Night and Horses and the Desert

by Robert Irwin

  Our lord the Sultan said: ‘The Sultan Mahmud intended to perpetuate his name up to the Day of Resurrection. It was suggested to him that he could become known as the “Supreme Builder”, but he said, “Buildings perish after three or four hundred years.” So then everyone agreed that a book should be compiled bearing the name of the Sultan Mahmud. They gave orders for the composition of the Sbahnama and they promised its author Firdawsi a mithqal of gold for each couplet. However, when the work was complete, Mahmud’s vizier suggested that a mithqal of silver for each couplet should suffice the poet. The whole work ran to 60,000 verses, so the Sultan sent 60,000 mithqah of silver to Firdawsi. At the time of receipt Firdawsi was in the hammam, so he gave 20,000 to the bath-keeper and another 20,000 went as payment for a bubbling barley drink, and he gave the final 20,000 to the bearer of the drink. When the Sultan heard of this he gave orders for Firdawsi to be killed because of this grievous insult. Firdawsi went into hiding. Then he composed a satire on the Sultan and he spent half the night with the treasurer and (while he was there) he requested a copy of the Sbahnama so that he could consult it. He took the book and wrote in it his lampoon on the Sultan Mahmud before fleeing from him.

  Then one day when the Sultan was out hunting, he requested the copy of the Shahnama to be brought to him. When he opened the book and he saw the satire, he became utterly enraged. He ordered the execution of the vizier and at the same time he sent sixty thousand mithqals of gold to Firdawsi’s home town. Just as this money reached one of the gates of Tus, Firdawsi’s coffin was being carried out by another gate. So they offered this money to his daughter, but she refused it. So the Sultan ordained that the money be spent on buildings in honour of the spirit of Firdawsi, and they built a great bridge which is still extant today.

  Husayni, Nafa’is Majalis al-Sultaniyya

  (ed. 'Abd al-Wahhab 'Azzam), in Majalis al-Sultan

  al-Ghawri (Cairo, 1941), pp. 81–2, trans. Robert Irwin

  COMMENTARY

  Firdawsi’s Shahnama, written around 1110, is one of the longest poems in the world. There is no fixed text, but its length is between 50,000 and 60,000 couplets. It was normal for a medieval ruler to store books (which were expensive artefacts) in his treasury. Thus a treasurer, or khazindar, often doubled as a librarian.

  A mithqal is a unit of weight. Like most such units it varied from region to region.

  Tus is a town in north-east Iran.

  Sadly there was little discussion of literature. Though the records of the sultan’s night conversations are absolutely fascinating, if one compares these sessions with the soirées of' Abbasid caliphs, Mamluk culture seems less impressive. There seems (to me at least) to have been a diminishment in the range of topics, the erudition and the literary skill displayed in the Mamluk sultan’s soirees.

  In 1516 the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Selim I invaded Syria and Qansuh al-Ghuri was defeated and died at the battle of Marj Dabiq. (He seems to have died as the result of a stroke, or a hernia.) Although Qansuh al-Ghuri’s nephew, Tumanbay, proclaimed himself sultan in Egypt and rallied last-ditch resistance to the Ottoman invasion, he was defeated at the battle of Raydaniyya in 1517 and subsequently executed. Thereafter the Mamluk territories were annexed to the Ottoman sultanate.

  The heroic last days of the Mamluk sultanate were celebrated in a prose romance entitled the Kitab Infisal dawlat al-Awam wa’l-Itisal Dawlat Bani Uthman (‘Book of the Departure of the Dynasty of Time and the Coming of the Ottoman Dynasty’). Nothing is known about its author, Ahmad IBN ZUNBUL al-Rammal, apart from what can be deduced from his own writings. Neither the date of his birth nor of his death is known, but he was probably a boy at the time of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, and he was certainly still alive in 1558. He was a rammal, that is to say a geomancer who told fortunes from randomly made markings in the sand. He wrote treatises on geomancy, astrology, dream interpretation and apocalyptic prophecy.

