IFAO

On November 28  at 18h00 Cairo Time Professor Jo Van Steenbergen will give a public lecture at the IFAO (Palais Mounira) entitled:

“The Politics of Arabic Historical Thought: Frames, Discourses and ‘Mamlukisation’ in 9th/15th -century Syro-Egyptian Historiography”

You can register for attending this lecture at the Palais Mounira by completing this this form . 

You can also attend this lecture online : Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/.......

Simultanious translation to arabic will be available in presensia and on Zoom.

Abstract: The late 6^th/12^th to early 10^th/16^th centuries are well known as a time in which an unprecedented number of texts about Islamic history were produced. It is also a very complex era of profound political and cultural transformation in Islamic history, which we mainly know about today from these texts. In the MMS-II project (UGent, 2017-21) we have asked what happens to current understandings of, especially, Syro-Egyptian history if we consider these texts not merely as sources and observers of that transformation, but also as historical actors who helped to make it come about. The MMS-II project has therefore been pursuing the first comprehensive survey and collective historical interpretation of the many dozens of Arabic texts of history that were produced in the early to mid-9^th/15^th century in Cairo and in related urban sites.

In this lecture, I will first present some of the main outcomes of this pursuit to survey and to offer further interpretations. Secondly, I will consider how diverse sets of both memories of the past and expectations of the future operated as framing devices across this corpus of texts. Finally, I will argue that this operation of different framing devices had common effects that were related to the representation of order, to a shared discourse of sovereignty, and to a ‘Mamlukisation’ of the 9^th/15^th-century sultanate’s leadership claims.