Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration 9781784537319, 9780755635801, 9780755635788

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: how the Ghurabā’ Fell Out of History
Genetic Purity and Languages
Orientalist Discourses on Sīn-Speakers
Unthinkability
Constructing a Roma Racial Subject in Modern Europe
Conclusion
Chapter 1: The Roma, Banū Sāsān, and the Ghurabā’
Who Were the Banū Sāsān?
Tribal Nomenclature
Ancestral Tribal Leader
Professional Subtribes
Renaming the Banū Sāsān to Ghurabā’
Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Aleppo: Private Journal
Premodern Romani History
Chapter 2: Sīn: The Language of the Banū Sāsān and the Ghurabā’
Buyid Iraq and Iran: Two Qaṣīdas
Buyid Iran and Abbasid Iraq: Maqāmāt
Artuqid Mosul: Didactic Prose
Mamluk Cairo: Shadow Theater
A Qaṣīda in Artuqid Mardin
Additional Sīn Sources
Sīm and Sīn in the Modern Era
Conclusion: Literary and Historical Implications
Chapter 3: Gharīb Literary Cultures in Mamluk Cairo
Gharīb Oral Culture
Maqāmāt Illustrations
Bāb al-Lūq, a Gharīb Neighborhood in Mamluk Cairo
Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, a Gharīb Poet
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Housing, Neighborhoods, and Cemeteries of Urban Ghurabā’
Maṣṭaba Housing
Historical Implications
Ghurabā’ Quarters and Cemeteries
Damascus
Ghurabā’ Quarter
Cemeteries
Aleppo
Ghajar and Ghurabā’ in Aleppo
Fez
Andalusian Cities
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Bulhāns: Illustrated Shiʿi Astrological Books
Uses of the Bulhān
Translations and Adaptations
Conclusion
Chapter 6: A New Narrative of Premodern Afro-Eurasian Printing
Johann Gutenberg
Pre-1500 Blockprinting in East and Central Asia
Printing Paper Money and Striking Coins
West Asian Printing as a Minority Enterprise
Ghurabā’ Printing
Printing Ink
ṭarsh of Tin
Knowledge Classification
Chapter 7: Ghurabā’ Astrologers and Print in Fifteenth-Century Central Europe
Epilogue
Appendix 1: Glossary of Premodern Sīn
Appendix 2: Tarot Cards, Treasure-Hunting Manuals, and Books of Shadow Plays
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Epilogue
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Bibliography
Unpublished Sources
Published Primary Sources
Modern Studies
Index

Citation preview

ROMA IN THE MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC WORLD

The Early and Medieval Islamic World Published in collaboration with the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean

As recent scholarship resoundingly attests, the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East bore witness to a prolonged period of flourishing intellectual and cultural diversity. Seeking to contribute to this evermore nuanced and contextual picture, The Early and Medieval Islamic World book series promotes innovative research on the period 500–1500 AD with the Islamic world, as it ebbed and flowed from Marrakesh to Palermo and Cairo to Kabul, as the central pivot. Thematic focus within this remit is broad, from the cultural and social to the political and economic, with preference given to studies of societies and cultures from a sociohistorical perspective. It will foster a community of unique voices on the medieval Islamic world, shining light into its lesser-studied corners. Series Editor Professor Roy Mottahedeh, Harvard University Advisors Professor Amira Bennison, University of Cambridge Professor Farhad Daftary, Institute of Ismaili Studies Professor Simon Doubleday, Hofstra University Professor Frank Griffel, Yale University Professor Remke Kruk, Leiden University Professor Beatrice Manz, Tufts University Dr Bernard O’Kane, American University in Cairo Professor Andrew Peacock, University of St Andrews Dr Yossef Rapoport, Queen Mary University of London New and Forthcoming Titles Cross Veneration in the Medieval Islamic World: Christian Identity and Practice under Muslim Rule, Charles Tieszen (Fuller Theological Seminary/Simpson University) Power and Knowledge in Medieval Islam: Shiʾi and Sunni Encounters in Baghdad, Tariq al-Jamil (Swarthmore College) The Eastern Frontier: Limits of Empire in Late Antique and Early Medieval Central Asia, Robert Haug (University of Cincinnati) Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives, Fozia Bora (University of Leeds) Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, William Granara (Harvard University) Gender and Succession in Medieval Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima, Alyssa Gabbay (The University of North Carolina at Greensboro) Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social History, Lisa Nielson (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA) Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration, Kristina Richardson (Queens College, City University of New York)

ROMA IN THE MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC WORLD

Literacy, Culture, and Migration

Kristina Richardson

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Kristina Richardson, 2022 Kristina Richardson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by www.paulsmithdesign.com Cover image: Les Maqâmât d’Aboû Mohammad al-Qâsim ibn ‘Alî al-Harîrî (© Bibliothèque nationale de France) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3731-9 ePDF: 978-0-7556-3578-8 eBook: 978-0-7556-3579-5 Early and Medieval Islamic World Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations ix INTRODUCTION: HOW THE GHURABĀ’ FELL OUT OF HISTORY

1

Chapter 1 THE ROMA, BANŪ SĀSĀN, AND THE GHURABĀ’

15

Chapter 2 SĪN: THE LANGUAGE OF THE BANŪ SĀSĀN AND THE GHURABĀ’

29

Chapter 3 GHARĪB LITERARY CULTURES IN MAMLUK CAIRO 47 Chapter 4 HOUSING, NEIGHBORHOODS, AND CEMETERIES OF URBAN GHURABĀ’

63

Chapter 5 BULHĀNS: ILLUSTRATED SHIʿI ASTROLOGICAL BOOKS 83 Chapter 6 A NEW NARRATIVE OF PREMODERN AFRO-EURASIAN PRINTING 103 Chapter 7 GHURABĀ’ ASTROLOGERS AND PRINT IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CENTRAL EUROPE 127 Epilogue Appendix 1: Glossary of Premodern Sīn Appendix 2: Tarot Cards, Treasure-Hunting Manuals, and Books of Shadow Plays

139 143

159 Notes 162 Bibliography 203 Index 227

ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 4.1 Scene outside the house of the king of the Sāsāni beggars

67 5.1 The Red King91 5.2 The Red King92 5.3 Aries constellation 95 5.4 Portrait of Sultan Murad III with bulhān 97 5.5 Ex libris of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain100 5.6 Blockprint of the Spanish royal coat of arms 101 6.1 Blockprinted amulet. Counterclockwise from upper left 116 6.2 Blockprinted Arabic amulet and lead case 121 6.3 Blockprinted Arabic amulet 123 7.1 Saint Dorothy130 7.2 Saint Sebastian131 8.1 “Fahrendes Volk (Metz Unmuss)”140

Tables 1.1 Key Sources on the Premodern Ghurabā’ 16 5.1 The Kitāb al-bulhān and Its Offshoots86 6.1 Cataloging Arabic Blockprints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art122

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Inspiration for this book came in late 2014, while I was a fellow at the Institut für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft at the University of Münster. I held that post from 2012 to 2014, where I worked with Professor Thomas Bauer, who warmly welcomed me into his weekly Arabic seminar. There, I had the honor of reading and learning alongside the most capable and kind Arabists I have ever met: Syrinx van Hees, Hakan Özkan, Anke Osigus, Andreas Herdt, Nefeli Papoutsakis, and Rana Siblini. Many of them were engaged with an edition of the poetry collection of Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, a fascinating Mamluk author who figures centrally in Chapter 3. I never would have learned so much about him were it not for the work of Thomas, Hakan, and Anke. From 2014 to 2015 the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg at the University of Bonn provided another intellectual home. Under the guidance of Stephan Conermann and Bethany Walker, I began to understand the vast scope of my project. Grateful for our weekly seminars, intellectual discussion, and brilliant workshops, I was able to shape this project as I have. During my 2017–18 sabbatical, I spent the fall semester at the University of Munich, where I had the pleasure to earn the moral and scholarly support of Helga Rebhan, Andreas Kaplony and Teresa Bernheimer. While living in Munich near the Benedictine monastery St. Boniface’s Abbey, I became aware that the community had Christian Arabic manuscripts. A librarian at St. Boniface’s directed me to their affiliated monastery in Andechs, a site of pilgrimage since the twelfth century. One intrepid morning, Boris Liebrenz met me and my daughter Cecilia in Munich, and the three of us ventured to Andechs on a manuscript pilgrimage. We were refused entry into the library, to my daughter’s relief, but the visit was not a total wash. The experience helped me appreciate the autonomy and isolation of monastic communities and the reverence that approaching the cloister on foot could inspire. That day’s excursion led to some of the book’s main arguments about the medieval transfer of print technologies. Warmest gratitude goes to Boris, who has offered endless support (along with welcome challenges) to my theories and project; I am so grateful for his friendship, patience, intelligent commentary, and hospitality over the years. Back in New York City, my home institution of Queens College has consistently supported my work with approvals of fellowship leaves and an internal Mellon Foundation award. The CUNY Graduate Center Committee on Globalization and Social Change helped hone my discussions on the stakes of this research. I owe gratitude to Gary Wilder, Joan Wallach Scott, Mandana Limbert, Susan BuckMorss, Duncan Faherty, and Barbara Naddeo, whose comments helped shape the Introduction. Two grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities—a

viii Acknowledgments

2019 summer stipend and a 2020 award—permitted the time and space to complete this manuscript. I am equally grateful for the informal conversations over coffees and beers with the Leipzig-based anthropologists Bernhard Streck and Olaf Günther. The book also benefited greatly from conversations with Beth Baron, Susan Boynton, Gottfried Hagen, Rob Haug, Stefan Heidemann, Daniel Kaufman, Lulu Reinhardt, Karl Schaefer, Martin Schwartz, the late Satadru Sen, Jens Ulff-Møller, and Torsten Wollina. Students in my history seminars on “History of the Roma” and “Printing Before Gutenberg” heard these arguments develop over time, and I really appreciated their engagement with and even resistance to so many new ideas. A version of the Introduction appeared as “Invisible Strangers, or Romani History Reconsidered,” History of the Present 10.2 (2020): 187–207, and a version of Chapter 2 was published as “Tracing a Gypsy Dialect through Medieval Arabic and Persian Literature,” Der Islam 94.1 (April 2017): 115–57. I would also like to thank the board of the Early and Medieval Islamic World series, my patient editors Rory Gormley and Yasmin Garcha, and the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript, whose comments helpfully sharpened my arguments. This book is dedicated to my family and my teachers.

ABBREVIATIONS AD BnF BSOAS EI2 EI3 IJMES JAOS JESHO JGLS JRASGBI SD ZDMG

Abū Dulaf ’s verses, translated in Bosworth 1976 II, 191–213 Bibliothèque nationale de France Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition Encyclopaedia of Islam, third edition International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s verses, translated in Bosworth 1976 II, 295–301 Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft

x

INTRODUCTION HOW THE GHURABĀ’ FELL OUT OF HISTORY

In the late sixteenth century a Muslim silk weaver named Kamāl al-Dīn regularly recorded anecdotes and observations about his life and work in Ottoman Aleppo. A lengthy fragment of this notebook survives today and makes for an unusual witness to this time and place, representing the perspective not of members of the religious, military, or scholarly elite but that of an ordinary craftworker.1 Kamāl al-Dīn lived in the northeasternmost quarter beyond the city walls, not in the city center where the old, elite families resided. The external border of his neighborhood fronted wilderness and absorbed a critical branch of the Silk Roads that extended eastward through Central Asia and into China. New migrants from Central and East Asia tended to settle there, and this cultural mix may have nurtured his sensitivity to people and their languages. In his notebook Kamāl al-Dīn recorded an Arabic sign alphabet that he had learned, composed entries in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, and discussed a Hebrew wall inscription with a Jewish friend. Perhaps most astonishingly, in early 1589 Kamāl al-Dīn noticed an unusual occurrence on the streets of Aleppo. I saw an easterner singing in seven languages with his tambourine in his hand. First, he sang in Arabic, then in Turkish, then in Persian, then in Kurdish, then in Gorani, then in the language of the strangers [bi-lisān al-ghurabā’], then in Hindi. In other years I have seen Indians with a dancing boy. They were playing a long-necked stringed instrument (ṭanbūr), a tambourine, and a vertical flute. Two copper bowls were in the hand of the boy. They wander from one musical act to another, just as the warbler (dukhkhal) does. Of their singing one can know the metre, but not understand its meaning, unless you are from among them. Praise to the great Creator.2

When first reading this list of seven languages, “the language of the Strangers” struck me as an uncharacteristically opaque phrase from an author who, in other passages, had taken pains to explain obscure terms. Judging by the syntax and grammar, it is clear that “the language of the Strangers” was not synonymous with “an unspecified foreign language” and also that “the Strangers” were a known group, but who were they? A tribal confederation known as Banū Sāsān renamed themselves ghurabā’ (“Strangers”) by the late thirteenth century, and this new

2

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

label—the classical Arabic term for so-called Gypsies—has endured into the present. The ghurabā’ also spoke a Semitic language that they called Sīn and that outsiders called “the language of the Strangers.” Today, Sīn, which some of its speakers now refer to as Sīm, survives as a spoken language among entertainers in Alexandria and Cairo, and among the peripatetic Ḥalab community that lives along the Nile basin in Egypt and the Sudan. The umbrella terms “Gypsies” and “Strangers” are similarly vague, in that they encompass the Armenian Lom and the Levantine Dom, who speak Indo-European languages closely related to Romani, as well as the English Travellers and the Central European Yenish (German, Jenische; French, Yéniche), who speak wholly unrelated languages. This broad conception of affiliation and identity sharply contrasts with researchers’ tendency to treat the Roma as an isolated diasporic Indian community, obscuring their historical relationships with culturally similar, but linguistically distinct groups. Neglecting their elective ties with European and Ottoman Jews, as well as certain traveling groups in Central Europe, distorts Romani history, by propping up racist framing of the Roma as representative of a “pure,” “uncorrupted” culture. Modern Romani studies are premised on a linguistic view of kinship. “Only if isolation [of the field of Romani Gypsy studies] is shattered and a fundamental debate about the premises of Gypsy studies takes place in prestigious periodicals and is addressed to a broad academic public can we expect, perhaps, to arrive at a deeper understanding of the history of Gypsies.”3 In fact, the key premise upholding the isolation of Romani studies from other “Gypsy” studies is the construction of Roma ethnicity on the basis of linguistic models of kinship. In the first half of this introduction, I will show how the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American philologists, medievalists, and ethnographers delegitimized the Strangers’ language and the culture that this language expressed. In the latter half of the introduction, I will show that Nazi German racial classifications were adopted and, indeed, strengthened by the Romani diaspora, in part because it appealed to their own Romani ethnocentrism but also to make themselves sympathetic to a legal regime that only recognized them as a distinct racial group. These related developments reveal how the Strangers became lost as an object of historical inquiry. The task now is to recover their medieval past and integrate into global medieval studies and as a vital corrective to centuries of academic and popular misconceptions about so-called Gypsies. * * * Yenish settlements have historically clustered around the River Rhine that flows northward from its source in the Swiss Alps through France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and into the North Sea. Long before I had begun research into the Strangers, I lived for three years in the charming German town of Münster, which, though slightly beyond the Rhine Valley, is home to a sizable Yenish population.4 Tourist shops sell postcards bearing Yenish words alongside their German equivalents, but other than its potential to market the town as quirky, Yenish

