Holt emphasized al-Jabarti’s reliance not only on Mamluk sources or contemporary Syrian biographies, but also on Ottoman Egyptian historical sources that Ayalon failed to mention. The accretion of findings in historiographical sources concerning Ottoman Egypt led Holt to publish an important article in 1968 that gathered them together.19 This survey actually determined for the coming generations the spatial and temporal scope of the field. The sources he annotated were soon to be expanded in number by yet further finds and determinations of the sources for the period. The new source findings especially helped recover the histories of heretofore unknown local lords who disengaged from the imperial centre. However, beyond the apparent political events lay the political culture of legitimacy that drew great nourishment from astrology. For instance, Ibn Surur gives us many examples of how local lords of the seventeenth century who lacked legitimacy to rule looked at the sky and consulted astrological tables and maps in order to construct anointed status.20 Moreover, following the astrological tradition of Abu Ma’shar, Ottoman-Egyptian historians looked at celestial events — eclipses, comets, and planetary conjunctions — as indications of the deaths and births of rulers, dynasties, and religions. In crucial moments of decision making these celestial events were, in a sense, a kind of ‘premodern poll’ in which critical voices could speak in the name of the providence of the stars without being suspected of subverting the political order. Moreover, political order was identified not only with natural order, but also with educational order. In the eighteenth century, alJabarti described faithfully and plainly the decline of learning in his time. He mentioned that in all Egypt there was no scholar who had a sufficient knowledge in mathematics and astronomy to discuss basic problems of science. He explicitly mentioned the diffusion of politics as one of the causes for the decline. ‘And when these faults were accompanied by deviation from established principle — then it was that disorder appeared everywhere, even in matters that were necessary for the order of their state and the maintenance of their authority.’21 19 P.M. Holt, ‘Ottoman Egypt (1517–1798): An Annotated Arabic Historical Sources’, Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt: Historical Studies from the Ottoman Conquest to the United Arab Republic (Oxford 1968), 3–12. 20 See MuÌammad Abi al-Surur al-Bakr al-∑iddiqi, Fi 'l-dawla al-{Uthmaniyya (Dubai 1990), 151, 218. 21 {Aja’ib al-athar fi ’l-tarajim wa ’l-akhbar, Thomas Philipp and Moshe Perlmann (eds), (Stuttgart 1994), vol. I, 419. 310 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY The al-Majalla al-Tarikhiyya Historians: Trends toward Social and Nationalist History Moving somewhat away from the work and the methods of Ayalon and Holt, historians of the Middle East shifted attention to newly available sources and other approaches. Intellectual and cultural histories based on manuscripts had formed the foundation for Middle Eastern studies for a long time, but now an opportunity was presented that could not be ignored when Middle Eastern governments began to open up extensive archival collections. Soon, scholars were able to consult rich, untouched collections of financial records, shari{a court registers, waqf documents, and the like. Interest in manuscript histories paled, and questions relating to the historiography of Ottoman chronicles were set aside. A younger generation of scholars began to lead Middle Eastern studies in new directions, towards social and economic studies based on the new materials. Only a handful of scholars, mainly native Egyptians, pursued topics relating to the still unexploited manuscript histories of Ottoman Egypt. Scholars like MuÌammad Anis, {Abd al-RaÌim {Abd al-RaÌman, Jamal al-Din alShayyal, ‘Izzat {Abd al-Karim and Layla {Abd al-La†if led the field, and during the late 1960s and 1970s their arena was al-Majalla altarikhiyya al-miÒriyya (The Egyptian Historical Journal∞). Two pioneering works of this school were published early in the 1960s, contemporaneously with the projects of Holt and Ayalon. In the Majalla issue of 1960–1962, MuÌammad Anis, an Egyptian historian, published an article entitled Îaqa}iq {an {Abd al-RaÌman alJabarti (Facts about the life of al-Jabarti), as a continuation and a response to Ayalon’s article.22 Instead of exploring the historian alJabarti in the same way as Ayalon did, Anis chose to recapture alJabarti the person and his intellectual environment. While Ayalon and Holt based their research on historiographical sources, mainly alJabarti’s accounts and those of his predecessors, Anis based his research on Egyptian archival documents, mostly of the shari’a court as well as al-Jabarti’s personal inheritance from the library of his father, Îasan al-Jabarti, who was a prominent scholar in natural philosophy. We know that Îasan al-Jabarti indeed wrote some works in astronomy, astrology and mathematics.23 He was the scion of a wealthy 22 MuÌammad Anis, ‘Îaqa’iq {an {Abd al-RaÌman al-Jabarti’, al-Majalla altarikhiyya al-miÒriyya, vol. 19 (1960–2), 69–84. 23 In his catalogue of Scientific Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library David King mentioned dozen of manuscripts either written or own by Îasan al- 311 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY family, who purchased many books and rare collections of scientific instruments, offered scholarships to students to come from other countries, even Europe, to study astronomy with him.24 Methodologically, we should be suspicious about these remarks of al-Jabarti about his father, especially because by the late-seventeenth century it was already clear that Europeans were revolutionizing the traditional sciences. However, what is important is that Anis, by carefully looking to al-Jabarti’s father as a source, opened a window for indications about the educational opportunities that al-Jabarti encountered. Thus, it seems that al-Jabarti was well grounded in natural philosophy; and, in part, that is the reason