Writing and Scholarship in Mamluk Lands

From 1250 to 1517, the Mamluk Sultanate ruled Egypt and much of Syria. Arabic writing served people in government offices, religious study and urban literary circles. A historian describing Cairo, a clerk learning how to compose a formal letter and a poet trading a witty verse used writing for different purposes, but all depended on trained readers and established forms.

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Histories of Cairo and its people

Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) devoted his Khitat to Egypt’s places, buildings and institutions. In its account of Cairo, he described the al-Qasaba, the main commercial street running between the gates of Bāb al-Futūḥ and Bāb al-Zuwayla. He contrasted the market’s earlier prosperity with his own time, when many shops were closed. This personal criticism of decline tied the city’s changing streets and trade to its history.

Biographical dictionaries organized knowledge around individual lives. Their entries might record a person’s teachers, offices, family ties and death, preserving connections that a year-by-year chronicle would not foreground. The fifteenth-century scholar al-Sakhawi’s al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ includes a final volume with 1,075 numbered biographies devoted to women. Many were people he had known. The entries preserve women’s careers and learned relationships within a reference work that readers could consult by person.

Reference books for government clerks

A chancery was a government office responsible for formal correspondence and documents. Clerks needed to know how to address officials, describe territories and arrange a letter according to the recipient’s rank. The appointment document or diplomatic letter therefore required both information and a practiced style.

Al-Qalqashandi (1355/56–1418), a Mamluk chancery clerk, brought this knowledge together in Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, a large administrative encyclopedia completed in 1412. In a section on letters arriving from Christian rulers in al-Andalus and northern regions, he explains how the chancery checked a foreign-language letter: a clerk copied the original and placed an Arabic translation on its reverse, while witnesses certified the translation. After an official checked the original against its translation, the sultan’s response could be drafted beneath each paragraph. This made accurate translation part of preparing the written reply.

Poetry among colleagues and patrons

Poetry could praise a patron, create a joke or establish a connection between writers. Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, a fourteenth-century craftsman-poet in Cairo, exchanged a short witty poem, or epigram, with the poet and biographer al-Ṣafadī. Al-Miʿmār also composed an eighteen-verse ode praising the senior official ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī. It begins with a complaint about winter cold before turning to a panegyric, a formal poem praising its patron.

His verse could also make a pointed joke at an official’s expense, setting pious language against unjust conduct. Praise and satire both relied on readers recognizing the target and appreciating the turn of phrase. The same poet could move between learned forms, workplace experience and the social world of patrons.

Learning through reading and performance

Religious learning also depended on personal transmission. Hadith are reports about the Prophet Muhammad’s words and actions; students learned them from named teachers and received permissions recording which texts they could transmit. Women taught hadith in Mamluk society, sometimes in gatherings held in their homes. The recorded permissions to transmit texts preserve these teacher-student connections. Zaynab bint al-Kamal (1248–1339), a teacher in Damascus, received written permissions to transmit hadith from eminent scholars beginning when she was one year old. The certificate gave her authority to transmit specified works; she studied them as she grew. A hadith’s chain is the sequence of transmitters through whom it passed. Because Zaynab lived long after some of her early teachers, later students could learn through fewer intervening transmitters, a short chain that scholars prized.

In Cairo, Ibn Daniyal used poetry and prose in shadow plays, performances staged with figures behind an illuminated screen. His comic characters brought literary wordplay into a public entertainment setting. Ibn Daniyal’s shadow plays belong to the same city culture as scholarly books and official manuals, while showing how written language could be adapted for an audience watching and listening together.