Introduction

3

culture was largely invisible in historical treatments of the town and the Rhine Valley. The modern-day Yenish and Ḥalab Sīn-speakers have much in common. Both communities have concentrated settlements along the banks of the Rhine and the Nile, two northward-flowing rivers. They are both identified with begging and itinerancy, and they speak mixed languages. The Yenish language has a German grammatical base, and its vocabulary derives mainly from German, Hebrew, and Romani.5 That the Yenish maintained close contact with Jewish and Roma communities is evidenced in the significant lexical absorptions but is also substantiated through historical documentation. After the First World War, many traditionally Roma habits like begging, fortune-telling, and itinerancy were restricted in Germany, and the Roma were made to live in housing for the poor outside large urban areas. Though the Roma and Yenish plied similar trades, often occupied the same camps, and intermarried and absorbed each other’s vocabularies, their histories are rarely told together.6 Both groups were targeted by Nazi laws: Roma classified as “Gypsy” and the Yenish as “asocial.” Between 1935 and 1945, many Yenish were interned in camps and deported from Germany and the Netherlands, and as many as 500,000 Roma and an undetermined number of Yenish were exterminated in concentration and labor camps. On its face the historiographical separation between the Yenish and the Roma is clearly arbitrary, akin to deeming the Ojibwa nation as other than Indigenous because their language group is distinct from that of the Cherokee nation. Rather, anthropologists eschew essentializing groups based on “predetermined, global criteria.” Current discussions privilege defining indigeneity “in local and relational terms” that depend on context and relationships with their environment. As such, they construct ties through settlement in the Americas, shared belief systems, and lifestyles.7 So how did Strangers understand themselves and their relationship to broader society? The term “Stranger” suggests a specific outward stance. In 1908 the German Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel published an essay about those members of a given society who complicate the binary of exclusion and assimilation. They constitute “an element of the group itself . . . an element whose membership within the group involves being both outside it and confronting it.”8 It is precisely this ceaseless negotiation of belonging to non-Stranger communities and subsequent adaptations to shifting those communities’ needs that define the Strangers’ worldview. For Simmel community bonds are forged and solidified through economic relationships, like the division of labor and land ownership. Therefore, the archetypal Strangers were tradespeople who furnished products and services that the local population could not provide themselves, as well as European Jews who “were no owner of land—land not only in the physical sense but also metaphorically as a vital substance which is fixed, if not in space, then at least in an ideal position within the social environment.”9 Simmel’s reading, in its privileging of labor categories and property as key determinants of social class, has a distinctly Marxist cast, but the medieval Strangers organized themselves into professional tribes and did not claim specific territorial origins.10

4

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

It is precisely this definition of strangerhood that researchers Aparna Rao and Joseph Berland argued was the distinctly unifying principle—over and above ethnicity, religion, language, or nationality—of peripatetic populations in Asia and Africa.11 This shared identity as Strangers is reproduced in the names of contemporary Muslim Gypsy communities in the Balkans, Africa, and Asia, many of which are some form of the name ghurabā’. This apparent naming continuity underscores the foundational importance of the medieval Strangers as well as the deliberate cultivation of social status outside of the mainstream. The term gurbet entered the Ottoman Turkish lexicon sometime after the 1550s, designating the same groups as the Arabic ghurabā’.12 The Kurbat of Syria speak Domari; the Afghan and Iranian Ghorbat are Shi‘ite peripatetics who speak Ghorbati; and in Egypt and the Sudan “the most common description of Gypsy groups along the Nile is ghurabā’, which means Strangers.”13 In the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, where Muslims are grouped according to perceived origins, there were three main Muslim communities: the Gharīb, the Lhasa Khache, and the Wabaling. The Gharīb were distinguished by their non-Tibetan name and their low-status work as beggars and street cleaners. In 1961 and 1962, the Gharīb migrated to India.14 Additionally, many European Roma communities today also bear this name, rendered as Gurbet, and their dialects are called Gurbet Romani. Communities of Rom Gurbets settled in the Balkan states of Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.15 In Serbia the Gurbéti clan is Muslim. In Cyprus the Gurbet clan speak Gurbetçi, and in Crimea the Gurbét clan also call themselves Truchmén, which may be a corruption of Turkmen. In North America the Roma call the Travellers gurbet.16 The Stranger label has deep historical roots and enduring continuity, and the Strangers’ self-fashioning as an alienated people emerges in premodern writings and also in modern memoirs and ethnographies of Roma and similar groups. Jan Yoors, a Belgian Flemish non-Roma who left his family in 1934 at the age of twelve to live with a Roma traveling unit, related an illuminating exchange with Pulika, a Roma elder. When Yoors referred to the Kalderash Rom as Russian Gypsies, “Pulika wearily told me how misleading it was to single out Gypsies by a national identity, in view of their constant, wide-flung traveling. He said I at least should know they were ‘a race of strangers.’”17 Pulika rejected the homogenizing, territory-based national identities in favor of a “racial” identity not rooted in blood, territory, or language, but in solidarity with fellow land-rejecting people who were estranged from the status quo. Pulika upends Yoors’s assumed naturalness of identifying with national categories. As the historian Joan W. Scott has written, “categories of identity we take for granted as rooted in our physical bodies (gender and race) or our cultural (ethnic, religious) heritages are, in fact, retrospectively linked to those roots; they don’t follow predictably or naturally from them.”18 While the category of Strangers is also inadequate for capturing the multiplicity of people’s lives, its ambiguity allows for a multiplicity of affiliations. Scott continues, “There’s an illusory sameness established by referring to a category of person (women, workers, African Americans, homosexuals) as if it never changed, as if not the category, but only its historical circumstances varied over time.”19 But in this

Introduction

5

next section, I will examine how the modern European state ruptured Stranger solidarities, dividing the Stranger community to reflect identities accepted by modern nations. This shift fundamentally changed the ways in which scholars wrote about and imagined Strangers. Nevertheless, Strangerhood has proven to be a persistent principle uncompromised by centuries of exposure to the culture or language or history of these Strangers. Even when they have shared information about their professions and habits, as they did periodically in the Middle Ages and to nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century ethnographers, Strangers became no less strange to observers.20 As Carlo Ginzburg demonstrated in his microhistory The Cheese and the Worms, learning more about the heterodox cosmology of the miller Menocchio did not make him more relatable to his contemporaries. He remained strange until the very end.

Genetic Purity and Languages In 1808 the philologist Friedrich Schlegel advanced the hypothesis that Sanskrit was the ancestral language of the Indo-European language family, and Arthur de Gobineau developed this idea further in his On the Inequality of the Human Races (1861), by proposing the existence of a superior parent Aryan race in his 1861 book. This problematic linkage of language with race enjoyed wide acceptance in late nineteenth-century scientific communities, and the familial/genetic model of relations influenced the vocabulary of both fields of study. Languages belong to “families” with genetic lineages such that we can speak uncontroversially of “ancestral” and “parent” languages. “Sister” languages, like Arabic and Hebrew, share a common “ancestor.” A so-called “bastardized language”—such as American English from the perspective of a speaker of British English—referred to what is now known as a dialect. The “bastardization” conveys the judgment of linguistic illegitimacy and tainted transformations. Even if the concept of bastardization has fallen into disuse among linguists, the idea of linguistic purity still has academic and popular currency. In 1886 the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein (German Language Association) was founded with the express mission of isolating “pure” German language from the “foreign” vocabulary that had invaded it. While this association has been disbanded, several European states still host similar institutions. The Académie Française, for one, actively combats the corrupting “competition” and “real threat” of English in modern French.21 In short, the taxonomy of language families does not capture the full spectrum of language development. Language isolates, such as the Ainu language of Japan, have no apparent genetic relation to any known language. Following the logic of kinship, each language isolate constitutes a single language family, and by one recent estimate they make up 32 percent of all language families.22 Many other languages, like Jamaican Patois, developed through cultural contact, not as genetic offshoots of parent languages. Language contact produces specific varieties of linguistic change, and current linguistic modeling ascribes subsidiary status to those pidgins, creoles, and

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Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

multilingual mixed languages that do not slot into genetic models. Rather than a vertical genetic development, these types of languages result horizontally, from everyday exposure and exchange. A contact language can only fit into a family tree as the ancestor of a language family. Even though it possesses no single “parent,” it can have descendants.23 Pidgins, such as Namibian Black German, develop when two or more groups share no common language, and rather than learning each other’s languages, they typically mix the grammars and draw vocabulary from one of the languages to create a pidgin. So, pidgins do not initially serve as anyone’s native language, though nativized pidgins would then be considered a creole. A creole like Gullah, on the other hand, is the native language of a speech community. In the case of mixed languages, the grammatical base derives from one language, and the lexicon from one or another different language, most famously exemplified by Jewish languages other than Hebrew. Yiddish (JudeoGerman), for instance, has a German grammatical base interspersed with Hebrew vocabulary; Judezmo/Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Shuadit (Judeo-Occitan), Yevanic (Judeo-Greek), and Italkian (Judeo-Italian) have traditionally been considered “multi-genetic languages,” though more recent research rejects the kinship terminology, reframing Jewish languages in terms of “fusion” or “divergence and convergence.”24 This more flexible approach circumvents the rigid genetic model of linguistics that has sustained particular cultural hierarchies. The dynamism of contact better captures the lived experiences of language speakers and paths of linguistic development of mobile populations. While language families have some scientific validity, reliance on this model alone to explain all linguistic phenomena simplifies complex historical developments. The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot remarked that Western observers created subalterns by weaponizing language against foreign populations. Because these observers did not find grammar books or dictionaries among the so-called savages, because they could not understand or apply the grammatical rules that governed these languages, they promptly concluded that such rules did not exist. . . . [T]he field was uneven from the start; the objects contrasted were eminently incomparable.25

Many observers—from the ninth century to the present day—have resolved the incommensurability of Sīn grammar with those of recognized languages by demoting Sīn to a casual jargon used within a community of thieves, tricksters, and beggars. In spite of today’s interdisciplinary consensus that Sīn-speakers are disreputable people who share a degraded form of speech, medievalists and social scientists have been largely unaware of each other’s scholarship on the subject. Most medievalists do not know that the language of the Banū Sāsān is a living language, and, conversely, most anthropologists and sociologists are unaware of Sīn’s medieval history. How did these separate epistemological traditions result in the same problematic conclusion?

Introduction

7

Orientalist Discourses on Sīn-Speakers Alfred von Kremer, who served as the Austrian consul to Egypt from 1859 to 1862, published his observations on the country in two massive volumes entitled Aegypten (1863). The section on the Ḥalab and similar groups, which was translated into English and published the following year, opens with a comparison of the Jewish and Stranger diasporas. “Excepting the Jews there is no people so scattered over the earth as the gipsies. Homeless and yet everywhere at home, they have preserved their physiognomy, manners, and language.”26 Von Kremer evokes the exceptionality and strangeness of their perpetual deracination, a condition that feels intensified among the Strangers, because unlike the Jews, they claim no ancestral homeland. For von Kremer and for generations of scholars after him, their language—like their lineage—is condemned because it is unclassifiable and untraceable. “All these subdivisions of the Egyptian gipsies speak the same thievish slang language, which they call Sīm. Nothing certain is known concerning the origin of this word.”27 Following this statement, von Kremer includes 106 Sīm words that he learned from a snake-catcher in Cairo and from other native speakers in Upper Egypt. On the basis of this slender evidence he reaffirms his earlier impression of the language: “There can be no doubt we have here to do with a thievish slang dialect, made use of by the gipsies in order not to be understood by strangers. The circumstance that amongst themselves they speak Arabic, and Sīm only in the presence of strangers, is decisive on this point.”28 Von Kremer registers his exclusion from conversation as a sign of Sīn-speakers’ hostile intent, though all he seems to describe is a community that is, at minimum, bilingual. In spite of its obvious limitations, von Kremer’s branding has regrettably structured, as we shall see, much subsequent research on speakers of Sīm/Sīn. During her fieldwork with Egyptian Sīm-speakers, the sociologist Alexandra Parrs learned—through her Arabic-English translator—the Sīm words for “cell phone,” “thief,” “woman,” and “police” from a field informant. On the basis of this meager list, she heavy-handedly reaffirmed that “[t]he term ‘thievish language’ used by von Kremer does, in this case, express a literal meaning. Sim has become a language or a code for theft and has reduced [its speakers] to that very identity.”29 A language implies historical and cultural depth on the part of its speakers, whereas a code suggests artificially or spontaneously formed speech, falling outside of genetic linguistic development. Von Kremer’s pronouncements have cast a long shadow over subsequent scholarship, superseding findings that directly counter his analysis. For instance, in the late 1990s the anthropologist Karin van Nieuwkerk interviewed female entertainers in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, who spoke Sīm. “How to understand the use of a secret language by a group which apparently has no marginal and excluded social status? Why do they have a secret code if they have nothing to hide and are more or less accepted?”30 The assumption that Sīm-speakers must be dishonorable becomes difficult to reconcile with the direct observation that ordinary Egyptians also speak this language. The medievalist encounter with the Banū Sāsān and their language, though limited to texts and images, has yielded similar research outcomes. Part of the difficulty

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Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

stems from how languages have been traditionally taught. Acknowledgment of language contact in the premodern Middle East has been mostly limited to Jewish languages like Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Syriac.31 The Andalusian historian and geographer al-Bakrī (d. 1046 CE) transcribed samples of an Arabic pidgin spoken among Black residents of the town of Mārīdī in southern Sudan.32 The most extensive and most influential historical treatment of the Banū Sāsān remains Clifford Bosworth’s two-volume study, based on two lengthy didactic poems—one from tenth-century Iraq and the other from fourteenth-century Syria—that aimed to inform an Arab audience about the tribe’s language and culture. Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī, the author of the earlier poem, identified as a member of the Banū Sāsān, and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, the author of the second one, claimed that a patron had commissioned him to embed himself among the Banū Sāsān and write about their language. Bosworth ultimately concluded that the vocabulary presented in the poems formed part of a jargon or a criminal argot.33 Because of Bosworth’s outsize influence on this topic, the jargon paradigm enjoys wide acceptance and even imaginative elaboration. One medievalist concluded that “[t]he Banū Sāsān argot seems to have been a highly developed code. Its basic appeal to beggars and enterprising travelers hardly disappeared with the Banū Sāsān themselves—coding one’s speech for an illicit trade, of course, seems transhistorical.”34 He continued by comparing sīn to graffiti in North American train yards. Bosworth acknowledged that certain features of the Sāsāni language challenged his classification and his assumptions about slang formation. He remarked that “[o]ne would not expect to find jargon words for prepositions or conjunctions,” like “upon,” “by,” “until,” and “up to.”35 Occasionally, Bosworth came across evidence of a Sāsāni word’s relationship to ancient Middle Eastern languages. In one of Abū Dulaf ’s verses, a Sāsāni man clandestinely defecates beneath a mosque carpet, then cleans himself by wiping his buttocks against the wall of the prayer niche.36 The Sāsāni term used for prayer niche is midhqān, and in ancient South Arabian inscriptions, mdqnt and mdqn means “a place of prayer within a temple.”37 Bosworth dutifully acknowledges these occurrences as curiosities, while resisting further analysis. To complicate the jargon paradigm, some of the premodern Sīn terms also appear in languages of modern peripatetics, so how to account for a jargon that persists for nearly 1,000 years? These categories imply unseriousness, social instability, and antisocial behavior and also capture none of Sīn’s linguistic complexity, disincentivizing researchers from treating it as a worthy subject of investigation. As I wrestled with this question during my research, it became ever clearer that the jargon framework was too narrow and should be discarded in favor of something more encompassing—namely, a language. Languages spoken by itinerant groups with nonconforming grammars are frequently described by scholarly and lay observers as “secret languages” that function primarily to conceal speakers’ conniving activities from presumably upright outsiders.38 Even the most well-meaning researchers do not examine these languages as minority dialects, rather centering their own experiences of incomprehension when confronted with this novelty. Furthermore, if they cannot understand these minority dialects, then even ordinary features of these languages

Introduction

9

are interpreted as extraordinary. Similarly, an anthropologist who studies the Mugat Gypsies in northern Afghanistan, has documented important Mugati vocabulary as evidence of their so-called argot. After presenting a list of Mugati terms for such household items as rice, plate, and bread, he wondered why a “secret language” would extend into the vocabulary of everyday life.39 Of course, as Trouillot reminds us, “grammar functions in all languages.”40 Exempting nonWesterners from the natural order of things removes them from ordinary historical processes and ultimately prevents researchers from objective engagement with these subjects and their languages. This wrongly perceived absence of linguistic order was interpreted as evidence of either the freedom of noble savages or of their unredeemed primitiveness.