why he incorporated in his accounts many comments on natural phenomena (eclipses, comets, and Nile fluctuations) and mechanics (water wheels, mechanical clocks, and firearms).25 Moreover, in his description of the French occupation of Egypt, al-Jabarti gives an interesting account of the way the Egyptians received the new sciences, technologies and the practices of experimentation in alchemy introduced by the French. Al-Jabarti writes: ‘They have telescopes for looking at the stars and measuring their scopes, sizes, heights, conjunctions, and oppositions… and clocks with gradings and minutes and seconds all of wondrous form and very precious.’26 Subsequently, in 1962, Anis published the short book Madrasat al-tarikh al-MiÒri fi 'l-‘aÒr al-{Uthmani (The school of historiography in Ottoman Egypt).27 In this milestone book, MuÌammad Anis Jabarti. For instance, AkhÒar al-mukhtaÒarat ‘ala rub‘ al-muqan†arat (A treatise on the use of the almucantar quadrant) (Dar al-Kutub, no. 4.4.25); Bab al-Ìisab sumut munÌarifat 53º janub bi-{ar∂ 30º (no. 4.7.27); R. fi Ma‘na 'l-haylaj wa 'l-katkhuda wa-rabb al-sana wa 'l-salkhuda wa-ma aÒÌabaha dhalika (A short treatise on specific concepts of astrology), (no. 5.3.35). See David King, A Survey of Scientific Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library (Indiana 1986), D91. 24 Al-Jabarti, ibid., vol. 1, 397. 25 For discussion of astrology as a cultural phenomenon and as an integral part of the political culture see vol. I, 147; vol. II, 97, 224; vol. III, 61; vol. IV, 27, 40. For astronomy and astronomical events (eclipses and comets) see vol. I, 114, 164, 360, 368, 383, 392, 393, 397; vol. II, 70–1, 99, 224, 227–8; vol. III, 31, 34, 355; vol. IV, 27, 40, 231, 285. For mathematics see vol. I, 74, 114, 164, 185, 187, 219, 250, 316, 332, 383; vol. II, 27, 35, 77, 224, 243, 247, 252; vol. III, 31, 34, 355; vol. IV, 168, 262. All in {Aja’ib al-athar fi 'l-tarajim wa 'l-akhbar, Thomas Philipp and Moshe Perlmann (eds), (Stuttgart 1994). 26 See Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation of Egypt, MuÌarram-Rajab 1213/15 June-December 1798, Tarikh Muddat al-Faransis bi-MiÒr (ed. & trans.) Shmuel Moreh, (Leiden: 1975), 117. 27 MuÌammad Anis, Madrasat al-tarikh al-MiÒri fi 'l-{aÒr al-{Uthmani (Cairo 1962). 312 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY briefly delves some of the ‘lost’ historiographical sources that preceded al-Jabarti. But his principal argument is that although during the Ottoman era intellectual life was weak generally everywhere in the empire, nonetheless, because of the decentralized character of the empire and the strongly rooted system of religious studies in Egyptian society, Egypt maintained a vibrant activity in religious disciplines, Ìikma, and historiography. Thus, the apparent non-existence of the field of Egyptian-Ottoman historiography until the beginning of the 1960s might be attributed to the poor understanding of early sources and to a perception that the Ottoman intellectual decline affected all provinces. Anis goes into the apparent non-existence of the field, and summarizes the reasons. First, most of the manuscripts had not been published or known outside of the libraries of Egypt (although, as Anis notes, the orientalist Brockelmann had already mentioned a few). Second, the fact that the extant manuscripts are mainly concentrated on the Mamluk period provides evidence for there having been an actual attenuation in historiographical writing during the Ottoman period. Anis ascribes the drop-off to: 1. the flow of manuscripts out of Egypt; 2. destruction of libraries during the many civil wars between the Ottomans and the Mamluks; 3. lack of interest in the study of history and a preference for other intellectual realms; 4. the decline of rational studies.28 Anis ventures down another route that sparks our interest: the relationship between the Ottoman culture’s poor climate for intellectual discovery and the concurrent decline of sciences. For him, Ottoman rule had no cultural role in Egyptian society and was only interested in extracting surpluses and defending it from invasion. On one level, the Ottomans had not built up any ‘cultural capital’ (bO— Í—UC) in scientific works that could be imparted to local intellectual scenes; but furthermore, Egyptians did not learn or use the Ottoman-Turkish language. Since the main sources of study were fiqh and Ìadith, the intellectual language consequently was Arabic. The cultural heritage the Ottomans could have bequeathed was a SunnaÎanafi tradition. However, since Egypt lacked a conflict between Shi’a and Sunna, and since the dominant school of law, al-Shafi∞∞{i Madhhab, was respected by the Ottomans, Anis concludes that the Ottomans had nothing to contribute to Egyptian intellectual culture. 28 Ibid., 11–13. 313 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY In spite of the low cultural impact of the Ottomans, and because of its indirect rule, Egyptian society was able to observe its own scientific, intellectual and cultural life.29 Or, in short, in spite of Ottoman rule, Egypt still had its own historiography. Although Anis mainly ascribes the cultural decline to the Ottomans, it is noteworthy that he also mentions some extra-Ottoman factors for this decline, such as the rise of Sufism. Considering the fact that his book was written during a time when a peak was reached in Arab nationalism, Anis’ approach, which treats a timeless Egypt beyond the effects of the Ottoman, may possibly be characterized as nationalistic. Anis’ book greatly contributed to the field of Egyptian historiography and especially to the discovery and assembly of neglected historiographical sources. He classifies the sources into three types, which were typically used in historical research on Ottoman Egypt until the 1960s. First, Egyptian, Turkish and European official documents, mainly in the archives of Dar al-maÌfuÂat or dafatir al-maÌkama alshar{iyya in Egypt. Second, contemporary travel accounts of visiting Europeans who documented the appearance and customs of Egyptians. Third, contemporary Egyptian accounts that directly