Islamic and scientific Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period

Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period by Elias Muhanna
The Composition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333)
Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab 

Abstract 

This dissertation explores the emergence of a golden age of Arabic encyclopaedic literature in the scholarly centers of Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). At the heart of the project is a study of Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (‘The Ultimate Ambition in the Branches of Erudition’), a 31-volume encyclopaedic work composed at the beginning of the 14th century and divided into five parts: (i) heaven and earth; (ii) the human being; (iii) animals; (iv) plants; and (v) the history of the world.

My study examines the formal arrangement, thematic contents, and codicological features of this seminal work, arguing that the rise of encyclopaedism in this period was emblematic of a certain intellectual ethos, a systematic approach to the classification of knowledge which emerged in the discursive context of a rapidly centralizing imperial state. I argue that the Nihāya grew out of an amalgam of several genres (including the adab anthology, the cosmographical compendium, the chancery scribe manual, the dynastic chronicle, and the commonplace book), developing into a new form and serving a different purpose from its literary predecessors. Such texts, long considered tokens of intellectual and cultural decadence, demonstrate the strategies used by Mamluk religious scholars, chancery scribes, and littérateurs to navigate an ever-growing corpus of accumulated knowledge.

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….......iii
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………….vi
List of Tables & Figures………………………………………………………………………………………………….viii
Abbreviations, Transliteration, and Dates….…………………………………………………………………….x
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Approaching Mamluk Encyclopaedism…………………………………………………………10
Reading the Medieval Encyclopaedia: Definitions and Approaches…………………..12
In Search of Arabic Encyclopaedism……………………………………………………………………21
The Instability of Actors’ Categories……………………………………………………………………28
A Middle Path……………………………………………………………………………………………………...31
Why Encyclopaedism?…………………………………………………………………………………………32
Chapter 2: An Encyclopaedist at Work:
al-Nuwayrī’s Intellectual and Institutional Milieus……………………..……………….39
Intellectual Activity in the Wake of the Mongol Conquests……………………………….41
Bureaucrat, Scholar, Compiler: Notes on al-Nuwayrī’s Biography………………….…47
Compiling the Nihāya…………………………………………………………………………………………..58
al-Nuwayrī’s Biographers…………………………………………………………………………………….63
A Scribal Milieu: al-Nuwayrī at the Diwān al-khāṣṣ….…………………………………………..68
The Nāṣiriyya Madrasa & Bīmāristān al-Manṣūrī……………….………………………………78
The Ethos of Empire..…….…………………………………………………………………………………….97
Chapter 3: The Shape of the Nihāya…………………………………………………………99
Books, Sections, Chapters, Sub-Chapters: The Nihāya’s Architecture………………101
Thematic Modularity & Cross-Referencing……………………………………………………….109
Taxonomy, the Ideological Science……………………………………………………………………124
The Nihāya and the Classical Adab Encyclopaedia…………………………………………….125
Textual Topographies………………………………………………………………………………………..134
By the Numbers: Mapping the Content of the Nihāya……………………………………….136
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………….149
Chapter 4: Cosmography, Anthology, Chronicle, Commonplace Book:
The Nihāya’s Sources and Compositional Models……………………………………….152
Compositional Models & Sources…..………………………………………………………………….160
The Adabization of the ʿUlamā’ & the Literarization of Historiography……………185
The Judge, the Sufi, & the Cow: al-Nuwayrī’s Epistemological Ecumenism……..191
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………….199

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..203


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