  The Infisal has been misclassified by some scholars as a serious historical chronicle. It is in fact a remarkably early example of the historical novel. It tells the tale of the chivalrous but doomed Mamluks. Although Ibn Zunbul clearly sympathized with the Mamluks, he also recognized the justice of the Ottoman cause and gave due weight to Selim’s piety. To paraphrase 1066 and All That, the Mamluks were wrong but romantic, whereas the Ottomans were right but repulsive. Ibn Zunbul is interested in the motivations of his protagonists and he often makes use of invented dialogue to bring out those motivations. The dialogue is vigorous, even at times to the point of crudity. His heroes are Tumanbay and his allies. Yet, for all their chivalric élan and martial prowess, the Mamluks are destined to be defeated. At one level, this is because of traitors within their ranks and the superiority of Ottoman firearms; but at another level, the Mamluks are fighting a hopeless series of battles against fate itself. All dynasties and people have their appointed times. Ibn Zunbul’s book is a nostalgic romance about a society on the turn. Unsurprisingly, given Ibn Zunbul’s other profession, his novel is pervaded by occult themes and imagery. The Infisal survives in many manuscripts, almost all of them containing significant variations and additions. The basic text seems to have been revised again and again over several decades. The way Ibn Zunbul presents his story suggests that it was designed for oral delivery.

  In the passage which is extracted here, a leading Mamluk general, Kurtbay the Wali (‘Governor’), has surrendered after the battle of Raydaniyya and has been brought before Selim’s tent.

  Then Selim emerged from his tent and took his seat on the throne which had been put there for him. He looked at Kurtbay and said to him, ‘You are Kurtbay?’

  He replied, ‘Yes’.

  ‘Where now is your chivalry and valour?’ asked Selim.

  ‘They are as ever.’

  ‘Do you recall the damage you have done to my army?’

  ‘I do and I shall never forget any of it.’

  ‘What did you do with ‘Ali ibn Shahwar?’

  ‘I killed him together with a lot of your army.’

  Then, after he had seen the treachery in the eyes of the Sultan and realized that Selim had resolved to kill him, so that it was all up with him, Kurtbay abandoned decorum and spoke in despair of his life. He looked the Sultan in the eyes and he raised his right hand and said, ‘Listen to my speech, so that you and others may know that we count Fate and the Red Death among our horsemen. A single one of us could account for your army. If you do not believe it, have a go, so long only as you refrain from using the gun. You have two hundred thousand men of all races here with you. So stand your ground and deploy your troops, and three of us will sally out against you: myself, the slave of God; the noble horseman, the Sultan Tuman-bay; and the Emir ‘Allan. Then you will see for yourself how we three will fare and you will then learn about yourself, whether you are really a king in spirit and whether you deserve to be a king. For only an experienced warrior deserves to be king – as were our virtuous predecessors (may God be pleased with them). Look into the history books and consider 'Umar ibn al-Khattab (may God be pleased with him) and observe his courage and similarly consider the Imam 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (may God be merciful to him and bless his face). But you have pieced together an army from the Christian and Anatolian regions and from other places as well and you have brought with you this device which the Franks invented, because they were incapable otherwise of encountering Muslim armies.

  The nature of the musket is that, even if a woman fired it, it would keep at bay such-and-such a number of men. If we had chosen to use this weapon, you would not have beaten us to it. However, we are a people who will not abandon the practice of the Prophet. Shame on you! How dare you fire upon Muslims who profess the unity of God and the mission of the Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him). The right way is that of Holy War with the lance and the victory belongs to God.

  It happened once that a Maghribi with a musket appeared at the court of Qansuh al-Ghuri (may God be merciful to him and slay his killer). The Maghribi informe
d the Sultan about how the musket had appeared in Venetian territory and how all the Ottoman and Arab armies were using it, and here was the weapon.

  Then the Sultan ordered him to teach the use of it to some of his mamluks. So he did so. Then he brought them in to the Sultan’s presence and they fired their guns, but the Sultan was displeased and he said to the Maghribi, “We are not going to abandon the way of our Prophet in order to follow the way of the Christians, for God, may He be praised and exalted, has said if God aids you, then you will be victorious.’”

  So the Maghribi went home, saying, “There are those now living who will see the conquest of this land by the musket.”

  Then Sultan Selim asked Kurtbay, “If you possess bravery and brave men and cavalry and you follow the Book and the Sunna, as you claim, then how is it that you have been defeated and expelled from your land and your children enslaved and many of you perished? How is it that you stand before me a prisoner?”