depicted Egypt of the Ottoman period. Anis stresses the value of these accounts and their previous neglect as the main cause for the poor state of the field.30 In this regard, he especially contributed to explorations of popular historical accounts used and written by soldiers. The ‘school of soldiers’, al-ajnad, was mainly centred around military history and the civil wars and frequently had as backdrop various miracles and supernatural events. The soldier-writers were not concerned with professional styles of history or literary skills. Also, much of the sources used by them were based in oral story-telling, and the contexts can be quite opaque. Anis stressed that in their time the soldier-writers were unknown and unimportant to contemporary historians, and only recently have historians developed an interest in their accounts. Anis’ historical approach — social-intellectual history along with exploration of new manuscripts — paved the way for other Egyptian historians who increasingly engaged with Ottoman Egypt. The next article on this topic in Majalla was published in 1967 by {Abd alQadir AÌmad ™ulaymat, who presented a new manuscript from 1711 and tried to explore the details of its writer, {Ali Bin MuÌammad alShadhili.31 The manuscript, entitled Dhikr ma waqa{a bayna {askar 29 Ibid., 14. Ibid., 8–10. 31 {Ali Bin MuÌammad al-Shadhili, Dhikr ma waqa{a bayna {askar al-maÌrusa al-Qahira (Account of what happened in the Army of Protected Cairo), introduced 30 314 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY al-maÌrusa al-Qahira (Account of what happened in the army of protected Cairo), dealt with the events that occurred in the uprising of 1711. The discussion by ™ulaymat of the text’s writer is short, and the importance of his article is that it provided a model for publishing a carefully annoted redaction of such historical accounts. Following the same path, {Amr Naqiçhqiçhi published an article in 1971 entitled ‘Risala fi iÒlaÌ al-dawla al-{uthmaniyya’ (A treatise on the reforms of the Ottoman Empire).32 In this article he presented and annotated a manuscript from the seventeenth century, Îasan Kafi al-AqhiÒari’s UÒul al-Ìukm fi niÂam al-{alam (The source of political authority in world order). Naqiçhqiçhi went into great detail about the life and activities of the writer and recaptured some of his library, mainly his own writings. Along with such an attempt to recapture the context in which the manuscript was written, he also analysed the text itself and its significance relative to contemporaneous texts. This contextual and textual approach characterized the Majalla school. In 1973 {Abd al-RaÌim {Abd al-RaÌman {Abd al-RaÌim published an article presenting and discussing a manuscript from circa 1650 written by Yusuf al-Shirbani.33 The manuscript, Îa al-QuÌuf fi SharÌ QaÒid Abi Sharuf, deals mostly with the economic conditions of Egyptian peasants. {Abd al-RaÌim attempted contextually to trace the writer’s identity and to recapture his motives in writing the text. Moreover, he evaluated Îa al-QuÌuf as a source not only for the intellectual history of Ottoman Egypt, but also for socio-economic history.34 These articles, among others published in Majalla, shifted the field of Ottoman Egypt historiography in the following directions. First, although preserving the essence of the ‘decline’ thesis, they refined and rearticulated it as follows: in spite of the ‘decline’ of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt still creatively maintained intellectual activity. Or, in short, the Ottoman ‘decline’ was not contagious as regards Egypt. Second, the Majalla school worked on historiographical sourand annotated by {Abd al-Qadir AÌmad ™ulaymat, al-Majalla al-tarikhiyya almiÒriyya (1967), 321–403. 32 {Amr Naqiçhqiçhi, ‘Risala fi IÒlaÌ al-dawla al-{Uthmaniyya’, al-Majalla altarikhiyya al-miÒriyya, vol. 18 (1971), 227–64. 33 {Abd al-RaÌim {Abd al-RaÌman {Abd al-RaÌim, ‘Dirasat fi maÒadir tarikh MiÒr fi 'l-{aÒr al-{Uthmani’, al-Majalla al-tarikhiyya al-miÒriyya, vol. 20 (1973), 287–316. 34 See for instance an anthology of articles on Ibn Iyas written by the members of this school. Ibn Iyas: dirasat wa-buÌuth (ed.) AÌmad {Izzat {Abd al-Karim (Cairo 1977); see especially the article of Sa{id {Abd al-FattaÌ {Ashur, al-Tadahur, ‘alIqtiÒad fi dawlat sala†in al-Mamalik fi ∂aw’ kitabat Ibn Iyas’, ibid., 63–89. 315 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY ces in Egyptian archives that had hitherto not been used, and this enlarged the scope of primary sources for the intellectual history of Ottoman Egypt. Finally, access to the archives added new types of source data for history, mainly shar{i court documents; this helped to shift the overall historical approach toward the direction of social-intellectual history. The Majalla historians paid little attention to explorations of the technologies and techniques by which Ottoman-Egyptian society functioned. But early researches and remarks even on a mundane and enormous process like the Nile may lead us into a new direction: the shaping of a particular Egyptian self-consciousness, public policies, political economy, and political culture through the history of science and natural philosophy. For instance, through the Damurdashi account (see below) we find many mentions of the way technological devices like water wheels and the Nilometer were employed to fight the low tides.35 We can also find many evidences of the way the fluctuations of the Nile placed and displaced populations from the villages to the cities and vice versa, and this naturo-demographic process impacted political and cultural space.36 MuÒ†afa {Ali, an Ottoman historian who visited Egypt in 1599, identified Egypt with the Nile to the extant that ‘God manifests Himself to Egypt’ in the fluctuations of the Nile.37 His metaphors for Egypt appropriated other natural phenomena. In a poem, he also identified Egypt with the Nile and Paradise: ‘Egypt is not Egypt but rather She is Paradise and the Nile is Kawthar [plentiful]’.38 In another poem he made the connection between the Nile and political economy through a story about a Vizir whose legitimacy in Egypt was seemingly challenged by a fluctuation in the Nile waters: When the year was 1008 [H] Khizr Pasha Proceeded in pomp to the Nilometer to attend the Release of the Water. His wish was to stop the tongues of the solidarity of Egypt But he completely failed… Contrary to its usual habit the Nile water shrunk… 35 See Daniel Crecelius and {Abd al-Wahhab Bakr translated and annotated these chronicles. See Al-Damurdashi’s Chronicle of Egypt 1688-1755: Al-Durra almusana fi akhbar al-kinana (Leiden 1991), 126. 