Aleppo and its historian Kamal al-Din Ibn al-'Adim: A historiographical examination of "Bughyat al-talab fi ta'rikh Halab".

Abstract

This is a study of the Aleppan civilian elite during the Ayyubid period (579-658/1183-1260), as portrayed by Ibn al-'Adim in the biographical dictionary and history of Aleppo, Bughyat al-talab fi ta'rikh Halab. My general goals in this dissertation are to discover who were the Aleppan civilian elite, what was the basis for their high social status and power, and how these attributes affected the course of Aleppan and Syrian history. Ibn al-'Adim's education, high social status, and government career influenced his views on notability. His life and career illustrate the ways men rose to prominence in Aleppo, the various ties that many elite members cultivated during the course of their study that supported them throughout their public careers, and the nature of some of these public careers. An analysis of sixty-two biographical notices of notables, who were contemporaries of Ibn al-'Adim, uncovers two different images of the civilian elite, one factual and the other ideal. The first reveals the concrete circumstances of these notables in contemporary society, in terms of the occupations they held and degree of professional mobility they experienced. The second image reflects Ibn al-'Adim's concept of the perfect notable. This shows the social and cultural values of Ibn al-'Adim's time and place which guided his definition of notability. Land and property ownership during the Ayyubid period was an important indicator for notable status and social power. To secure their holdings and social standing in society, the civilian elite continued to make use of all forms of property control available to them, namely milk (ownership), iqta' (assignment of a stipend from the revenue of a specific property), and waqf (endowment). The political role that the notables played throughout the history of Aleppo is seen by Ibn al-'Ad im to have influenced the course of the principality's history. The increased erosion of these notables' political influence during Ayyubid rule marks a transformation of the role that they played in medieval Aleppo. This transformation, however, represents an intermediate stage in their gradual evolution from a politically relevant social group in the pre-Nurid period to an inactive group, whose political functions were taken over by the military in the Mamluk period.