  Kurtbay replied, “You have not taken our land because of your strength or because of your horsemanship. It has only happened by God’s decree and fate fixed from eternity. For every dynasty there is a fixed duration and an appointed end. This is the way of God (may He be praised) with his creation. What has become of the holy warriors:? And what has become of kings and sultans? You also must certainly die …”’

  Ibn Zunbul, Akhira al-Mamalik. Waqi'a al-Sultan al-Gburi

  ma a Salim al-Thani, trans. Robert Irwin, 'Abd al-Mu'nim

  Amir edn. (Cairo, 1962), pp. 57–9

  COMMENTARY

  Although there are two printed versions and many manuscripts, there is no properly established text of Ibn Zunbul’s book and the text I have used for my translation has its problems and obscurities.

  I have translated furusiyya as ‘horsemanship’, but it is not a very satisfactory translation because furusiyya also has connotations of chivalry, courage and military prowess. Medieval Arab treatises on the arts of war in general and on the requirements of Holy War (jihad) in particular were known as books of furusiyya.

  'Ali Ibn Shahwar in my text is a corrupt rendering of ‘Ali Ibn Shahsiwar. Shahsiwar had been an Ottoman client prince and enemy of the Mamluks in eastern Anatolia. (Despite Kurtbay’s boast, an ‘Ali ibn Shahsiwar in fact seems to have survived the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and outlived Kurtbay.)

  In this extract, ‘decorum’ is my translation of adab. As we have seen, in other contexts the same word could be translated as belles-lettres.

  ‘Fate’ is manaya, which has the more specific sense of fated death. Manaya was one of the key notions in pre-Islamic poetry. Arab fatalism predates the revelation of the Qur’an.

  ‘Red Death’ is a stock phrase for violent death, as opposed to ‘White Death’, which is a natural death.

  Bunduq means a bullet. (It also means a hazelnut.) Bunduqiyya means a rifle, musket, or arquebus. Coincidentally, Bunduqiyya is also Arabic for Venice – hence doubtless the Maghribi’s impression that the musket originated in Venice.

  Historically, the alleged dialogue between Selim and Kurtbay is a piece of nonsense. The Mamluks loved guns and had been using them for decades, before any alleged arrival of a prophetic Maghribi at the court of Qansuh al-Ghuri. They both bought guns from their Venetian allies and they also manufactured them themselves. The story reflects the prejudices of Ibn Zunbul rather than those of the ruling military elite of Mamluk Egypt. In fact Kurtbay, a former governor or wali of Cairo, was discovered in hiding and seems to have been peremptorily executed. It is all but certain that his argument with Selim never took place. The dialogue is fiction, not history. The meeting was invented by Ibn Zunbul to provide a context for a meditation on the decline of chivalry and the doom of dynasties – themes he returns to again and again in his historical romance.

  Historians of Arabic literature have neglected Ibn Zunbul. (He does not even rate an entry in the capacious Encyclopaedia of Islam.) It may well be that other writers from the sixteenth century onwards have been overlooked. The decline of Arabic literature in the post-medieval period may possibly be an optical illusion, the product of insufficient research into the literary productions of the period in question. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certain that relatively few texts from the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries have been published and edited (and even fewer have been translated into English).

  Although it is conceivable that the decline of Arabic literature in what European historians call the ‘early modern period’ is more apparent than real, there does appear to have been a decline both in the quantity and quality of original writing in Arabic in that period. We find no poets who can bear comparison with Mutanabbi or Ibn al-Farid, or prose writers who can match the achievements of Ibn Hazm or Hariri. This phenomenon requires explanation. In part it may be due to the relegation of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and much of North Africa to the status of provinces within the Ottoman Turkish empire. Cairo was no longer the seat of a court which could dispense lavish patronage to writers. (Baghdad had, of course, ceased to be a significant centre of patronage centuries earlier.) The culture of the court elites tended to be Turco-Persian rather than Arabic. Outside the courts, Arabic culture was by and large dominated by a rigorist Sunni orthodoxy, something which had not been the case in, for instance, the tenth century. Horizons seemed to have shrunk and there were to be no more translations from the Greek, or from more modern European languages, until the late eighteenth century. The poetry and fiction which was produced in the Ottoman centuries was mostly conventional and backward-looking (though there were of course occasional exceptions, such as the satirical verse of the seventeenth-century Egyptian, al-Shirbini).

  ‘In time Arabic literature would revive. That revival should be seen as beginning in the late eighteenth century with al-Jabarti (d. 1825) and his vividly written chronicle of Egyptian history since the Ottoman conquest. In the late nineteenth century Jurji Zaydan practically invented the Arabic novel (though, as we have seen, he did have one precursor in Ibn Zunbul). In the twentieth century there was a real renaissance of Arab poetry. Experimental poets like Adonis have found precedents and licence for their experiments in the works of medieval poets. Innovative novelists such as Naguib Mahfouz, Gamal al-Ghitaniy and Tayyib Salih have succeeded in breaking away from the Western form of the novel and have sometimes drawn on medieval Arab prose works in order to do so. But all this should really be the subject of another book.

  Index

  Abbas ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim 197, 203

  al-’Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf, Abu al-Fadl 121–2, 124

  ‘Abd al-Hamid ibn Yahya, known as al-Katib, ‘the Scribe’ 63, 262

  Risala ila al-Kuttab 63–5

  ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, Caliph 44, 58–9

  ‘Abd al-Mu’min, Yusuf ibn 290

  Abd al-Rahman I 245

  ‘Abd al-Rahman II 245

  ‘Abd al-Rahman III, Caliph 246–7

  Abdela the Saracen 287

  Abraha 338, 345

  Abraham 358

  Abu al-’Atahiyya (Abu al-Ishaq Isma’il ibn al-Qasim) 126–7

  Abu al-Faraj Ali ibn al-Husayn ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Qurashi al-Isfahani xi, xiii, 123, 154, 155, 218–19

  Kitab al-Aghani (‘Book of Songs’) xi, 154–5, 218–19

  Abu al-Fida xii

  Abu al-Hudhail

  Muhammad ibn al-Hudhail, known as Allaf ‘The Fodder Merchant’ 106

  Abu al-Tayyib [ibn Idris] 152

  Abu ‘Amr ibn al-’Ala 5–6

  Abu Bakr, Caliph 42

  Abu Bakr (poet) 268

  Abu Darda 103, 104

  Abu Dhu’ayb 60–61

  Abu Dulaf: Qasida Sasaniyya 178

  Abu Firas al-Harith ibn Sa’id al-Hamdani 219, 223–5

  Rumiyyat (‘Byzantine Poems’) 224–5

  Abu Hamid al-Gharnati 354

  Abu Harith Ghaylan ibn ‘Uqba (Dhu’l-Rummah, ‘He of the Tent Peg’) 134, 135

  Abu Malik al-Hadrami 106

&n
bsp; Abu Nuwas (Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani’al-Hakimi) 56, 60, 71, 74, 84, 86–7, 89, 114, 123–6, 210, 261–2

  Satanic Panic 125–6

  Abu Sulaiman al-Mantiqi al-Sijistani 173, 174–7

  Abu Tammam 118, 132–8, 143, 210

  Hamasa (‘Courage’) xi, 138, 352

  ‘Spring’ qasida 142

  Abu Uthman al-Mazini 58

  Abu Yazid al-Bistami 128

  Abu-l-Aswad 103, 104

  Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Qasim 211–15

  Abu’l-Qasim 211–12

  Abukarib (As’ad Kamil) 133, 135

  Adonis 32, 123, 229–30

  ‘Adud al-Dawla, Emir 148, 155, 215, 221

  al-Adwani, Dhu-l-Isba’ 102, 104

  Al-Ahnaf ibn al-Qays 102–3, 104

  A’isha III

  al-Akhtal, Ghiyath ibn Ghawth 43–5, 47, 56, 58, 67, 238

  Alexander, Emperor 151–2, 153

  Alf Layla wa-Layla see The Thousand and One Nights

  Alfonsi, Petrus: Disciplina Clericalis 313

  Alfonso VI of Castile 266, 287

  ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, Caliph 42, 65, 164, 218, 248, 250, 431, 433

  Ali ibn Maitham 106

  Ali ibn Mansur 107

  al-Amin, Caliph 123

  ‘Amiri, Abu’l-Hasan 213

  ‘Amr ibn al-’As 65, 265

  Amra III

  al-Anbari, Abu Bakr 354

  ‘Antara ibn Shaddad 17–18, 238, 417

  Mu’allaqa 17

  The Arabian Nights see The Thousand and One Nights

  Arberry, A. J. 14

  Aristotle 75, 84, 213, 215