36 See op. cit., 42. 37 See MuÒ†afa {Ali’s Description of Cairo of 1599 (trans.) Andreas Tietze (Wien 1975), 30. 38 Ibid., 51. 316 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Thus, the centrality of the Nile can illuminate the spatial anchors that formed attitudes, or, in another sense, a style of Egyptian historiography and consciousness. Modernism as a Style of History and Its Link to Perceptions of Modernization As mentioned above, al-Jabarti represents in some way a dividing line. On the one side, his stature tended for a long time to overshadow and obscure that of his historiographical predecessors. On the other side, however, for some historians he also marks the beginning of modern historiography, and his historiographical heritage was a guide for nineteenth-century historians. In 1958, Jamal al-Din alShayyal published a book entitled al-Tarikh wa'l-mu}arrikhun fi MiÒr fi 'l-qarn al-tasi{ {ashar (The history of Egyptian historians during the nineteenth century).39 The book sets out two tasks. First is a detailed study of Egyptian historiography and historians of the nineteenth century, and, second, an analytical and comparative study of their motives, aims, topics and styles. His main argument is more or less similar to that of Anis — that at the end of the eighteenth century Egypt experienced the beginning of a spontaneous scientific and cultural revival. It was an internal movement, which emerged regardless of outside influences from either the East or the West. Al-Shayyal explicitly characterized the trends of the nineteenth century as nationalistic because of the specific links to various cultural and political expressions of national revival, one that looked back retrospectively to older glories and legacies.40 By so doing, he emphasized that before the revival movement, Egypt, that is Ottoman-Egypt, was in cultural decline and outside of history. Al-Shayyal, as a loyal student of Shafiq Ghurbal, an Egyptian historian who wrote on the MuÌammad {Ali era, conceived the historiography of the nineteenth century as a product of a larger, social and political, modernization of Egypt by MuÌammad {Ali. 39 Jamal al-Din al-Shayyal, al-Tarikh wa'l-mu}arrikhun fi MiÒr fi 'l-qarn al-tasi{ {ashar (Cairo 1958). For an English version see Gamal al-Din al-Shayyal, A History of Egyptian Historiography in the Nineteenth Century (Alexandria 1962). In his recent publications he expanded the discussion including more historians with profound contextual and textual discussions. See al-Tarikh wa'l-mu}arrikhun fi MiÒr fi 'l-qarn al-tasi{ {ashar (Cairo 2000). Tarikh al-tarjama wa'l-Ìaraka al-thaqafiyya fi {aÒr MuÌammad {Ali (Cairo 2000). 40 Al-Shayyal, op. cit. (1962), 82. 317 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY In a certain sense, then, al-Shayyal cross-fertilized historiography, drawing on the utility of MuÌammad {Ali’s perception of a transformation of Egyptian society. He argues that the pre-nineteenth-century historiography consisted mainly of chronicles on the Muslim world or Egypt, annals without analysis or criticism, and dealing in topics generally connected to political history. The nineteenth-century historians were exposed to modern, some would say scientific, perceptions of history by the intense period of travel to Europe by Egyptian students. Such works were modern in the sense that they aspired to ‘real’ depictions and reconstructions in which evidence was criticized, commented upon, and double-checked, and out of which narratives were created. As a result, Egyptian historiographers turned away from the chronological method and instead dealt with subjects, periods or countries as monographs. Their realm of interest included local history and political history, but went further and became infused with science, technology, statistics, economies, and to some extent intellectual history. In this way, for example, the encompassing subject of political institutions could be narrated in its own right as a vital development within the larger topic of post-Prophet Islamic history.41 Stemming from his main interest in nineteenth-century historiography, al-Shayyal published an article in 1968 on intellectual and social life in eighteenth-century Egypt, which reaffirmed his assertions about nineteenth-century historiography. He argued that, with its subjection to the Ottoman, Egypt’s intellectual life deteriorated because the centre of intellectual gravity moved to Istanbul. The causes for this predicament were twofold; first, as mentioned, the Turkish language alienated native Arabic intellectuals; second, on leaving Egypt for Turkey, Sultan Selim I took with him a great number of Egyptian ulema and rare manuscripts on poetry, philosophy, and natural philosophy.42 Writing in 1984, Jack Crabbs followed in the steps of al-Shayyal.43 He reviewed the transition from traditional to modern historiography through the exploration of the changes that occurred in Egyptian historiography from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. His chief argument was that traditional Islamic historiography came 41 Ibid., 103–5. Gamal al-Din al-Shayyal, ‘Some Aspects of Intellectual and Social Life in Eighteenth Century Egypt’, in P.M. Holt (ed.), Political and Social Changes in Modern Egypt (Oxford 1968), 117–32. 43 Jack Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Study in National Transformation (Cairo 1984). 