Unthinkability What historical possibilities have been obscured, if not foreclosed, by internalizing particular narratives? In Middle Eastern historiography one can cite the inviolability of the Qur’an as a concept long unquestioned by historians. David S. Powers has written frankly about his own struggles with this taboo. “The idea that the early Muslim community might have revised the consonantal skeleton of the Qur’ān is unthinkable not only for Muslims but also for many Islamicists—including, until recently, myself. This unthinkable proposition is one of the central concerns of the present monograph.”41 Only when Powers was willing to break with this tradition did he examine some of the earliest Qur’an manuscripts for evidence of revision and tampering, ultimately identifying significant changes to the core Qur’anic text. Similarly, the status of blue and green eyes as despised in medieval Islamdom has only recently been entertained. The physiognomy of whiteness has been so widely assumed to convey neutral, if not positive, associations that medievalists have rather assumed scribal error than entertain the possibility that medieval authors intended to express dislike of pale eyes.42 Unthinkability in the context of Romani history functions similarly and extends into two key realms. First, there is a pervasive assumption that the Roma, as unlettered nomads, left no recorded history, so the field of premodern Romani history barely exists. The earliest written records about the Roma appear in fifteenth-century Europe, penned by non-Roma observers. Historical knowledge about pre-fifteenth-century Roma is inferred through analysis of their Romani language. Its classification as an Indo-Aryan language indicates historical roots in western India. Kurdish, Persian, Greek, and Turkish loanwords in modern Romani point to migrations and long stays through these territories. Related Indo-Aryan languages and dialects, such as Lomavren, a mixed language spoken by the Lom of Armenia, and Domari, spoken by the Dom of West Asia, became markers of a distinct racial category. Second, after the Second World War, the Roma reinforced racial pseudoscience to represent themselves before European publics as a racialized nation in

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Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

exactly those homogenizing terms set forth by Oriental philologists and in Nazi discriminatory laws. Historians have not challenged this framing.

Constructing a Roma Racial Subject in Modern Europe As discussed earlier, central to a racialized myth of language was the notion that one could eradicate “intruders” and isolate pure language. Linguistic hierarchies arose with “less pure” nongenetic languages like creoles, pidgins, and mixed languages occupying an uncertain classification and scientific validation. The pseudoscientific genetic model has not been abandoned but rather strengthened by parallel racial pseudoscience. Racial families can be “bastardized” by racemixing, diluting the assumed purity of genetic racial groups. Although the Roma endured nearly 400 years of slavery, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in Wallachia and Moldavia, they are more commonly associated with a later period of European mass violence, the Nazi German campaign of racial genocide.43 The Nuremberg Laws, passed in September 1935, defined citizenship as something only those with German “racial” heritage could claim. A follow-up decree issued on November 14 that same year defined degrees of Jewishness, and on November 26, a parallel law defining Gypsies (Zigeuner). The distorted racial logic outlined here still persists, as shall be seen, in contemporary understandings of the Roma community. 1. Z pure Gypsy (Vollzigeuner or stammechter Zigeuner) 2. ZM+ Zigeunermischling with predominantly Gypsy blood 3. ZM Zigeunermischling with equal parts German and Gypsy blood a. a ZM degree I is a person who has one German and one pure Gypsy parent b. a ZM degree II is a person who has one German and one ZM degree I parent 4. ZM- Zigeunermischling with predominantly German blood 5. NZ Nichtzigeuner encompasses all remaining cases of non-Gypsies.44 The construction of the first concentration camp for Roma began months after this declaration. Between 1935 and 1945, as many as 500,000 Roma were exterminated in concentration and labor camps alongside an unknown number of itinerants, such as the Yenish. When Nazi Germany fell, Allied forces pursued policies of denazification and reparations. In 1953 the West German government passed legislation to compensate survivors of the Holocaust who had been targeted on “grounds of political opposition to National Socialism or for reasons of race, religion or ideology.” Under this formulation Jewish survivors of the Holocaust received reparations, but Romani citizens of Germany who made these same claims upon the state were denied them. According to West German officials, the Roma had only been targeted

Introduction

11

by the Nazi regime as asocials and criminals, making them ineligible for compensation.45 Ironically, this denial of reparations forced the Roma to beg West Germany and nongovernmental organizations for charity, although it was their public begging that had initially inspired Nazi condemnation. The only possible responses were to either question the restrictive definition of genocide or to adjust their petitions to the demands of the law. Choosing the latter, Romani activists adopted wholesale the racial criteria of the Nazi regime and began redefining themselves as a nonterritorial nation, unified by the Romani language.46 (The Yenish do not speak Romani, so they have not been included in the Roma’s reparations claims.) In 1971, a number of Roma groups convened for the first World Romani Congress in England, where members voted to adopt a Romani flag and anthem and to repudiate the exonym “Gypsy” in favor of “Rom,” the Romani term for “man.”47 In a deliberate parallel with the Hebrew Shoah (“destruction”), in the year 2000, Ian Hancock, a linguist of Romani origin, began using the term Porrajmos—a Romani word that means “devouring”—to refer to the Roma Holocaust.48 The term has not gained wide currency, as it is “used by only a handful of activists, many of them non-Roma, and it is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of victims and survivors,”49 but the move is part of a broader political strategy. As the sociologists Andrew Woolford and Stefan Wolejszo have noted, “much depends on the ability of victim groups to articulate and gain public and political acceptance for the trauma narratives they use to describe their suffering and to communicate the necessity of reparative action.”50 Related efforts have focused on influencing European language policies and making Roma rights a human rights issue. Linguists worked to standardize the Romani language in Latin script, and activists petitioned nations to sign the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages to recognize Romani as a minority language within their border. When Spain became a signatory to the charter in 2001, it agreed to recognize Catalan and Basque as minority languages but not Romani. Other efforts include encouraging the teaching of Romani in European universities by publishing language-learning materials.51 In April 1996 Roma activists founded the European Roma Rights Centre to centralize the struggle against anti-Roma legislation and incidents, like police brutality, forced sterilization of women, and segregated schooling.52 These developments have had varying influences within European Romani communities. More successful has been the official German response to Roma suffering. A memorial to Roma and Sinti survivors of the Holocaust was dedicated in 2012 in Berlin. Of all of the activists’ adopted proposals, the name change from “Gypsy” to “Roma” has had the greatest influence on scholarly discourse about traveling communities. Replacing usages of “Gypsy” with “Roma” flattens differences in this cultural landscape, and the nomenclature presents certain challenges for specialists. (I myself have not escaped this problem. This book’s very title is a capitulation to the erasure of ghurabā’ from historical literature. The Arabic word is unfamiliar to Arabists; Gypsy is culturally offensive; and Roma is the most recognizable term for contemporary readers.) The erasures from this new convention are handily

12

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

illustrated from a recent New Yorker article about the effects of the Syrian civil war in the northern town of Saraqib: “Many of Saraqib’s thirty thousand inhabitants trace their roots to Ottoman times, though in recent decades a community of Roma has settled on the south side, cornering the market in dentistry.”53 As far as I know, there is no community of Roma in Saraqib, though there is a documented Dom community that specializes in dentistry. I presume that the New Yorker journalist was informed that “Gypsies” lived in the city, then substituted this problematic term with the preferred, though imprecise, “Roma.”54 These distinctions have import, because Dom and Rom inhabit West Asia. In fact, a Romani community lives in the city of Zargar, near the Iranian capital of Tehran.55

Conclusion The creation of a sealed and bounded Rom identity serves the aims of Romani nationalism, a movement that arose from the post–Second World War erasure of Romani suffering and denial of European citizenship, but it has a distorting effect on any studies of Romani history. After fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Hungary, Michael Stewart concluded that “the Rom do not have an ethnic identity. For them, identity is constructed and constantly remade in the present in relations with significant others, not something inherited from the past.”56 Historians can appreciate the political aims of Romani nationalism while not wholly accepting its premise of homogeneity. The Strangers have historically eschewed discrete identities, in favor of more expansive associations. Acknowledging these broader associations would pave the way for, say, Romani-Yenish-Jewish histories of early modern Europe or histories of medieval Middle Eastern Strangers, in which mixed languages like Yiddish and Yenish are studied anthropologically, and begging is not ascribed to social or racial deviance. Mixed languages bear witness to long and complex cultural interactions, and professional beggars participated in informal economies with varying degrees of competence, creativity, and financial success. Perceptions of beggars as criminals who speak in coded language to defraud naïve publics have been strongly influenced by state laws that criminalize and pathologize public begging, obscuring the possible appeal of subsisting on charitable donations.57 For one, the earnings of the women, men, and children who begged were not subject to state taxation or oversight. In fact, one tenthcentury Sāsāni poet suggested that their begging was a form of public taxation that exceeded even a state’s financial authority: “We [the Banū Sāsān] exact a tax from all mankind, from China to Egypt, and to Tangier.”58 Secondly, there is no major initial financial investment or business overhead, such as a craftsperson would need to purchase raw materials, apply for vendor permits, or rent a market stall. Without any operating expenses, all the money collected is clean profit. Thirdly, the money had not been borrowed, so there existed no obligation of repayment— with or without interest. It had also not been stolen, so earners assumed no adverse legal consequences. In short, beggars possessed their earnings free and clear of bureaucracies and institutions. As the preacher ʿAjīb counseled his fellow ghurabā’

Introduction

13

in a thirteenth-century shadow play, “Let your finest robe be of rags, and your greatest concern to collect money. If you follow these two pieces of advice, you will be safe from bankruptcy and debt.”59 From the perspective of the ghurabā’, begging could serve as a theater of aspiration, just as any other profession. While this type of financial autonomy also brought financial insecurity and social isolation, it crucially freed people to construct a society alongside but very distinct from the majority one. They maintained their languages over centuries, cultivated craft expertise, and developed a rich literary heritage. What began as an attempt to identify a casual reference in a weaver’s notebook has developed into the reconstruction of an archaic language and the history of its speakers. It is nothing short of a radical reimagining of the Islamicate Middle Period. The guiding question of this Introduction has been “how did the ghurabā’ grouping disappear from collective historical consciousness?” The following chapters highlight the interpretive choices that displaced the ghurabā’ as historical subjects and the resulting silences that shape our understanding of these groups. In post–Second World War historiography the history of eastern ghurabā’ has been isolated from those of the European Roma, the Sīn language reduced to a deviant slang or a secret language, their labor as beggars or other street workers denigrated as dishonorable, and their opaque heritage interpreted as hostile dissimulation. Chapter 1 opens with a reconstruction of the early Islamic history of the Zuṭṭ, a medieval Romani tribe that formed part of a larger Banū Sāsān tribal confederation. The Banū Sāsān renamed themselves ghurabā’ by the late thirteenth century. Though not all tribal members of the Banū Sāsān were linked by belief systems or ethnicity, they did share common lifestyles and the Sīn language. Chapter 2 details the history and the linguistic characteristics of Sīn. In Chapter 3, I read Ibn Dāniyāl’s (d. 710/1311) shadow play Wondrous and Strange as an ethnographic map of the underground economy of thirteenthcentury Cairo. This singular text offers insights into the interdependence of underground and above ground economies. The professional specializations of Sīn speakers testify to their adaptability in quickly shifting landscapes. They developed niches as unlicensed medical workers (eye doctor, circumciser of girls), acrobats, animal trainers, astrologers, beggars, and laborers (torchbearing night watchmen and camel drivers). In this section, I also focus on the personal letters and verse of Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār (d. 749/1348–9), a vernacular poet who explicitly identified as a gharīb, lived in the gharīb quarter of medieval Cairo, and integrated Sīn terminology into his work. His poetry mostly concerns themes that, for his particular historical moment, were particularly voluptuous: beer, hashish, wine, men who could not satisfy their female lovers, penises, and unrestrained sexuality. The implications of gharīb-authored literature for medieval Arabic letters are tremendous, because such a minority voice has not previously been acknowledged. Al-Miʿmār’s own references to his living situation, to Sīn, and to the ghurabā’ have been misunderstood so that one modern biographer concluded that “we can be certain of the poet’s membership in the urban middle class.”60 It is necessary to place al-Miʿmār and his particular innovations within the proper cultural context. Chapter 4 unsettles presumptions about Romani and gharīb nomadism,

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Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

by pinpointing the locations of the urban settlements of Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’ in Iberia, West Asia, and northern Africa, with close attention paid to the communal homes, as well as the neighborhoods, streets, and cemeteries bearing their names. The final three chapters turn to the innovative manuscript and print cultures pioneered by ghurabā’ astrologers. Chapter 5 explores the illustrated astrological books that emerged by the thirteenth century and were known by their Sīn name, bulhān. These large-scale works inspired similar astrological book genres in the Ottoman Turkish, Safavid Iranian, and Mughal (Gūrkānī) Indian empires and in the Quṭb Shāhī Sultanate of southern India. In Chapters 6 and 7 the focus turns to blockprinted amulets produced by the ghurabā’ (and pilgrimage certificates also probably printed by them) in West Asia, northern Africa, and Iberia from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. This print phase was remarkable for its early adoption, centuries-long duration, and multilingualism, but historians of European and Arabic print have consistently downplayed its historical significance. I intervene in this debate to analyze not only gharīb techniques of production but to also establish plausible timing and routes of transmission of blockprinting technology through Hungary into the Holy Roman Empire in the first decades of the fifteenth century. The production of single-page devotional woodcuts in Bohemia and Bavaria in the 1410s coincided with the arrival of “Egyptian” bands to the region, and I argue that these phenomena were likely linked. The Epilogue considers how this book has laid the foundation for a transhistorical, transregional Ghurabā’ studies. This book does not exhaustively cover every facet of medieval gharīb existence but offers readers a sensitive treatment of their daily lives and the literature and crafts through which they uniquely and enduringly expressed their culture.

CChapter 1 THE ROMA, BANŪ SĀSĀN, AND THE GHURABĀ’

Who Were the Banū Sāsān? The name “Banū Sāsān” translates to “the sons of Sāsān” or “the children of Sāsān” and in most contexts is rendered as “the tribe of Sāsān.” In my first book I dismissed them as “a band of 3rd/9th-century beggars,” continuing a tradition of casual ascriptions that did not take the perspective of the Sāsānis into account.1 Instead of identifying the Banū Sāsān as “the shadowy brotherhood of the medieval underworld”2 or simply “the name allotted to these bandits,”3 the group should be understood as a tribal entity. The Banū Sāsān was a multiethnic, multiconfessional group that consciously styled itself as a tribal nation, with an eponymous founder, subtribes organized by profession, local shaykhs, and a mixed language called Sīn. By the late thirteenth century the term ghurabā’ (Strangers) had become synonymous with the Banū Sāsān conglomeration. The sources for this investigation were penned largely by people who identified as ghurabā’ and others who were closely allied with them (Table 1.1).

Tribal Nomenclature Two tenth-century Sāsāni poets wrote ethnographic poems about this patronage group. One of them, Abū Dulaf Misʿar b. Muhalhil al-Yanbūʿī al-Khazrajī (d. second half of the tenth century), composed a long poem whose narrator claims to be of “al-qawm al-bahālīl, banī l-ghurr, banī sāsān,” which reads as a standard statement of tribal pedigree.4 Terminology related to tribes (qawm, āl, shaʿb, banū, qabīla, faṣīla, ʿimāra, baṭn, fakhidh, ʿashīra, etc.) is notoriously unstable, but we can roughly understand this passage to mean that the narrator belonged to the “confederation of the beggar chiefs,” as bahālīl means “beggar chiefs” in the dialect of the Banū Sāsān. In turn, the bahālīl group is divided into the tribes of al-ghurr and sāsān, neither of which I have been able to trace in the sources. In this same poem the narrator identified the beggars who use false tears to solicit charity as umarāʾ al-qawm, or the princes of the people.5 Individual members of the Banū Sāsān assume tribal identities and construct the collective as tribal.

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Table 1.1  Key Sources on the Premodern Ghurabā’ Al-Aḥnaf al-ʿUkbarī (tenth century)

Iraq

Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī (second half of tenth century) Al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122)

Iraq

Ibn Dāniyāl (d. 710/1311)

Cairo

ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī (d. fl. 646/1248)

Syria

Anonymous in 745/1345

Iran

Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349)

Iraq and Syria

Iraq

Qaṣīda sāsāniyya sixteen lines survive Qaṣīda sāsāniyya 196-line poem Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī fifty picaresque tales Bābat ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb shadow play Kashf al-asrār prose Ketāb-e sāsāniyān ba-kamāl vocabulary list Qaṣīda fī lughat al-ghurabā’ seventy-five-line poem

The name of the second Sāsāni poet Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAqīl b. Muḥammad al-Aḥnaf al-ʿUkbarī (d. late tenth century) indicates that he had a clubfoot (aḥnaf) and that he came from ʿUkbara, a town located between Samarra and Baghdad. Al-Thaʿālibī referred to him as “the poet of the beggars,”6 and ʿUkbarī himself referred to the Banū Sāsān as his family. “My brothers of the Banī Sāsān, people of shrewdness and good fortune, / Theirs is the land of Khurasan, and then Qāshān as far as India, / And as far as Byzantium and Zanj, and to Bulghār and Sind.”7 ʿUkbarī’s delineation of the territory controlled by the Banū Sāsān is so large as to be meaningless, suggesting that he was probably aiming at what a thirteenth-century commentator expressed about them: “They have no ancestry; their only ties are to the earth.”8 In the testimonies of both Abū Dulaf and ʿUkbarī, the language of tribal identity need not refer narrowly to blood ties or an ethnic identity. As Ira M. Lapidus has aptly shown for the premodern Middle East, the tribe was a social construct that could be based on “the agglomeration of diverse units, including individuals, clients, religious devotees, and fractions of clans as well as perhaps lineages and clans.”9 These poems, addressed to outsiders, may also have served to consolidate a group identity that was still crystallizing in this period.

Ancestral Tribal Leader The Banū Sāsān was named for its ancestral leader, a certain Shaykh Sāsān. Some eighth-century writers identified this Sāsān as the son of the pre-Islamic Persian emperor Bahman b. Isfandiyār. According to this version of events, when Sāsān was denied access to the throne, he abandoned court and took to a peripatetic existence. His followers became known as the Sons of Sāsān.10 By claiming a noble lineage, the Banū Sāsān strategically deployed genealogy to elevate their social status in a society where status depended on genealogy. Arnold Franklin has shown that medieval Jews, Amazigh, and Persians claimed similarly prestigious lineages as “a strategy that various populations utilized as they sought cultural



1. The Roma, Banū Sāsān, and the Ghurabā’

17

legitimacy within the medieval Arab-Islamic world.”11 Neither medieval Sāsāni writers nor their sympathetic contemporaries corroborated the specific Iranian origin of this story, though they did emphasize the royal and ancient nobility of Sāsān and their pride as his descendants. In his book about the secrets of his own Banū Sāsān tribe, he claimed that preachers held the most prestige in the Banū Sāsān, because Shaykh Sāsān had originally established this group.12 Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349), in his qaṣīda poem on the Banū Sāsān, described them as “heirs to King Sāsān,” who “linked [their] ancestry to the lineage of Sāsān.”13 A character in Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play about the Banū Sāsān proclaims: “We are the Banū Sāsān, descended from kings who possessed golden ornaments.”14 They consistently styled themselves as heirs to a prestigious and wealthy royal dynasty. Sāsān remained an important historical-mythical figure of the Banū Sāsān; however, in actuality, a single person never presided over the entire group. Rather, members of the confederation divided themselves along occupational lines and recognized leaders of these smaller units.

Professional Subtribes Although early Sāsāni writers included various groups, like peoples coming from Kabul, East Africa, and Sind, among the Banū Sāsān, the tribal confederation selforganized along professional lines.15 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries each professional Sāsāni grouping was consistently named a ṭāʾifa (pl. ṭawāʾif), a word that translates as “clans” or “subtribes,” so that one can read of, say, a ṭāʾifa specializing in astrology and another in driving camels. Mamluk Egyptian chroniclers adopted this terminology when they referred to the chief of the beggars as shaykh al-ṭawāʾif. By the fifteenth century, ṭarīqa (“path”; pl. ṭarāʾiq) came into use as another name for these professional orders.16 Significantly, at this time, the terms ṭāʾifa and ṭarīqa also designated an individual Sufi order. A Sufi order was typically named for its founding spiritual leader, and its members shared a spiritual genealogy leading back to this shaykh. Each local order was also headed by a shaykh. Sāsānis, like Sufis, created social solidarities independent of kinship ties, though they only derived social legitimacy by reproducing the idioms of tribal kinship. The professional arrangements of the Banū Sāsān may have been forerunners to the sixteenth-century formation of craft guilds in the Ottoman Arab provinces. A craft guild, also called a ṭāʾifa, adopted the same tribal model as Sufi orders and Sāsāni subsections. A guild typically claimed ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib or another contemporary of Muḥammad as its spiritual patron, and a shaykh presided over the members. Al-Raḍī Muḥammad b. al-Ḥusayn, a late sixteenth-century Cairene author, explicitly identified various subsections of the Banū Sāsān—the entertainers, drummers, Qur’ān-reciting beggars, fortune-tellers, monkey trainers, magicians, land surveyors, mosque supervisors, and dues collectors—as craft guilds.17 But as a member of the prestigious guild of physicians and barbers, al-Raḍī Muḥammad held Sāsāni orders in low esteem, denouncing their

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unapprenticed members whose labor undermined the expertise of respectable craftsmen.18 Al-Raḍī Muḥammad’s insistent diatribe about Sāsāni social and professional illegitimacy came just as craft guilds emerged in Cairo, so this timing begs the question: did craft guilds develop in reaction to Sāsāni laborers as a way to authenticate the professionalism of majority workers? The Sāsāni ṭawā’if offered the public credible and cheaper alternatives to professional crafts and services. Notably, astrologers and lay healers uttered spells, prepared unguents, and wrote amulets for sick clients who could not afford professional medical care, and street preachers lured worshippers from mosques with their fiery speeches and feigned tears.19 In the ongoing competition for customers, the professional tribes of the Banū Sāsān were better positioned to set local prices and to create new sales strategies. Some Sāsāni preachers planted colleagues in the crowd, who would pose as Jews or Christians and loudly proclaim that the preacher’s words had inspired their spontaneous conversion to Islam. All in all, rather than constituting a mysterious, dysfunctional social group, the Banū Sāsān was neither deviant nor obscure. The Banū Sāsān manifested traditional tribal attributes, sharing a common line of descent (from Shaykh Sāsān), recognizing a tribal leader, reproducing their customs and trades through generations (begging, entertaining), and speaking a tribal mixed language (lughat al-shaykh Sāsān), about which more will be said in Chapter 2.

Renaming the Banū Sāsān to Ghurabā’ Sometime in the early 1200s Sāsānis began the process of renaming their own Banū Sāsān confederation to ghurabā’ (Strangers). The early phases of this renaming began among the Sāsāni astrologers, whose cultural contributions will be treated in greater detail in this book’s final three chapters.20 Writing in early thirteenth-century Syria, Jawbarī opened his chapter on street astrologers by calling attention to their alternative name and to their multilingualism. “Know that this ṭā’ifa [of the Banū Sāsān] is called the ghurabā’, and they sell amulets and have poems in Sīn.”21 Although Jawbarī referred only to the astrologers as Strangers, Ibn Dāniyāl (d. 710/1310) divided the Banū Sāsān into Strangers and littérateurs. In ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb the title character ʿAjīb al-Dīn calls out to his fellow Sāsānis: “You are kinspeople, the Strangers and the other people of letters among the Banū Sāsān!”22 By the time that Ḥillī composed his poem Qaṣīda fī lughat al-ghurabāʾ wa-funūnihim wa-ḥiyalihim (a qaṣīda on the language of the ghurabāʾ, their arts, and their wiles) in the fourteenth century, the term ghurabā’ had replaced Banū Sāsān as the group’s preferred name, as it appears nowhere in the poem.23 Ḥillī only refers to this group as ghurabāʾ, their factions as ṭawāʾif al-ghurabāʾ, and to their language as lughat al-ghurabāʾ.24 Manuela Höglmeier made this connection, noting that in premodern Islamicate literature on beggars and tricksters, ghurabā’ was interchangeable with Banū Sāsān.25 Still, the language that Ḥillī explores is the same one that tenth-century authors had presented as lughat Banī Sāsān. The transformation of the group’s name, as suggested in al-Ḥillī’s poem, is confirmed by a Cairene street performer named Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Zarkhūrī (d. c. 1482),



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who adds that this change was an internal one. The tenth chapter of his Zahr al-basātīn fī ʿilm al-mashātīn (Flower of the Gardens: On the Science of Mechanical Legerdemain) “is about the orders (ṭarāʾiq) of the Banī Sāsān and their working techniques. I know that this order (ṭarīqa) consists of various types and techniques, but they call themselves al-ghurabāʾ. Like the peasants (al-fallāḥīn), they are also called al-aʿwām.”26 The ghurabāʾ name came to designate more than just Banū Sāsān in the medieval and early modern periods, as it became the classical Arabic umbrella term for Gypsy-like peoples, who were viewed wrongly as a unified ethniclinguistic group.27 The term more accurately applied to people who were both estranged from and dependent on settled communities for economic support. By plying marginal or disreputable trades, they could maintain cultural distance from the majority culture, allowing them space to maintain ancestral minority languages intact or by speaking mixed languages that combined the features of the majority group’s language and their own minority languages. Identifying the proximate causes of a group’s name change often identifies a crucial moment in the history of social formations. In the Qur’an, revealed between 610 and 632, the word muslim designated a generic monotheist, which included Jews, Christians, early Muslims, and other Arabian worshippers of a single god. At the end of the seventh century, the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) urged the early Believers to redefine muslim more strictly as a monotheist who recognized Muḥammad as the final prophet and the Qur’an as the word of God.28 Ethnic terms also formalized in the early Islamic period. The Arab expanded and contracted based on political exigency. Although Greek and Roman authors referred, respectively, to Yemen as Arabia Eudaemon and Arabia Felix, the inhabitants of that region only considered themselves Arabs when “it became politically advantageous to do so in the early Islamic period.”29 Once Arab Muslims established themselves as the dominant military and political force of Arabia and parts of the Roman and Persian Empires, the identification with the Umayyad victors came easily. Similarly, before the eleventh century, the term Kurd designated a generic nomad, only narrowing to a specific ethnic group that spoke a range of dialects after Turkic nomads swept into West Asia in the eleventh century, necessitating a differentiation between the many, competing nomadic groups in the region.30 We have already examined the context of genocide and reparations that led European Roma to reject the “Gypsy” label in the mid-twentieth century. But what external or internal pressures led the ghurabā’ (Strangers) to replace the Banū Sāsān tribal identity with a term that spotlighted their social alienation? It is possible that at least two phenomena were developing concurrently. The prestige of the Sāsān name derived from its associations with the ancient Sasanian Empire in Persia. Centuries after Arabs had conquered the Sasanians in 651, identifying as “the sons of Sāsān” no longer suggested a recent inheritance of Iranian wealth and sophistication, necessitating a change. A second possible influence emerged as the professional identities of the Banū Sāsān became entrenched in local communities and their trades were reproduced generationally. Their labor, socially rejected and often considered menial, along with their

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residence on the physical edges of cities could have formed the basis of a new solidarity, expressed beautifully through a declaration of estrangement. Because ghurabāʾ literally means “strangers” or “foreigners,” historians have understandably translated it as such but often with a coda about how the translation registers as curious in the given context. In this way the history of the term ghurabā’ parallels that of the English word “queer,” which entered the English language in the sixteenth century but came to signify in the twentieth century a person whose sexual habits or identity lay outside of the European-American heteronormative. A gharīb similarly lay outside of the Arabo-Muslim sociocultural normative. The various significations of the term ghurabāʾ have also been obscured when researchers read all uses of the word from the ninth to the sixteenth century as having the same signification. This terminology also entered the Ottoman Turkish lexicon after the 1550s. In a recent article published on the vocabularies used for Gypsies in Ottoman/ Turkish lexicon and their etymologies, gurbet is mentioned [as] one of the names attributed [to] Gypsies. . . . Similarly, in Ottoman archival prose from the second half of the sixteenth century we see terms such as gurbet taifesi or cemaat-i gurbetan (community of gurbets). And this community is almost exclusively mentioned together with the Gypsies.31

When the Banū Sāsān renamed themselves ghurabāʾ sometime in the late thirteenth century, they had created a new autonym that is crucial for understanding the medieval history of ethnic formation in western Asia and northern Africa. The ghurabā’ spoke Sīn, so historians now have the name of the collective (ghurabā’) and a language (Sīn) as entry points to the history of these marginalized people, their migrations, and their interactions in broader society. This new information should offer a more complex view of medieval Middle Eastern demographics. Historically, the Banū Sāsān had been ethnically and religiously mixed, counting among its ranks the Zuṭṭ, Persians, Aramaic speakers, Jews, and Nubians. All of its members shared a certain status as social outcasts. The recognition of ghurabā’ as the classical Arabic term for so-called Gypsies also helps connect the history of Roma, Dom, Lom, and similar groups to their medieval pasts in Arab and Persian lands. Not all Roma have left western Asia. As mentioned earlier, the Zargari of Iran still speak Romani today. And those Roma who migrated to Europe show Arabic and Persian influences in their dialects. Several Romani dialects in Italy, for instance, contain Arabic and Persian vocabulary, but they are often overlooked by Roma linguists who may not have background in Arabic or Persian. The Sinti of Tre Venezie say térso “deaf ” (< Arabic aṭrash “deaf ”), hángari “soot” (< Persian ahangar “smith”), and xal “tumor, cancer” (< Arabic khāl “mole”). In the Vlach Romani dialects of Italy, the word fílo “ivory” probably derives from the Arabic term for elephant, fīl. The Calabrese Roma also use bustan (< Arabic bustān “fruit garden”) to mean “fruit garden.”32 Furthermore, many Stranger communities in Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Sudan still bear names derived from the Arabic ghurabā’. The Kurbat of Syria



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speak Domari. Naturally, these peripatetic groups are not confined by national boundaries, and the Ghorbati are also defined as a Shiʿite group in Afghanistan;33 and in Egypt and Sudan “[d]ie häufigste Umschreibung der Zigeunergruppen am Nil lautet nämlich ghuraba’, d.h. Fremder.”34 In Iran, Ġorbats constitute a minority group living in several cities of Mazandaran (a province on the north of Iran) and Tehran. The term “Ġorbats,” in plural, stands for different groups living in several cities in Mazandaran, and embraces all clans and communities of the Ġorbat population.35

In 1473 the Venetian diplomat Giosaphat Barbaro was dispatched to visit the Aq-qoyunlu leader Uzun Hasan. As his party approached the Taurus mountains from the north, he found “steep hills inhabited by a certain people called CORBI, different in language from all their neighbors, exceedingly cruel, and not so much thievish as openly given to robbery.” As he got closer to Tabriz, he also “met with certain TURKMEN, who, with certain Corbi in their company, came toward us, asking us where we went.”36 D. T. Potts understood the “Corbi” to have been Kurds, but we should entertain the possibility that Barbaro had encountered Ghorbati tribes attached to the Turkmen as clients. The two groups are often mentioned together in early modern sources. The anonymous author of a 1617 chronicle about Golconda, India, under the Quṭb Shāhī dynasty referred to “Turkmen and foreign troops” (javanan-i gharīb va turkman), “foreign and Turkmen brave ones” (dilavaran-i gharīb va turkman), and “foreign and Turkmen commanders” (silahdaran-i gharīb va turkman).37 Could Ghorbati and Turkmen groups have served as soldiers? If these readings are correct, then medieval and early modern Turkmen history may be another useful entry point into histories of the ghurabā’. Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Aleppo: Private Journal In this book’s opening passage, a silk weaver named Kamāl al-Dīn was listening to a street musician in Aleppo in early 998/1589. He classified lisān al-ghurabāʾ as one of seven specific languages that he had heard, so it would be illogical to translate this phrase as “the language of the foreigners.” He also referred vaguely to the singer as an easterner, though his performance reminds him of Indians who had also performed in multiple languages. With the evidence before us, this lisān al-ghurabāʾ could be the lughat al-ghurabāʾ linked to the Banū Sāsān, or it could refer to an Indo-Aryan language, like Domari. The order of the seven languages sung moves from the most familiar to the most remote. Arabic was the local language in Aleppo. The Ottoman overlords spoke Turkish. Persian was the language of the empire’s Safavid rivals. In the sixteenth century Kurdish and Gorani were spoken in Iran, and Hindi is an Indian language. If we understand the language order as moving roughly eastward from Aleppo, then it would place the origins of the ghurabāʾ language in Central Asia or India. In this respect, the Arabic and English terms ghurabāʾ and “Gypsies” are similarly imprecise, as they could refer to various clans or even a single tribe.

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Premodern Romani History Within the broad category of ghurabā’, the Roma remain the most recognizable social group and command considerable general interest. A history of premodern Asian Roma and Roma-adjacent groups has not been attempted since the 1903 publication of Michael de Goeje’s Mémoire sur les Tsiganes à travers l’Asie, the first book-length treatment of the subject. More than 100 years later, his four major historical findings still hold up under scrutiny, but some of his conjectures can be confirmed with new historical techniques. He argued that the European Romani language bears a strong similarity to West Asian languages like Domari or Lomavren. Second, he surmised that the high incidence of Armenian and Greek vocabulary in European Romani signals the Roma’s long sojourn in these areas. Third, he placed the entry of the Roma in pre-Islamic times. Between the sixth and eighth centuries, Sasanian kings and Umayyad caliphs forcibly relocated Sindis, among whom were some Roma, to Iraq and Iran. Last, Romani people entered Anatolia in the second half of the ninth century. Based on these findings, he proposed theories about the nature and timing of the formation of Kaoli and Nawar tribes in West Asia. He closed the book on a plaintive note: “These are only conjectures, but I do not believe that we will ever make a firm determination, because Arab historians, just as with their Western brothers, maintain a nearly absolute silence about these peoples, as though they are not worthy of serious human interest.”38In the intervening years geneticists, linguists, and historians have presented new information that enhances our understanding of premodern Romani history. So, in this concluding section of the chapter, I will draw on de Goeje’s work to sketch an updated history of the premodern Roma. The northwestern Indian Jat tribes, whose languages belong to the Indo-Aryan language family, have long been identified as the forerunners of the Roma, Dom, and Lom tribes of Europe and Asia. The current state of genetic and linguistics research confirms the historical relationship between the Jat and the Roma. Several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Orientalists hypothesized that the Jat tribe of northwest India, who live today in Pakistan and whose language is IndoAryan, were the forerunners of the Roma and Dom.39 Geneticists have more recently presented evidence that rare genetic mutations are singularly prominent in populations of the Roma of Slovakia and the Jat of Pakistan.40 According to the ninth-century Basran writer al-Jāḥiẓ, the people of Sind could only pronounce the Arabic letter jīm as zay so that the tribal name Jat was rendered as Zat.41 The Arabicized form of this name became Zuṭṭ, and an individual man was a Zuṭṭī and a woman a Zuṭṭiyya. Premodern samples of the Zuṭṭ language would help confirm their identity as Roma, but none have been recovered. All known references to their language only emphasize its unintelligibility. The Basran grammarian and linguist al-Aṣmaʿī (d. c. 828) described Zuṭṭī speech as having “the sound of small grasshoppers, jumping in the bushes of the ʿarfaj plant.”42 The poet Al-Ṣāḥib Ibn ʿAbbād (d. 385/995) did not have such pleasant associations with this language, seeing as he insulted al-Mutanabbī’s verse for its resemblance to “the gibberish of the Zuṭṭ.”43



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The Iraqi historian al-Balādhurī (d. 892) claimed that the Sasanian ruler Bahrām Gōr (r. 420–38) brought 10,000–12,000 Zuṭṭ from Sind to the Khuzistan province in southwestern Iran, where they settled in cities along the Persian Gulf. This stretch of swampy land and humid canals was most commonly known as al-Baṭīḥa (marshlands) or its plural al-Baṭā’iḥ. Within this landscape, several site names testify to a long Zuṭṭ presence there. The Nahr al-Zuṭṭ (Canal of the Zuṭṭ) in the Baṭā’iḥ dates to the Sasanian period, which may have served the Zuṭṭ and their livestock herds.44 The Ḥawmat al-Zuṭṭ (Territory of the Zuṭṭ) stretched from a point six leagues southeast of Arrajan (present-day Behbehan) to Ramhormuz, which places the territory in the Iranian province of Khuzistan.45 A thirteenthcentury manuscript copy of al-Kāshgārī’s eleventh-century map is the only survival of this work. The copyist placed Bilād al-Zuṭṭ squarely in southern Iraq, seeming to confirm the permanent settlement of Zuṭṭ in the area.46 Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī, a companion of the Prophet Muḥammad who served as governor of Basra from 638 to 650, resettled a large number of Zuṭṭ in a separate residential quarter in Basra. The Zuṭṭ did not remain isolated for long, eventually forming an alliance with the city’s Ḥanẓala faction of the influential Tamīm tribe that had settled land from Arabia into southern Iraq. Perhaps to strengthen ties with tribal leaders, the governor enlisted the Zuṭṭ to stand watch over government buildings in the town, as well as a prison in Sijistān.47 Their training as sentinels played an important role in the Battle of the Camel in Basra. In 656 Aisha, the Prophet Muḥammad’s widow arrived in Basra with her supporters Ṭalha and Zubayr to urge the caliph ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib to avenge the recent murder of the previous caliph ʿUthmān. As they approached the mosque in Basra, they were met by Zuṭṭ and Sayābija—a people of Malaysian or Sindi heritage. Aisha slaughtered them, then advanced into the building to continue her search for ʿAlī.48 In later works the Zuṭṭ and Sayābija again appear in fighting units that were separate from the general imperial army. During al-Ḥajjāj’s governorship in Iraq (694–713), a contingent of Zuṭṭ and Sayābija troops sailed from Iraq to Sind to support Umayyad fighters there. These same groups maintained their military roles under the Abbasids, as they also fought in the army of the Abbasid caliph Al-Manṣūr (r. 754–75). During their long tenure in majority Muslim spaces, they converted to Islam, probably in stages, encouraged by coercive measures from local authorities. One hadith reports that a number of Zuṭṭ who worshipped idols were brought before ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 661), who ordered them burned alive for their idolatry.49 No contextualizing details are given in this anecdote, but it has a high degree of plausibility. ʿAlī also reportedly executed Manichaeans living in the same swamps of Iraq as the Zuṭṭ. Furthermore, after examining the wealth of evidence for public burnings in the early Islamic period, Christian Sahner found that nearly all of them had taken place in Iraq, suggesting that ʿAlī could have persecuted the Zuṭṭ when his capital was in Kufa.50 The Zuṭṭ adapted to the marshy environment of southern Iraq, an area plagued by heat and mosquitos and hostile to human settlement, by becoming breeders of buffalo. The wet terrain was ideal for raising buffalo herds that needed to wallow

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in deep water to regulate their body temperatures. The animals were valuable livestock for their milk and meat. Even after the first Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya (r. 661–80) forcibly removed 27,000 Zuṭṭ and Sayābija from lower Iraq to Antioch and Cilicia in southern Anatolia, they continued to tend water buffalo in their new environs.51 The Umayyad caliphs Yazīd I (r. 680–3) and Walīd I (r. 705–25) continued the program of removals, perhaps as a military strategy to fortify the Byzantine border, even transporting herds of buffalo with the people. Writing in Baghdad in the ninth century, Jāḥiẓ mentioned the Zuṭṭ in a chapter on fleas and mosquitos in his Book of Animals: “Muḥammad b. Hāshim al-Sindī said: ‘While I was among the Zuṭṭ, I saw mosquitoes flying on the back of the bull. . . . Then they dipped their probosces into the hide of the buffalo (jild al-jamūs).’”52 That a man from Sind bore witness to this scene was probably not incidental. He may have been a Zuṭṭ himself, living among his people. Or perhaps may have spoken one of their Indian languages. The Zuṭṭ remained unintegrated into Arab society for centuries, inhabiting the physical margins of the Abbasid Empire, spaces intensely hostile to human settlement. The environmental exposure made people especially susceptible to waterborne and mosquito-borne illnesses, like malaria or dysentery, and their livestock vulnerable to viruses and parasites. In 205/821 Zuṭṭī dissatisfaction with these circumstances boiled over into open revolt, when they rebelled against the manual labor to which the Abbasids had consigned them in the coastal marshes of Iraq. They may have been held in slavelike conditions, as Abbasid judges generally accorded peasants working in the Sawād of lower Iraq the legal status of a slave.53 The Zuṭṭ began disrupting lines of communication and supplies of dates between Basra and the capital of Baghdad. The long-lasting rebellion continued under Ma’mūn’s successor al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 833–42). In addition to their military and husbandry skills, the Zuṭṭ of the marshlands had developed other specialized skills, notably as expert boatswains who nimbly escaped Abbasid forces with their facility on the canals and in the marshes. Al-Ṭabari records the verses of an anonymous Zuṭṭī poet who minced no words in conveying the rage of his fellow rebels: O people of Baghdad, die! May your frustrated rage, out of longing for barnī and suhrīz dates, be prolonged! We are the ones who struck you in open defiance and violently and who drove you on like weaklings. You did not thank God for His previously vouchsafed goodness and were not mindful of His benefits, duly extolling [Him]. So summon help from the slaves, made up of the supporters of your state (abnā’ dawlatikum), of Yāzamān, of Balj and of Tūz, Of Shinās (Ashnās), of Afshīn and of Faraj, those who are conspicuous in silk brocade and pure gold, Those who wear garments of Chinese silk velvet, with the seams of their gored fringes fastened to their sleeves,



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Those who carry sharp daggers, with their hilts fastened to unsewn, fine linen belts. The sons of Bahallah [Indians] leading the sons of Fayrūz [Persians] will slash their skulls with gleaming Indian swords. [They are] riders, whose steeds are black and are bedecked with seashells on their noses’ rims (i.e., their steeds are ships with decorated bows), With detachments rendered subject to them, in the water, which are like ebony and shīz wood when they are hurled forward! Whenever you are eager to seek us out in the depths of our boundless open sea, well, beware, for we shall hunt you down like those who trap birds with snares Or with a rapid and violent snatching, just as the birds seeking refuge in overhanging river banks are seized by hungers using swift falcons. Fierce fighting—fighting the Zuṭṭ—you must acknowledge, is not like just eating tharīd or drinking from goblets! We are the ones who gave war its milk to drink, and we shall certainly follow it up with the violent onslaught of warriors who fight in the sea. And we shall indeed assault you with an assault that will make the Master of the Throne take heart and inspirit the lord of Tīz! So weep for the dates! May God make your eyes flow with tears on every Day of Sacrifice, every Day of the Breaking of the Fast, and every New Year!54

The author opens and closes the poem with expressions of contempt for an impious, urban, leisurely class that eats high-quality dates and tharīd and drinks from expensive goblets. He sneers at the privileged frustrations of the Baghdadis (“So weep for the dates!”) and at the enslaved Persian and Turkish commanders who protect them. These non-Arab fighters turned their backs on fellow outsiders, like the Zuṭṭ, to don the trappings of wealth—gold jewelry, expensive Chinese silks, and daggers holstered in linen belts. By contrast, the Zuṭṭ are portrayed as righteous, fearless naval fighters, who navigate the “boundless open sea” of the Iraqi wetlands in wooden boats decorated with seashells. During this prolonged period of fighting, the Zuṭṭ, armed with Indian blades, hunted Abbasid soldiers who encroached on their territory. Likening the marsh to an “open sea” may not have been literary exaggeration. The archaeologist A. Asa Eger has detailed the man-made and natural processes, like damming and flooding, that expanded the marshlands into substantial freshwater lakes, as well as the carbon dating of organic sediment and freshwater mollusks that places these developments in the Sasanian

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and early Islamic periods.55 Given the continued habitation of the marshlands into the modern era, further excavations may yield more submerged artifacts, such as wooden vessels, metal weapons and tools, jewelry, skeletons, and sculpted idols and dolls, that supplement Ṭabarī’s lone extant record of the Zuṭṭ rebellion. The final battles of the rebellion took place in the early years of al-Muʿtasim’s caliphal reign. In 219/834, he dispatched a general named ʿUjayf b. ʿAnbasah to the garrison town of Wāsiṭ to attack the Zuṭṭ, who were at this time led by one Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān and his deputy S.m.l.q.56 With a force of 10,000 fighters, ʿUjayf blocked the roads and the canals, surrounding the Zuṭṭ and capturing them. He reportedly transported 27,000 Zuṭṭ in their own boats up the Tigris to Baghdad in Muḥarram 220/January 835. Soon afterward, al-Muʿtasim banished the captured Zuṭṭ to ʿAyn Zarbah, a town in Cilicia along the Byzantine-Syrian border, and the Byzantines moved in quickly to slaughter the new arrivals.57 Chroniclers write very little about the Zuṭṭ once they are removed from the heart of the Abbasid empire, but occasional references to them in religious and literary sources paint a consistent picture of Indians of striking appearance and daring social and religious affiliations. According to a hadith narrated on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, Muḥammad said: “I saw Moses, Jesus, and Abraham (on the night of the Ascension to the heavens). Jesus was of red complexion, curly hair, and a broad chest. Moses was of brown complexion, straight hair, and tall stature as if he was from the people of al-Zuṭṭ.”58 A fifteenth-century commentary on this hadith expands on the comparison of Moses with the Zuṭṭ, who are identified as “a race of Blacks. It is said that they are from among the Indians. Their bodies are tall and thin.”59 When individual Zuṭṭ appear in the sources, their physical or social nonconformity is spotlighted. As a youth in Basra and Kufa, the poet Abū Nuwās (d. 814) fell in love with Janān, a Basran slave girl whose mother, a Sindī woman named Muhra, had married a Zuṭṭī man with a crooked back.60 His nickname Wāza, meaning “Straight,” emphasized his physical difference. The Zuṭṭī inclination toward Shiʿism was also well known.61 In 295/907–8, a dāʿī missionary named Abū Ḥātim al-Zuṭṭī, who lived in the Sawād near Wāsiṭ, encouraged his fellow Qarmaṭīs, adherents to a branch of Ismā’ilism, to intensify their ascetic practice by refusing to eat animal meat, garlic, onions, leeks, and turnips. Al-Zuṭṭī named this sect of his the Baqliyya, or Vegetarians, and the name became a general sobriquet for the Qarmaṭīs.62 The Zuṭṭ also distinguished themselves through unique grooming habits and dress. The men cut their hair into the shape of a cross and wore “Zuṭṭī robes” (al-thiyāb al-zuṭṭiyya).63 Though no descriptions of these robes have survived, they apparently consisted of specialty cloth woven by Zuṭṭī artisans. Weavers were lowstatus laborers in the early Islamic period, so close documentation of these artisans and their craft rarely surfaces in the sources.64 However, several sources reveal that in eighth- and ninth-century Iraq the Zuṭṭ sold their cloth to local dealers who specialized in these products. Two Kufan merchants of Zuṭṭī cloth transmitted Shiʿi hadith from Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq: ʿAbdallāh b. Ayyūb b. Rāshid al-Zuhrī and Abū ʿAlī Asbāṭ b. Sālim.65 At least one hadith records a purported conversation between



1. The Roma, Banū Sāsān, and the Ghurabā’

27

another cloth dealer and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in the year 138/755–6.66 If the Shiʿi Zuṭṭ embedded themselves in Shiʿi professional and patronage networks in lower Iraq and Khuzistan, then early Shiʿi sources may constitute a rich source for Zuṭṭī social history. The Zuṭṭ also made occasional appearances in fifteenth-century Syrian literature. Al-Badrī (d. 894/1489) compiled a list of words that different groups used to refer to hashish. The first entries were likely fabricated translations of hashish into Chinese, Persian, and other non-Arabic language, and the rest of the entries referenced low-status members of Syrian society. The Zuṭṭ word for hashish, according to al-Badrī, was “r-ḍ-w-y.”67 Ibn Ṭawq dutifully recorded that in Shawwāl 889/November 1484, a Damascene man had paid nearly half of the debt—49 of 105 ashrafiyyas—that he owed Ibn al-Zuṭṭī.68 The lender’s name means “the son of the Zuṭṭī man,” a formulation that may have deliberately signaled his foreignness to the community. Luke Yarbrough has argued that peers of the Egyptian bureaucrat Ibn al-Nābulusī (d. 660/1262) called him “the son of the man from Nablus” to emphasize his nonlocal, eastern Mediterranean heritage. His foreignness limited his professional appeal and prospects in the Ayyubid chancery where Jewish and Coptic employees had formed close networks, an affront that drove Ibn al-Nābulusī to denounce non-Muslim administrators in his Sword of Ambition treatise.69 Although the Zuṭṭ, distinguished by their dark skin, height, and thinness, were segregated into separate fighting units and into inhospitable swamps, they did make common cause with fellow outcasts. Al-Jāḥiẓ composed biographical sketch of a Basran man named Khālid b. Yazīd al-Mukaddī, who earned his living as a kajār, beggar (mukaddī), and storyteller (qaṣṣ). The term kajār was written as ‫كحار‬ in the manuscript, but if pronounced kachār or kajār, it has resonances with the modern Arabic term ghajar, which is both an Egyptian term designating a gypsy and the name of a tribe in Egypt that may have once spoken an Indo-Aryan language. Today, the Ghajar speak Arabic with considerable Romani vocabulary.70 This Khālid b. Yazīd consorted with vagrants of al-Jabal (in eastern Iraq), robbers of al-Shām, the Zuṭṭ of the jungles (zuṭṭ al-ājām), nomadic chiefs, Bedouins, the assassins of the Baṭṭ river (in Khuzistan), the robbers of al-Qufṣ (a mountain in Kirmān province), the butchers of al-Jazīra, and outlaws from Qīqān (in Sind) and Qaṭris (in southern Iraq).71 The Banū Sāsān also counted the Zuṭṭ as members. As Abū Dulaf wrote in the tenth century: “And among our number are the Zanj and the Zuṭṭ,”72 both low-status groups of black people (sūdān), who were often enslaved. Jawbarī, writing three centuries later, included “lepers (be they Zuṭṭ or others)” as part of the Banū Sāsān.73 Because historical references to the Zuṭṭ are so rare, historicizing groups with which they affiliated—namely, the Banū Sāsān— seems the best available method for assessing premodern Romani history. At the same time, to mitigate against pigeonholing the ghurabā’ or the Zuṭṭ as a solely premodern formation, it is important to acknowledge the persistence of the Zuṭṭ name among professional strangers in modern western Asia. A British traveler in nineteenth-century Oman contrasted the Zuṭṭ with the Arabs while noting their resemblance to European Roma and Travellers. His assessments strikingly echo

28

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

medieval obsession with Zuṭṭī skin color, height, and their separation from mainstream society. “They are taller in person and more swarthy, and they have that cunning and shifty look stamped on their physiognomy so observable in the gipsies of Europe. . . . Everywhere they maintain themselves as a separate class and do not intermix by marriage with strangers.”74 In the early twentieth century the Dom of northern Syria and Palestine were known locally as Nawar and Zuṭṭ.75 In conclusion, the astrologers of the Banū Sāsān confederation started to refer to themselves as ghurabā’ by the early 1200s. By initiating this name change, they signaled to their peers that they both recognize and support their chosen estrangement from majority society. They maintained separateness through their marginal professions and Sīn language. By the late 1200s Ibn Dāniyāl had divided the Banū Sāsān into the ghurabā’ (Strangers) and the udabā’ (literary people). And in the 1300s Ḥillī had fully substituted ghurabā’ for Banū Sāsān. Although the Banū Sāsān name occasionally appeared in sources after this time, the ghurabā’ label remained the group’s preferred and widely acknowledged identifier. Strikingly, the ghurabā’ speak for themselves in the sources of this chapter and present their language and professions on their own terms. The proto-Roma Zuṭṭ belonged to the Banū Sāsān, but we have few sources composed by Zuṭṭī writers. Al-Ṭabarī recorded one Zuṭṭī man’s ninth-century Arabic poem, but nothing more has come to light. However, by reading sources sympathetic to the ghurabā’ alongside Arab outsiders’ incidental references to the Zuṭṭ, one understands how the Zuṭṭ came to ally with marginalized peoples. In the Umayyad period they held lowly positions as sentinels and laborers in southern Iraqi cities and marshlands and were occasionally forced to relocate to northern Syria. Their living conditions in Iraq became so intolerable that they rebelled against the Abbasid state in the early ninth century. The Abbasids responded by transferring thousands of Zuṭṭ to the Syrian Byzantine border in the mid-850s, and from that point onward, we find that authors show little interest in Zuṭṭ communities. In the incidental mentions of Zuṭṭ in later Arabic literature, nonghurabā’ convey their discomfort with Zuṭṭī nonconformity in faith, hairstyles, dress, and language. That they found the Zuṭṭ aggressively alienating simply confirms the aptness of the new ghurabā’ label.

CChapter 2 SĪN THE LANGUAGE OF THE BANŪ SĀSĀN AND THE GHURABĀ’

The language of the Banū Sāsān has been mischaracterized as a secret language or a thieves’ cant. It is a mixed language that takes the form of embedding a substitutive vocabulary into the grammatical structure of other languages and it has historically been spoken within communities of peripatetics and commercial nomads. In general, these lexicons do not have independent grammars, as is also the case with Para-Romani languages such as Calò and Angloromani, which have Romani-derived lexicons embedded in Andalusian Spanish and English grammars, respectively.1 In the Middle East this phenomenon is observable in Loterā’i, a mixed language that consists of special substitutive vocabulary inserted into local Iranian languages. This language is attested as early as the tenth century in Astarabad (known today as Gorgan, Iran) whose speakers were not identified by ethnicity or religious affiliation and today is mostly spoken by Iranian Jews.2 The Sīn lexicon survives today in the languages of peripatetics, dervishes, and entertainers in the Maghreb, Egypt, Sudan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In northern Africa, some Ghawṣ dialects have Sīn vocabulary; in northeast Africa the ancient mixed language is still known as Sīn and sometimes as Sīm; in Central Asia, the dialect of Abdal dili or Abdoltili incorporates some Sīn words. These particular dialects take the form of communicating in the dominant surrounding language with insertions of Sīn vocabulary.

Buyid Iraq and Iran: Two Qaṣīdas The earliest mention of the Banū Sāsān occurs in a work by the Persian author Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 756), so the terminus ante quem for tribal formation was 756. Two hundred years after this mention the Banū Sāsān rose to quick prominence in the literary circles of Buyid Iran. The Buyids, who themselves claimed descent from the Sasanian emperor Bahrām Gōr, controlled most of Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and Syria from 934 to 1062. They professed Shiʿism and presented themselves as the inheritors of the pre-Islamic Sasanian dynasty, which had been overthrown by the Muslims in 651. The Buyid ruler bore the Persian title Shahanshah (king of

30

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

kings) and did not seek to usurp the caliphal title. Buyid metalworkers consciously reproduced figural and animal Sasanian motifs in their works, and it is in this milieu that the Banū Sāsān, a peripatetic tribal group, found welcome court patrons. Tenth-century Buyid and Abbasid authors described them as speakers of a particular language, of which some vocabulary has been preserved in poetry by members and associates of the Banū Sāsān. While based in Rayy, the Buyid grand vizier Ibn ʿAbbād kept a circle of these poets close to him and befriended a member of the Banū Sāsān—a man named al-Aqṭaʿ whose hand had been amputated as punishment for stealing—and also “learned from him the language of the beggars and the parlance of the persistent mendicants.”3 Ibn ʿAbbād learned enough of the Sāsāni language to include Sāsāni words in his own poetry. A sample verse, with Sāsāni words in parentheses, reads: Don’t hold yourself back from pleasures, if they present themselves; persist in them to the utmost, and don’t bother about being blamed! Don’t spit them out again when you have attained them, but spend the night with a beardless youth (shawzar), a wide-buttocked lad, a loved one, For wine (ṣamī) and copulation (matr), after indulgence with him—these are the really good things of life, so don’t turn away from what is good! Set about indulgence in eating to the full, and in wine from a flowing bowl, for fortune mingles indifferently the good (taksīḥ) with the bad (tahzīb).4

We know the meanings of these words because of the interlineal glosses in poems that al-Ṣāḥib had commissioned from two other Sāsānis, al-Aḥnaf al-ʿUkbarī, whom he described as “the incomparable one of the Banū Sāsān in Baghdad at this present time,”5 and Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī. He specifically asked them to write poems about the Banū Sāsān. Both al-ʿUkbarī and Abū Dulaf produced qaṣīdas (polythematic poems with a single meter and rhymeletter) describing their traditional professions and introducing vocabulary from the tribal language. Al-ʿUkbarī’s qaṣīda was apparently written first. In it, he mentioned various trades practiced by members of the Banū Sāsān, including the beggar who feigns blindness (isṭīl), the peddler of amulets (man yanfidhu sirmāṭan), the astrologers, bloodletters, sellers of unguents and medicines, Sufis who rambled about their asceticism, and the beggar leaders of the “tribe of exile” (bahālīlu banī l-ghurba).6 Sometime after this, “Abū Dulaf presented the Ṣāḥib with a qaṣīda in which he imitated al-Aḥnaf al-ʿUkbarī’s poem rhyming in dāl concerning this slang. In it, Abū Dulaf mentioned the beggars, and made people aware of their different subdivisions and their various practices.”7 The narrator of Abū Dulaf ’s 196-verse qaṣīda is the author himself, who claimed membership in the Banū Sāsān (vv. 9–10) and proceeded to recount every deceptive practice employed by these people. The poem contains 238 words from the Sāsāni lexicon, many of which are also found in al-ʿUkbarī’s poem, and they are all given explanatory glosses.



2. Sīn

31

Bosworth’s investigations of the Banū Sāsān lexicon show that much of this lexicon derived from several languages that suggest Persianate, Hellenistic, and Semitic influences and a late antique origin for the lexicon:

Greek • isṭabl / iṣṭabl “mosque” < Greek stávlon “resting-place, stable” • qalaftūriyya “the form of a talisman not made from a matrix” < Greek phylaktērion “amulet”8 Syriac • qamṭar / qimṭar “case for books and records” < Syriac qamṭriyā < Greek kamtra “case for books or papers” Persian • tukhandiju “you laugh” < Persian khandagī “laughter” • jarrakha “to dance” < Persian charkh “wheel; circle of dancing dervishes” Hebrew • ṣammā “to give wine to drink” < Hebrew ṣāmē’ “to be thirsty” • kūsh “black slave” < Hebrew kush “Nubia” Arabic • bahlūl “beggar leader” < early Arabic bahlūl “generous, noble” • ās “physician” < Arabic asā “to treat, cure” Akkadian • shallafa “to destroy” < Akkadian šulputum “to ravage” • shann “two” < Akkadian šenā “two” • sikr “weir” < Akkadian sekēru “to block up, dam”9 Martin Schwartz has recently shown the Jewish Aramaic roots of several other terms.10 ●●

●●

●● ●●

maysarānī “beggar who pretends to have fought the infidel on the frontier” < Aramaic mēyṣar “border” barkakk “person who extracts molars” < Aramaic associate bar + kakka “(molar) tooth” kidh “penis” < Jewish Aramaic gīd “penis”11 dammakha “to sleep in the cold” < Aramaic dmkh “to sleep”

In verse 83 Abū Dulaf explicitly counted Persian- and Aramaic-speaking members among the Banū Sāsān. Aramaic was a late antique Middle Eastern lingua franca until the collapse of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE, at which moment Greek gained ascendancy. The Islamic conquests of the Middle East in the seventh century spread the Arabic language into areas where Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and

32

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

Persian had until then been chiefly spoken. As such, the Sāsāni words derived from Akkadian, Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Greek (and one or two terms from Syriac), signaling the local indigeneity of the Banū Sāsān and early language contact with Byzantines and Sasanians. In Abū Dulaf ’s tenth-century poem, lughat Banī Sāsān strikingly shows no influence from Turkic languages, though as we will see, by the fourteenth century, Turkish, Sogdian and Indic words had entered the lexicon. If this mixed language is an ancient one, one may speculate that the significant number of terms of obscure etymology, such as samqūn (boy), zaghmara (to be certain, convinced), and muljam (cat), ultimately derive from an extinct or unrecorded parent language.

Buyid Iran and Abbasid Iraq: Maqāmāt The Banū Sāsān was a common literary trope in Arabic literature from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. The theme of the eloquent, wily, peripatetic beggar inspired a new genre of Arabic literature, the maqāma. Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 1008), a poor peripatetic whose name literally means “the innovator of the age from Hamadhān,” is credited with founding this literary genre. He met Abū Dulaf in Rayy, most likely at al-Ṣāḥib Ibn ʿAbbād’s literary salons, and seems to have derived inspiration from the work being produced there. In his personal letters, al-Hamadhānī referred to his fifty-two-episode work as Maqāmāt al-kudya (Episodes of Begging) or Maqāmāt al-Iskandarī, but in all likelihood, al-Hamadhānī never compiled his own maqāmāt in a definitive written collection.12 In any case, his title Maqāmāt al-Iskandarī refers to the antihero Abū l-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī, who is dressed as a beggar and moves from town to town tricking unsuspecting audiences out of their money. In only one episode, the nineteenth entitled Al-Maqāma al-sāsāniyya, is al-Iskandarī depicted as a member of the Banū Sāsān. While in Damascus the narrator sees outside of his door “a troop (katība) from the Banī Sāsān. They had muffled up their faces, and besmeared their clothes with red ochre while each of them had tucked under his armpit a stone with which he beat his breast. Among them was their chief (zaʿīm), who was reciting, they alternating with him; he intoning and they answering him.”13 The leader of this Sāsāni troop is none other than al-Iskandarī. Al-Hamadhānī’s most famous imitator was the Abbasid Basran official al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122), whose fifty maqāmāt spawned countless commentaries, entered the canon of Arabic literature, and inspired some of the most treasured specimens of medieval Arabic book arts.14 The window for medieval Arabic illustrated books was short, lasting principally from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, but the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century illustrated manuscripts of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt assume an outsized importance in scholarly literature on medieval Arabic book arts and are frequently used as typical scenes of everyday life in medieval Islamdom. The fifty maqāmāt are structured as brief encounters between the narrator al-Ḥārith b. Ḥammām and the hero Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, who identifies as a member of the Sāsāni family (āl Sāsān) and earns a living through swindles and begging, sometimes employing his son in his tricks.15 Al-Ḥarīrī played with his audience’s expectations for a story about a Sāsāni. Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī practices astrology



2. Sīn

33

(maqāma 29) and cupping (47). He may also have emphasized to a knowledgeable audience that father and son belonged to the Banū Sāsān by referring to the son as a jawdhar ʿalayhi shawdhar, or a young gazelle wearing a short cloak. Shawdhar is a Persian term for “a short woman’s cloak,” and the Sāsāni term for “beardless youth (Arabic, amrad).”16 The occurrence in Arabic literature of the word shawdhar is so rare that it would have registered doubly for an audience. As far as I know, it is only elsewhere attested in the poems of al-Ṣāḥib Ibn ʿAbbād and Abū Dulaf, where the shawdhar/shawzar serves as an object of sexual desire for an adult male.17 Our hero Abū Zayd is introduced in the first maqāma as “the light of al-ghurabāʾ, the crown of the littérateurs,” where al-ghurabāʾ is synonymous with Banū Sāsān.18 A thirteenth-century commentary on the forty-ninth maqāma explains that Sāsān is the shaykh of the beggars and of the ghurabāʾ, who are Banū l-Ghabrāʾ. Al-ghabrāʾ is the Earth, and they are called Banū al-Ghabrāʾ because some of them belong to the Earth and the air, roaming through lands. They have no ancestry; their only ties are to the Earth. It is said that they are called that because of their ties to the dust of the Earth.19

Their uprootedness made them suitable characters who embark on journeys and through their adventures discover something about themselves. The maqāma frame narrative of the pious Arab narrator and the Sāsāni hero was faithfully reproduced into the modern era, some of them even incorporating Sāsāni language into the works. Maurice Pomerantz has identified two Sāsāni words— khushnī (outsider) and ghurash (trick)—in one of al-Ṣafadī al-Barīdī’s fourteenthcentury maqāmāt.20 In this same period Ibn Abī Ḥajalah (d. 1375) composed a maqāma cycle about a trickster character named Abū l-Riyāsh, who is an Egyptian member of the Banū Sāsān and speaks in the Sāsāni tongue (bi-lisān min banī sāsān). The final maqāma, entitled “The Book Maqāma, Called the Return of the Gharīb” (Al-Maqāma al-kutubiyya al-mawsūma bi-ʿawd al-gharīb), is so named because Abū Riyāsh, the Sāsāni gharīb, reappears in the life of the narrator Al-Sājiʿ b. Ḥamām.21 Similarly, the titles of later Ottoman maqāmāt, such as al-ʿĀmilī al-Ḥānīnī’s (d. 1626) Farqad al-ghurabāʾ wa-sirāj al-udabāʾ and al-Khafājī’s (d. 1659) Maqāma sāsāniyya, suggest this genre may be useful for investigating representations of the Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’ and also for recovering samples of their dialect.22

Artuqid Mosul: Didactic Prose A true breakthrough for our understanding of the language of the Banū Sāsān and in the naming of this group comes in a book composed between 1232 and 1248 called Kitāb al-mukhtār fī kashf al-asrār (The Book of the Selected Disclosure of Secrets). It is a thirty-chapter work purporting to expose the secrets of the Banū Sāsān. The author ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī (d. fl. 646/1248) was himself a member of the Banū Sāsān, and he composed the work at the behest of Masʿūd Rukn al-Dīn Mawdūd, the Turkmen Artuqid leader of Mosul (r. 1222–32). In Chapter Six of this work, al-Jawbarī enumerated the various types: confidence

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

34

men (aṣḥāb al-nawāmīs), Sufis (fuqarāʾ), beggars at gates or makers of fans and talismans (al-madrūzīn?), Zuṭṭī lepers (aṣḥāb al-balāʾ min al-zuṭṭ), those who travel with bears and monkeys, those who train cats and mice to play peaceably together, those who claim to have physical disabilities, and those who make beards for women.23 In Chapter Twelve, al-Jawbarī claimed that the astrologers in the Banū Sāsān referred to themselves as al-ghurabāʾ and were known among the various clans (ṭawāʾif) by this name. Furthermore, they communicated in poems or messages in Sīn (wa-lahum ishʿār bi’l-sīn).24 Later in the book al-Jawbarī elaborated on the nature of Sīn. As for revealing the secrets of the astrologers, they have a form of communication that they call Sīn. It is a manner of verbal expression (wa-huwa l-balāgh alladhī yatakallamūna bihi) that only they and their ilk can understand. I understand it, and in it, one can say: ‫سمقوني كسحاب ببهت ما ابهله في سيني فرحات‬ ‫ ودمخ في الطلموت يرتد في صهوتي سعّا للبركوش فيه كدى‬. . . ‫ومطي شن‬. They express many things—countless and unlimited things—in Sīn! They hold royal literary salons that are not for kings, as well as amazing large gatherings (awqāt ʿajība). And if there were no fear of making this book too long, I would recount innumerable anecdotes. They are known among the various subtribes (bayn al-ṭawāʾif) as al-ghurabā’. This is an amazing language (hiya lugha ʿajība). I know that they call themselves ghurabā’ because they produce wonders (gharā’ib) of all sorts that amaze others.25

In al-Jawbarī’s account only the astrologers of the Banū Sāsān and their friends speak Sīn, and these astrologers are known as ghurabā’. While I can only speculate as to why al-Jawbarī limits the language and the name ghurabā to the astrologers, it is clear that his Sīn sample is the same as the lughat Banī Sāsān preserved in the qaṣīdas of both al-ʿUkbarī and Abū Dulaf. Using the two earliest of the thirtythree known Arabic manuscripts of Kashf al-asrār, I will attempt to transliterate and translate a sample of Sīn.26 In Leiden Or 191 (dated 715/1315), folios 91b and 92a read: saqmūnī kasiḥāb bi-baht mā abhalahu fī nisbī f.r.ḥāt wa-maṭṭī shandalī wa-dammakha fī al-ṭ.l.mūt y.r.t.d. fī ṣahūtī saʿʿā li’l-barkūsh fīhi kaddā. The later manuscript, Istanbul Karaçelebizade 253, dated 717/1317–18, reads: samqūnī kasiḥāb h​.b​.t​.​r​.sh bi-baht mā abhalahu.27 samqūn-ī My boy

kasiḥ-āb handsome

bi-baht with a face

mā not

abhalu-hu28 more beautiful than it

“My handsome boy has a face more beautiful than any other.” Though the sentiment is generic, it may not be a coincidence that Ibn Dāniyāl gave similar lines, only in Arabic, to the young male accomplice to the amulet maker, one of the few nonprofessionals to speak in his play. The boy recites: “The beauty of my face surpasses the beauty of anyone of any race.”29 The grammar and syntax are Arabic, as are the prepositions (bi, fī) and the negative particle (mā). The pronominal suffix -hu is also Arabic. The morphology



2. Sīn

35

of comparative adjectives also follows the Arabic aXXaX model. The suffix -ī indicates personal possession, as it does in Arabic. fī nisb-ī f.r.khāt wa-maṭṭ-ī in my house ? and my belongings

shandal piled up

wa-dammakha fī and he slept in

al-ṭ.l.mūt30 the darkness(?)

“F.r.khāt and my belongings are piled up in my house. He slept in the darkness.” y.r.t.d. fī ṣahūt-ī ? in my desires

saʿʿā he went out

li-l-barkūsh to the beggar feigning deafness

fīhi in which

kaddā31 he begged

These translations are tentative, and I am unable to translate the final line of the Leiden manuscript. But even without full translations, one sees that in al-Jawbarī’s thirteenth-century sample, Sīn consisted of interspersing Sāsāni vocabulary into an Arabic syntactic and grammatical structure.

Mamluk Cairo: Shadow Theater Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Dāniyāl al-Mawṣilī al-Khuzāʿī (646/1248–710/1311) was born around 646/1248 in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. His Khuzāʿa tribe originated in the Yemen but had long ago settled in Mosul. Li Guo has described Mosul in this period as an interconfessional, polyglot city, where “various tongues— Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Kurdish, ancient Semitic (Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew)—were heard all over the town.”32 In 660/1262, shortly after the Mongols destroyed Mosul, Ibn Dāniyāl fled to Cairo. In this same year, 1,000–2,000 Mongol/Tatar refugees from Hülegü’s army sought shelter at the court of Mamluk Sultan Baybars (r. 1260– 77), who warmly welcomed them with a public banquet near Bāb al-Lūq. He also constructed homes for them in Bāb al-Lūq and in the Ḥusayniyya neighborhood north of Cairo. Both areas subsequently became marked by high crime, neglect, and poverty. (This reputation remained for centuries. In the seventeenth-century Evliya Çelebi described the male and female sex workers and the beggars of Bāb al-Lūq.) In Rajab 660/June 1262, the Tatar or Mongol Sayf al-Dīn Salār al-Manṣūrī arrived in Cairo with a group of mamluks, then was promptly given a prestigious appointment in the Mamluk army.33 During the second reign of Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn, which lasted from 1299 to 1309, Salār was appointed the sovereign’s viceroy and while in this position served as Ibn Dāniyāl’s patron. Ibn Dāniyāl had established a close rapport with the predecessor to al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s first reign, Sultan al-Ashraf Khalīl (r. 1290–3), and expressed his loyalty to the Qalāwūnid dynasty by writing nearly twenty praise poems for members of the royal family and for the viziers who served them. Ibn Dāniyāl, in turn, received a stipend from the court and enjoyed the prestige of being part of the royal entourage.34 This represents a spectacular rise for someone who after arriving in Cairo as a sixteen-year-old refugee, practiced eye medicine at the Bāb al-Futūḥ, the portal between the rough extramural Ḥusayniyya neighborhood and

36

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

the walled city. A medical career did not automatically confer prestige. “Physicians (ṭabīb) and oculists (kaḥḥāl) . . . could belong either to the common people or the elite. Their social status depended on their clientele: those treating members of the elite had a higher status than those whose patients represented a more modest segment of the population.”35 Judging by the placement of Ibn Dāniyāl’s booth, his clientele would have consisted largely of poor residents of Ḥusayniyya. The Iraqi physician ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (d. 629/1231) offered intriguing details about medical workers with poor clientele. I say that ghurabā’ who sell potions on the highways are superior to those [physicians]. Firstly, because most people, and especially the elite, beware of them and do not hand themselves over to them. Secondly, they give [the milky latex of] spurges [yattūʿāt] and [the juice of] bashbūsh, that is colocynth leaves, to healthy people whose temperament can bear mistakes more than sick patients. They mostly administer their drugs to peasants and [other] hard-working people, whose temperament can bear strong drugs. Moreover, the ghurabā’ have tried and tested drugs and tried herbs which they gather and test themselves; and they tell each other what they know about them.36

Al-Baghdādī portrayed the ghurabā’ medical remedies as harsh on the body and their methods as haphazard and experimental. The ghurabā’ of thirteenth-century Iraq derived their medical knowledge experimentally on nonelite laborers, who may have had few other affordable options for medical care. When ingested, the spurge and colocynth plants that the ghurabā’ administered to patients would have induced a laxative effect, which Jawbarī confirmed was a common strategy of the ghurabā’. If they [highway physicians] want to make a spectacle showing that they administer a drug which expels worms, they take the sinews of camels and give them the shape of the worm. Then they take some laxative plant and put these sinews into it without the idiot noticing it. When he eats it, his bowels are moved and nature secretes something which is like water, and in which these sinews similar to worms are present.37

Al-Baghdādī claimed that the ghurabā’ shared such medical knowledge among themselves, perhaps because elite physicians did not train with the ghurabā’ or treat them as legitimate colleagues. Aside from anecdotes about highway physicians, there is little trace of these roadway practitioners in premodern sources. Ibn Dāniyāl himself composed an urjūza (a poem in rajaz meter) on medicine that may add new perspectives on the practice of nonelite physicians.38 Beyond his work as an oculist, we know that during his early years of isolation and poverty in Cairo, Ibn Dāniyāl had frequent occasions to observe and interact with the ḥarāfīsh (sing. ḥarfūsh), a group that led a lifestyle similar to that of the ghurabā’ and also communicated in Sīn. In 1837 Étienne-Marc Quatremère traced the word ḥarfūsh and its variants in various thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Arabic chronicles and manuals. The ḥarāfīsh elude precise definitions



2. Sīn

37

but Quatremère concluded that the most apt definition of ḥarfūsh was “a man of the lowest class.”39 More than a century later, William Brinner published an important article in which he posed a series of in-depth, exploratory questions to define the ḥarāfīsh, understand their internal leadership structures, and ask how the term sultan al-ḥarāfīsh became synonymous with shaykh mashāyikh al-ḥirāf. Ultimately, Brinner found that the sources did not allow him to draw firm conclusions, but he could claim with reasonable certainty that the ḥarāfīsh lived in abject poverty, worked as beggars, and recognized one of their own as a leader (sultan). As early as the fifteenth century, the term ḥarāfīsh was being gradually replaced by juʿaydīyya.40 Neither Quatremère nor Brinner had easy access to Ibn Dāniyāl’s poetry collection which includes a thirty-four-verse qaṣīda about “the order of the ḥarāfīsh.” The narrator describes antisocial behaviors of the ḥarāfīsh that recall those of the Banū Sāsān. Ibn Dāniyāl’s narrator claims, “you see me when I sleep— furnace ashes are my mat, my bowl is under my cheek. / I warm up by the fire, until you see my skin spotted from it [the heat] like a cheetah.”41 A Sāsāni figure in Abū Dulaf ’s poem “makes himself a pitiable object through covering himself with the ashes of a furnace. . . . He then comes out [of the furnace] covered in dusty ashes, and leads people to think that he has been obliged to seek refuge there because of the intense cold and his lack of clothing.”42 However, the most explicit connection the poem makes between the ḥarāfīsh and the Banū Sāsān comes with the insertion of a verse in Sīn. 25: [A list of 12 nicknames] form a community united by ill fortune. Among their company is Iblīs / With his companions. And they all are my companions. 26 Whoever among you calls himself ḥarāfīsh is, / like myself, all alone. 27 [in Sīn] I see the man and the boys begging, but I give them not a single silver coin.

With slight variations, verse 27 is reproduced in his shadow play on the Banū Sāsān called ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb. The manuscripts of Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow plays are the earliest texts we have of this genre, but from these we see “that the shadow theatre, as seen in Ibn Dāniyāl’s work, was a gradual development from the Arabic maqāma form.”43 The prologue of the second play, ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb, reads in part: In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Nothing occurs without Allah. This is the second shadow play of Ṭayf al-khayāl, and it is the shadow play of ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb. It includes the ways of the fraudulent ghurabāʾ. I have already answered your questions about whether the master is charming and the coarse speak sweetly, so that you do not think that I am concerned with uninteresting literature. . . . This shadow play includes the ways of the fraudulent ghurabāʾ who are well versed in the language and methods of Shaykh Sāsān.44

The narrator himself is named Gharīb and, as his name suggests, he represents the archetypal member of the “fraudulent ghurabā’,” who will introduce the audience

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World

38

to these speakers of lughat al-shaykh Sāsān. In the midst of his opening monologue, he recites four verses in Sīn.45 ّ ‫قططوا العطامي والعتل الزكادجي الزرندي‬ ‫ في زقاقيهم‬.1 ‫ الكويكات والخندج وقرداح وبزباز والكبان المكدي‬.2 ‫ وشريميط والمفكك والقنب وبركان والمحنّ القمندي‬.3 46 ‫ هطل ال ُكدّ والسماقين والفَيس وما إن يكيفهم شطر مردي‬.4

1. fī zaqāqayhim In their speech

q.ṭ.ṭṭū ?

al-ʿ.ṭāmī the ?

wa’l-ʿatal al-r.r.d.kājī And the indigent the ?

al-z.r.n.dī the ?

2. al-k.w.y.kāt the ?

al-kh.f.n.j the ?

wa-q.r.d.āḥ and ?

wa-m.r.tān and ?

wa’l-kayyān and the ?

al-mukaddī the male beggar

3. wa-shirāmīṭ and an amulet maker

wa’l-mufakkak wa’l-q.n.b and the escapologist and the ?

wa-b.r.kān and ?

wa’l-m.ḥ.nn al-q.m.n.dī and the captivating the ? storyteller

4. Haṭala al-kuddu He saw the male beggar

wa’l-samāqīn bi’l-fays wa-mā in yakīfuhum sh.ṭ.r mardī and the boys while andhe gives clever two begging NEGATION them thief silver coins

I am unable to reconstruct most of the Sīn words in the first three verses, but I would provisionally translate the last verse as: “The man saw the boys begging, but the clever thief did not even give them coins.” Even without a full clarification of the text, one can make some syntactical observations. As in al-Jawbarī’s text, Sīn prose consists of Arabic syntax (verb-subject-prepositional phrase), the definite article al-, and the use of the Arabic particles wa- and bi-. A verb is even conjugated in the masculine third-person present-tense form, in the manner of Arabic. This poem again demonstrates that Sīn is a para-language, a lexicon embedded in the grammar of another language. Previous editors and translators have tackled this poem, the difficulties of which stem from the manuscript variants. One must imagine that Arabic scribes were not familiar with Sīn, so approximated some of the words. Georg Jacob acknowledged that this poem was written in the language of al-Shaykh Sāsān, so instead of attempting a translation, he edited the Sāsāni portions, indicating all of the manuscript variants.47 Later translators have not been so circumspect. René Khawam produced a French translation of these verses that, like his translation



2. Sīn

39

of al-Jawbarī’s Sīn text, must be completely contrived.48 Francesca Corrao claims that Jacob’s edition “non ha senso,” not realizing that he had identified it as a nonArabic passage. She proceeds to recombine the manuscript variants to arrive at Persian or Arabic words that would fit the context. So, for instance, in the second hemistich, she reads al-zakādajī as al-razkādiḥ, which is the Persian word for “wrangler,” a dramatic move that requires the insertion of a consonant and the removal of the final letter. Her final translation produced a list of professional types.49 Similarly, Safi Mahfouz and Marvin Carlson considered the language a form of corrupted Arabic, so they altered words to make them classical Arabic. Ultimately, they produced a list of mostly obscene nicknames.50 The following is my translation with the Sīn terms in italics: When there was no one left who would ask the heavens for its rain, and no one who would seek his gain, we considered using tricks against them, so that we wouldn’t need them. We abandoned our work but grew bored with leisure and laziness. Now we stand unrivaled in contriving tricks, and we have separated into these groups. Fear has not deterred us and there is no panic! We have fallen upon governors (kuzak) and penises (kiyādh)! We have shot arrows at marākim and mihkād! It is we who have undertaken the description of the woodblock printer (waṣf al-ṭ-rāsh) and who regard commoners as aḥshāsh. We have seen the boy (samqūn) and the man (kudd) together, and we have plundered (ʿabaynā) the ḥirmī and the sukrī. To whoever goes off and begs, we have given bread as charity. And we hid silver dirhams (murūd), gold dinars (marāqīn) and copper coins (tubūk). Out of modesty we dressed shabbily (aṭṭaraḥnā). We gathered (hankamnā) in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.51

After Gharīb’s opening monologue, a series of carnivalesque characters— entertainers, a sex worker, medical quacks, and laborers—present their work. Several scholars have noted the similarity of professions showcased in ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb to those commonly held by European Roma and similar groups. Mahfouz and Carlson referred outright to “the gypsies of the clan Banū Sāsān,” and Li Guo designated the Banū Sāsān “the ‘Gypsies’ of Cairo.”52 Romani cultures are central not only to shadow theater in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Turkestan, and Greece but also to its forerunner, the maqāma.53 In Iran, the main figure is named Kaçal Pahlavān (Bald Athlete), and in Turkestan it is Palvan Kaçal. The Persian word pahlavān means “athlete” or “gymnast,” referring perhaps to the traditional itinerant trade of acrobatism and rope dancing. The Bahlawān tribe in Egypt still bears this name. In the Turkish shadow play tradition known as Karagöz, each play has two main characters: Karagöz, the Çingane (Romani) blacksmith, and Hacivat, the principled Turk. The Greek shadow theater tradition derives from the Turkish one. The similarities between Ibn Dāniyāl’s Gharīb and the figure of Karagöz are unmistakable, both strangers far from their homelands, performing work on the margins of society.54 Notice must equally be made of the consistent use of a narrator and a protagonist, who act as moral foils to each other, not only in ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb but in nearly all of the Banū Sāsān-related maqāmāt. Furthermore, the

40

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hero-protagonist in Arabic works always has a connection to ghurabāʾ or gharīb. Recall that al-Ḥarīrī’s Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī is “the light of the ghurabāʾ.”55 Al-Ḥarīrī’s work inspired the Andalusian Ibn al-Ashtarkūwī (d. 1143) to write his own maqāma featuring the narrator Abū Ghamr al-Sāʾib b. Tammām and the hero Abū Ḥabīb al-Sadūsī, who has two sons, Ḥabīb (Beloved) and Gharīb (Stranger). Ibn Dāniyāl abandoned innuendo and outright named his protagonist Gharīb, who delivers the opening monologue and epilogue, closing the play by repeating the words: gharībun gharībun gharībun gharīb (“a stranger, a stranger, a stranger, strange”).

A Qaṣīda in Artuqid Mardin The third known qaṣīda about the Banū Sāsān, following those by ʿUkbarī and Abū Dulaf, came from an itinerant Shiʿi Iraqi peddler named Ṣafī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Saraya al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349), who found literary patronage at the Artuqid court of Mardin in southern Anatolia. While not a gharīb himself, Ḥillī, in the prologue to his poem, claimed that “one of his friends asked him to compile for him the language of the ghurabāʾ (lughat al-ghurabāʾ), their professional arts and wiles.”56 He pledged to elucidate in his seventy-five-verse poem, for the benefit of outsiders, their “esoteric knowledge, their activities, their special practices and their stratagems,” while also explaining the meaning of 277 words in their language (ajʿalu alfāẓahā bi-lughatihim).57 Like the earlier works examined in this paper, it is a poetic ethnography and didactic exercise, intended to teach the uninitiated about ghurabāʾ vocabulary and lifestyle. Certain linguistic developments become apparent in this later work, most significantly the inclusion of Turkic, Sogdian, and Indic lexemes. In verses 6 and 65, Ḥillī introduced the term kazākī, which was glossed as “governors and princes.” Bosworth related this term to the Turkish gezek, which means “guard or watchman.”58 At the time of Ḥillī’s writing, most of West Asia was ruled by Turkic-speaking peoples, like the Mamluks, the Artuqids, and the Seljuks. The Sīn term for village qantah probably derived from the Sogdian word for village kanθ.59 At least one Indic term appears in this fourteenth-century poem: habatrā “cold wind” (v. 9), from Hindi havadar “windy.” Another new development in this qaṣīda is the inclusion of prepositions and conjunctions, such as hafī “in,” t.r.thā “until,” s.d.l “upon, by,” and l.b.y.ṣām “up to, up to where.”

Additional Sīn Sources Samples of medieval and early modern lisān al-ghurabāʾ must be preserved in other documents, but certain literary genres will probably yield more information than others. Shadow theater has already been proposed and discussed, but literary mujūn, that is, literature on obscene, profane subjects, was often inspired by “the living oral culture of the urban lower classes.”60 The mujūn poet Abū Nuwās wrote



2. Sīn

41

a series of poems about al-shuṭṭār, or clever thieves. Of this group we know little, but they did have a distinctive form of speech, though it may not classify as a separate language. For example, aḥnadha is a shuṭṭāri verb that means “to pour increasingly less water and more wine to accelerate intoxication.”61 Other writers used lower-class persons as informants or directly transcribed their vernacular speech into their literary works. The Iraqi judge al-Tanūkhī (d. 994) recorded anecdotes allegedly obtained from clever thieves (al-shuṭṭār), conjurers (al-mushaʿbadhūn), dancers, singers, and young sex workers (kāghān).62 The writings of the Baghdadi mujūn poet Ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 391/1001) “expressed obscenity and were intertwined with the languages of the khuldiyīn, the beggars and the clever thieves.”63 According to al-Thaʿālibī, the khuldiyya were a group of beggars and members of the Banū Sāsān (mukaddūn and sāsāniyyūn),64 and the name may also relate to the prisoners of the Khuld palace in Baghdad or residents of the Khuld quarter of the city. Al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363), writing three centuries later, cited Ibn al-Ḥajjāj’s description of his method for learning these languages. What aided me in my style is that my father had sold plots [of land] connected to his houses. The people who bought them divided them and built lodges in which they housed beggars, the lowly ghurabāʾ, handicapped beggars (askanūhā al-shaḥḥādhīn wa’l-ghurabāʾ al-sufl wa-dhawī al-ʿāhāt al-mukaddīn), every rascal and homeless from the Khuld [a district of Baghdad] and loud and foulmouthed ones. I used to hear their men and women, especially in summer nights, cursing back and forth on the roofs. I had a blank paper and a box with writing utensils and I used to write down what I heard. When I encountered what I did not understand, I wrote it down the way I heard it and the next day would summon the person from which I heard it. I could recognize their languages (anā ʿārif bi-lughātihim), because they were my neighbors. So I used to ask him about the explanation and would write it. I remained [like] the Aṣmaʿī of that area for a time.65

Ibn al-Ḥajjāj’s interest in his neighbors’ speech left a demonstrable mark on his poetry. In at least one poem he included two lines of obscene Aramaic, presumably overheard one evening.66 But what else do we know about these neighbors? Al-Ṣafadī described a portion of them as ghurabāʾ, essentially employing fourteenth-century language to capture a tenth-century phenomenon. As we have seen, the term ghurabāʾ referred to the Banū Sāsān at the time of al-Ṣafadī’s writing, and this group and their modes of begging were major themes in popular literature. Moreover, the ghurabā’ certainly would have figured among groups of disenfranchised people who spoke different dialects or languages. Ibn al-Ḥajjāj’s reception may have been an outlier. In his poem Abū Dulaf flagged ṣallāj (masturbator) as a Sāsāni word. His seventeenth-century commentator al-Khafājī, however, denounced this term and its cognate ṣalj (masturbation) as deriving from “an inferior colloquial language” that he explained elsewhere was the language of the Banū Sāsān.67

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Sīm and Sīn in the Modern Era The Sīn preserved in the poetry of al-ʿUkbarī, Abū Dulaf, and al-Ḥillī and in al-Jawbarī’s Kashf al-asrār has survived as an Arabic-Sāsāni dialect among the Ḥalab and Ghajar Nile tribes and entertainers in Egypt and Sudan and as Sāsāniinflected Uzbek or Tajik among ghurabā’ and entertainers in Central Asia. Some Sāsāni lexemes also appear in Algerian and Moroccan Arabic dialects. In 1856, Captain Newbold published vocabulary samples from three gharīb tribes in Egypt: the Ḥalab, the Ghajar, and Nawar. All of them spoke Egyptian Arabic, but they also spoke tribal languages. The Ḥalab spoke a mixed language that they called Sīm, and it is Arabic with much Sīn vocabulary. The Ghajar include Sīn and western Romani in their dialect, and the Nawar insert many Persian words into their Arabic dialect.68 In Egypt and Sudan, the Ḥalab speak a blend of Sīn with Arabic modified by distinct morphological patterns. It shows significant South Arabian contact and a smattering of Indo-Aryan vocabulary words. Some years later, the ethnographer Alfred von Kremer erroneously observed that “[a]ll these subdivisions of the Egyptian gipsies speak the same thievish slang language, which they call Sīm. Nothing certain is known concerning the origin of this word. According to the opinion of the natives Sīm means something secret or mysterious.”69 The sīm word list he produced has since been shown to represent not a single pan-Egyptian Gypsy dialect but only the dialect of the Ḥalab.70 The list is a mixture of words derived from Arabic and words directly from Sīn. