2019 Volume 54 Pages 85-104
This paper evaluates the narrative strategy that the Ottoman Shāfiʿī judge and historian Mūsāb. Yūsuf Ibn Ayyūb (d. after 1002/1593–94) employed in his work al-Tadhkira al-Ayyūbiyya, a biographical dictionary of Damascene elites from the 9th/15th through 10th/16th centuries. I study the case of Sāra bt. Aḥmad Ibn al-Muzalliq (d. 923/1517), an elite woman from a leading Damascene merchant family who was memorialized in this work, to understand how Ibn Ayyūb reconfigured the biographies of Sāra’s marriages and patron associations in Shāfiʿī elite circles from an earlier era, to stress his own social, professional and intellectual genealogy among Shāfiʿī notables. By drawing on several historical works from the turn of the sixteenth century, including the notarial diary of Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq, I argue that Ibn Ayyūb both fulfilled, and diverged from, his explicit mission of improving upon the work of Ibn Ṭūlūn, the preeminent historian of early sixteenth-century Damascus. Even though Ibn Ayyūb eschewed Ibn Ṭūlūn’s attention to what the former deemed “unnecessary facts” and verbose style, Ibn Ayyūb borrowed heavily from Ibn Ṭūlūn in both style and content. For his construction of Sāra’s marriages to two key figures of the ʿulamāʾ establishment, Muḥammad b. Ḥasan Ibn al-Muzalliq and Abū Bakr Ibn Qāḍī ʿAjlūn, I illustrate how Ibn Ayyūb implicitly historicized the Ibn al-Muzalliq family through the lens of his own strained association with Sāra’s grandson, a minor judge in late sixteenth-century Syria, and downplayed the Ibn al-Muzalliq’s earlier prominence in favor of Sāra’s second marriage union to Abū Bakr Ibn Qāḍī ʿAjlūn, a figure to whom Ibn Ayyub painted a close family connection.