42 318 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY to its end with al-Jabarti, and then the ‘western impact’ generated a new historiography. Crabbs conceived traditional Islamic historiography as moving between two poles: the dry facts of chronicles that lacked interpretation and those historical accounts that were overwhelmed by political and religious propaganda. For Crabbs, the ‘modernity’ of nineteenth-century Egyptian historiography subsequently took up analysis, judgment, and interpretation through induced evidence. By employing these characteristics, modern Egyptian historians limited their role to the discussion of the past they were capturing, and avoided the roles of astrologers, philosophers and prophets. Socially speaking, these modern historians concentrated totally on their professional duties as academicians and writers, perhaps thus inducing a lack of ability (through lack of traditional educational pathways) even to recognize the traditional historians’ polymathy and concurrent skills (for example, those of astrology, astronomy, geography, calendrics, hydraulics, botany). In regard to certain styles of history writing that singularized Islamic Arabic historiography, Crabbs sees the modern as having replaced an earlier, over-dramatic metaphorical style: ‘modern’ stylistic norms called for a relatively sober, lucid, and undramatic tone. Several of Crabbs’ constructions should be challenged. The notion of the ‘western impact’ on Egyptian historiography creates two detached historical spaces, East and West. While the latter is active the first is passive and ready to absorb impact and changes from outside. According to Crabbs, internal factors within Egypt may be interpreted as having been roadblocks to the transformation of historiography and other scientific fields into professions. Thus, influence from the West was needed to rescue Egyptians from a frozen, traditional historiography. In 1968, Gabriel Baer published an article dealing with {Ali Mubarak’s al-Khi†a† al-tawfiqiyya al-jadida. Baer explored the diverse sources Mubarak used: official documents, personal observation, oral evidence, and Arabic sources, as well as works in European languages. Baer argued that the sources of personal observation and oral evidence make Mubarak’s Khi†a† an indispensable and unique source for the study of the social history of Egypt in the nineteenth century.44 However, instead of seeing Mubarak’s Khi†a† as a source for 44 Gabriel Baer, {Ali Mubarak's Khi†a† as a source for the History of Modern Egypt’, in P.M. Holt (ed.), Political and Social Changes in Modern Egypt (Oxford 1968), 13–27. 319 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY social history, I propose to examine it as a source for understanding how European scientific knowledge, with its values and techniques of precision, experiment, and statistics were used by Mubarak and other bureaucrats to construct ‘objectivity’ as a means for centralization of the rule of MuÌammad {Ali. For instance, Khi†a† contains statistical tables of populations, incomes, production of crops, and data concerning the educational system.45 Moreover, Mubarak also wrote a manuscript Kitab fi 'l-Mawazin wa 'l-mikayil wa 'l-maqayis (On weights and measures) in which he suggests the creation of universal measurements and weights with the aim of transforming Egyptian social and economic interactions into a centralized and controlled system — a political order.46 By so doing, Mubarak ‘the bureaucrat’ became a historian and used historiography in order to present an ‘objective’, ‘responsible’ and ‘impersonal’ account to transform Egypt into a centralized modern society. Re-evaluating and Broadening the Contexts of Primary Sources and MSS: The Seeds of a New Trend One may see what might be called a new trend that built its foundations on top of the accumulated work of Holt and Ayalon, and upon the work of the Majalla historians, who added older sources and incorporated them into social history. By the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, various scholars in the field led a conference called ‘Arabic manuscripts relating to the history of eighteenth-century Egypt’; it convened in March, 1990, hosted by Daniel Crecelius at California State University, Los Angeles. Following the conference, Crecelius edited and published the conference papers, which handled the conference topic from a variety of angles.47 The articles present a re-evaluation of al-Jabarti’s work from the perspective of the eighteenth century and expose a rich range of still unexploited manuscript sources of that period. Moreover, the papers examine the genealogical ties among these manuscript histories and look for links between Arabic and Turkish sources. Most of the papers find it necessary to deal with the question of al-Jabarti’s borrow45 See for instance, {Ali Mubarak, al-Khi†a† al-tawfiqiyya al-jadida li-MiÒr alQahira wa-muduniha wa-biladiha al-shahira (al-†ab’a al-ula), Bulaq MiÒr 1307H. [1890c.]), vol. 1–2, 94, 95, 98–100. 46 See {Ali Mubarak, Kitab fi 'l-mawazin wa 'l-makayil wa 'l-maqayis, K 4524 (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-MiÒriyya, 1325H) Catalogued by David King as no. 6.8.12. 47 Eighteenth Century Egypt: The Arabic Manuscript Sources, Daniel Crecelius (ed.) (Claremont California 1990). 320 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY ings from earlier sources, and evaluate the quality of the particular sources they examine. Most of the writers have brought fresh ideas to the field, avoiding teleological questions regarding the ‘decline’ of the Ottoman Empire, and, instead, have favoured questions that delve into particulars of eighteenth-century Egyptian historiography. André Raymond’s meticulous study concerns a contemporary account of the troubles of 1711, which centred around the Janissary Amir, Franj AÌmad. As noted above, this account by al-Shadhili was first discovered by {Abd al-Qadir AÌmad ™ulaymat in 1967. Raymond describes the work as ‘a totally isolated element in Egyptian historiography of the eighteenth century.’48 Raymond suggested that it should be seen, perhaps, as a specimen of a genre, the contemporary monograph on a crisis, which had both earlier and later examples, including Ibn Zunbul’s prose epic on the fall of the Mamluk sultanate. {Abd al-RaÌim {Abd al-RaÌman {Abd al-RaÌim, a contributor to the series of Majalla studies, offers a comparison of two major chroniclers of the first half of the eighteenth century — Shalabi and Yusuf al-Mallawani. He extracts as much personal information about the authors as is revealed in their chronicles and compares their methodologies and styles. He notes that al-Jabarti borrowed from both.49 Moreover, he stresses that historical accounts of that time are not limited to their usefulness for political history, but also have rich information relating to the intellectual, social, economic, and political life of Egypt in the Ottoman period. {Abd al-Wahhab Bakr undertakes a comparative study of the Damurdashi group of manuscripts, which consist of biographies of Ottoman officials in Egypt between 1688 and 1755.50 In his research using shar{i court and waqf documents, he does not affirm the identity of the writers of the chronicles that claimed to witness the events they recounted. But turning to text criticism, following Holt, Bakr suggests that the five known Damurdashi manuscripts form a common family; his analysis of phrasing and the reporting of events suggests that, while they have much in common as a textual family, they 48 André Raymond, ‘The Opuscule of Shaykh {Ali al-Shadhili: Source for the History of the 1711 Crisis in Cairo’, ibid., 38. 49 Jane Hathaway suggested that the Turkish chronicler Mehamed ibn Yusuf alHallaq who produced Tarih-i Misir-i kahire is the same person as Yusuf alMallawani. 50 Daniel Crecelius and {Abd al-Wahhab Bakr translated and annotated these chronicles. See Al-Damurdashi’s Chronicle of Egypt 1688-1755: Al-Durra al-musana fi akhbar al-kinana (Leiden 1991). 321 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY can also be analysed into two branches. It remains unclear whether they are the products of four individual officers or whether they are separate versions of an undiscovered urtext. Jane Hathaway reviews three early-eighteenth-century Turkish and Arabic manuscripts and presents a thoughtful reconsideration of chronicle writing in the eighteenth century. She examines the links between Arabic and Turkish sources and demonstrates how petitions or reports from the authorities in Cairo to the central government in Istanbul found their way into court calendars and into Turkish histories. Moreover, she shows how such calendars and histories might have been used by bilingual historians as sources for their Arabic histories during that period. Finally, as opposed to scholars of the field who have employed the ‘decline thesis’, she places al-Jabarti within the tradition of eighteenth-century Ottoman historiography. These articles, among others, presented in a nutshell here, give alternative approaches toward the study of the historiography of Ottoman Egypt. In a manner different from Holt’s and Ayalon’s, the new school maintains a keen interest in contextualizing and historicizing the historiographical accounts. Nourished by the Majalla school, they look for social-intellectual history not only in the narrow arena of Egypt, but also in an intellectual space ranging from Istanbul through Damascus to Egypt. The departure from the deductive discussion of the historiography of Ottoman Egypt in relation to the Ottoman–Europe dipole is an important step; it opens the possibility for inductive explorations. Although these new historians conceive the historiography of Ottoman Egypt as reflecting political events, or sometimes as genres of writing, they point towards larger more valuable directions. The historiography of Ottoman Egypt gives us not only sources of political history, but it opens a window for pursuing research into intellectual history, philosophies of nature and science, scientific work, and the sociology of knowledge. Interrogation of Texts: a Step toward Cultural-Intellectual History In the 1990s, social and cultural contextualization was the aim of most scholars working on the historiography of Ottoman Egypt. At the end of the decade, however, works returned to textual analysis. Yet, instead of taking the text as having self-value, as had been the case with earlier types of textual analysis, this new trend opened up a window to the sociology of knowledge by ‘interrogating’ the text and 322 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY by conducting an inductive textual-archaeological excavation for the sources of the authors. High linguistic skills in Arabic along with strenuous detective work has brought about a new methodology that prompts questions about the intellectual culture and the making of knowledge in Ottoman-Egypt. While working with David Ayalon on a newly edited version of al-Jabarti’s eighteenth-century work {Aja’ib al-athar fi 'l-tarajim wa 'lakhbar, Samuel Moreh, for example, has taken Ayalon’s questions about al-Jabarti one step further. Ayalon had noted that in al-Jabarti’s statements there emerged two views concerning his sources.51 First, al-Jabarti stated that he had only a few poorly written pamphlets by soldiers, in particular the work of AÌmad Shalabi b. {Abd al-Ghani. Second, in other parts of his chronicle al-Jabarti wrote that ‘the mains cause for the chronicle in its existing form was the Damascene historian al-Muradi.’52 By comparing al-Jabarti’s {Aja’ib with earlier chronicles, and by examining quotes from different editions, Moreh supplies us with new evidence from a few manuscripts that have resurfaced in the last decades. Moreh confirms Ayalon’s argument that, although al-Jabarti obscured his sources, he relied heavily upon the earlier chronicles of {Abd al-Ghani, al-Muradi, and on those of his own teacher al-Zabidi. Moreover, by going back to the first copies, Moreh shows that alJabarti’s {Aja’ib was edited by his friend Îasan al-{A††ar and other copiers. Moreh examined dozens of editions and copies, which were compared to the first printed version. He shows that the Azhari linguistic style of al-Jabarti, which was completely obscure to the layman, changed during its long process of editing into a completely different style that was reflected in the final copy.53 It will be useful to look carefully at Moreh’s textual strategy, as an example of this approach to Egyptian historiography. Moreh triangulated al-Jabarti’s {Aja’ib printed edition textually with two other points of reference. On the one hand he places the printed edition in comparison with the original autograph manuscript; on the other hand he compares them both to earlier chronicles of Ibn {Abd alGhani, al-Damurdashi, and others, as well as the biographies of Murta∂a al-Zabidi’s works, Mu{jam mukhtaÒÒ and al-murabba al-kabuli fiman rawa {an al-shams al-babili. In addition to this methodological 51 David Ayalon, ‘The Historian al-Jabarti and his Background’, BSOAS, 23 (1960), 222. 52 See Ayalon, ibid., 224. 53 See David Ayalon and Shmuel Moreh, The Egyptian Historian al-Jabarti, his Life, Works and Manuscripts (forthcoming, Oxford-Manchester 2004). 323 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY strategy, he went back to al-Jabarti's autographs and some other copies that were edited and corrected in the margins by the author himself, and shows that al-Jabarti's {Aja’ib was edited by an unknown copyist. By so doing, Moreh not only unfolds the intellectual lineages of al-Jabarti, but more importantly also supplies some pointers to the sources of the latter’s teacher al-Zabidi, who admitted that he himself depended upon the biographies collected in KhulaÒat al-athar by MuÌammad Amin al-MuÌibbi (1651–99). Moreh’s findings are significant because the printed edition of {Aja’ib, which was printed by the Bulaq Press in four volumes in 1297/1879, misleadingly standardized the text of the unknown copyist as the text of al-Jabarti himself, thus, to take one example, distorting names of persons and places. He has shown that the printed version of {Aja’ib not only failed to be loyal to the autograph version, but also exceeded the original version by refining the Azhari linguistic style of al-Jabarti, with its inaccessible grammatical structure. This sort of approach was also employed by Stefan Reichmuth, who elucidated the relationship between al-Jabarti’s {Aja’ib and that of al-Zabidi. Reichmuth established that al-Jabarti not only copied portions of his teacher’s work, but also left his own traces on the draft of al-Zabidi's work. Thus, Reichmuth asserts that al-Jabarti’s work is a summary of 150 years of traditional chronicles that, luckily enough, happened to be accessible to al-Jabarti via his father’s, Îasan alJabarti’s, collection.54 Îasan al-Jabarti was a prominent scholar in astronomy and mechanics and incorporated his interest in historiography with natural philosophy. This combination was the intellectual nest in which the most prominent historiographer of Ottoman Egypt shaped his intellectual trend. Moreh subsequently utilized Reichmuth’s evidence.55 He asserted that for more than a century al-Jabarti’s work was the only source available for scholars who did not want to use poorly written manuscripts in colloquial Arabic, whereas, in fact, al-Jabarti himself had relied on them. Therefore, instead of delegitimizing either the historical and scholarly value of al-Jabarti’s predecessors for being less comprehensive or al-Jabarti for relying on them, Moreh suggests that they should be valued by means of a new perception of intellectual culture. Accordingly, copying from other historians without acknow54 S. Reichmuth, ‘Notes on al-Murtada al-Zabidi’s Mu’jam as a source for alJabarti’s history’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 25 (2001), 374–83. 55 Samuel Moreh, ‘al-Jabarti’s Method of Composing his Chronicle: {Aja’ib alathar fi 'l-tarajim wa 'al-akhbar’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 25 (2001), 366. 324 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY ledgment ‘was not done only by al-Jabarti but also by many other historians.’56 Although, Moreh and Reichmuth confined their project only to factual traces in the text itself, I suggest, however, that they laid the foundations for other historians who are looking for the significance of literary evidences in the local intellectual culture. For instance, while plagiarism (sariqa) was forbidden in the realm of poetry, this intellectual tradition was a common practice among Ottoman-Egyptian chroniclers. This vital distinction, made by Moreh, between the ethics of poetry craft and historiography, might shed new light on how the art of poetry was conceived as individual creativeness and as the property of the poet himself, whereas history was less an act of creativity and more the documentation of events, which were intellectual public property. Conclusion It seems that al-Jabarti and the ‘Ottoman decline’, thematically and periodically, are both axes of the field. For Ayalon, Egypt fell into abeyance with the Ottoman conquest and historiography declined, along with other intellectual activities, to such an extreme that, in the period between al-Jabarti and the last Mamluk historian Ibn Iyas, almost nothing happened in the realm of historiography. Holt refined the ‘decline thesis’, arguing that the rise of local powers brought Egypt back to history as constituted and reflected in the miscellaneous historical accounts that he examined. As a result of these perceptions, Holt and Ayalon were mainly interested in the interrelations of al-Jabarti’s accounts and others and in political history. The social inclination of the Majalla led Anis, {Abd al-RaÌman, and others to recapture the social contexts of al-Jabarti and his ancestors and to conclude that, in spite of the Ottoman decline, Egypt had had intellectual activity. The school of modernization conceived alJabarti as the watershed of historiography. What existed before him was considered traditional Islamic historiography and what came after him, as modern Egyptian historiography. The early 1990s’ school departed from the ‘decline’ and ‘modernization’ theories and started to look at the historiography of Ottoman Egypt as a realm of socialintellectual history. The previous interest in political history was replaced by new approaches involving cultural and intellectual history 56 Ibid. 325 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY that aimed to recapture the social context as well as the intellectual content of the historical accounts. What is to be done? Historiography and History of Natural Philosophy It seems that still much is left to do. The virtues of some of the works mentioned here, mainly Holt, Ayalon, Anis, Moreh and others, do not sufficiently respond to all the potentials of the field. A few new themes, theoretical frameworks, and periodizations may find a comfortable home. First, the methodologies of the old Rankian positivist school and the current post-modernist trends of the linguistic turn, both result in pure positivism. These two extreme poles of historiography conceive the text as having self-value, as ‘a witness of history’ with nothing beyond it. I suggest taking the findings of Moreh and Reichmuth as the foundations for future handling of the text as a ‘suspect’ that contains dormant clues and should be ‘interrogated’. This methodology enables us to recover certain hidden, extratextual realities linked to the text that might represent the intellectual culture of Ottoman-Egypt. Most of the accounts focused on the history of historiography and avoided exploration of intellectual culture. None of the writers I have discussed tried to deal with the philosophy of history and its connection to natural philosophy that can be extracted from manuscripts. Other than discussing the historian’s craft, it is important to retrieve the historian’s perception of nature, that is, history (the land, waters, technologies, and cosmologies) and its driving forces as sources of everyday life. Of course this also necessitates a discussion of the way in which they conceived the notion of ‘time’. In this regard a few questions can be raised; whether historians of that time were guided by the Ibn-Khaldunian godly ‘order of existence’ or by man’s playing in the vicissitudes of time? What were the causes of events? Such questions were insufficiently addressed in the case of al-Jabarti’s dealing with Sufism. Contrary to the Sufi equivocation between the two poles of chance and determinism, he stressed an orthodox philosophy of history, emanating from the notion of the tawÌid, which conceived historical events as the direct action of the Will of God. AlJabarti’s polemics with Sufism only tempt us to open wider the window on to the intellectual history of Ottoman Egypt. Since most of the secondary literature deals with political topics, it is also necessary to recover the perception of natural phenomena in 326 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Ottoman Egyptian historiographical writings that were linked to politics through astrology and astronomy. Historiography has usually been ignored by historians of Islamic science, who confine the sources of the field to works of natural philosophers and their way of explaining nature. However, Muslim historiographies, let alone in early modern times, could serve as an important source for understanding how nature was heavily embedded in local political and religious cultures. Along with the accounts of the rise and fall of rulers, historians also mentioned the coming of comets, lunar and solar eclipses, and the fluctuations of the Nile. A discussion of this important subfield will provide insights into Egyptian ideas about history and time. It could also open new venues for historians of science who are interested in perceptions of nature found not only in the technical texts of natural philosophers, but also in the wider literature. Of course, the important connection exists between all this and political history. Studies can employ a variety of histories of mechanics, astronomy, astrology, and philosophy and cosmology, simply to gain insights into court policies and court remonstrances. The field might also present crucial questions on the sociology of knowledge. Since none of the manuscripts was originally printed, a close, very concrete, community of intellectuals must be held in our minds as instrumental in making an intellectual culture of philosophy, history, and science at that time. In this regard some questions should be asked: Who had access to the manuscript? Who were the copiers and the owners of the manuscripts? What uses, such as gifts, exchange, or collectibles, had been made of them apart from the teaching and studying of history? How have the manuscripts absorbed the influences from the other intellectual activities of the writers? In the same vein, the manuscripts of the soldiers, ajnad, should be presented as a counter-intellectual community that was not closed to non-historians and involved not only reading and writing, but also oral and aural activities. An employment of literary criticism can help in our understanding of the role of historiography in the opinions of this concrete community. Since nineteenth-century historiography was printed, other questions should be raised, especially concerning the relationship between historiography, topographical accounts, numerical surveys, and the redefinition of local space. That is to say, the relationship between informative surveys and the shaping of public policies via the facts conveyed in them. For example, did chroniclers or court intellectuals utilise travel accounts that mentioned population trends in urging various court economic and fiscal policies? 327 CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY In these ways, we may begin to interrogate pre-modern texts. We should keep in mind the polymathy and the problems of learned scholars, who laboured to know the bigger picture and the workings of the sky and the earth. Thus it is possible to build upon advances over the last four decades in our ability to use Ottoman-Egyptian sources, but we have definitely left behind the serious assumptions that at a certain time that world became ‘stagnant' and was ‘frozen' out of history. Even though, while under the Ottoman, politics and the needs of empire did place a shroud over some aspects of intellectual culture, it could not dampen problem-solving, creativity, and approaches to natural philosophy — things that went on in mens’ minds generally throughout the world. 328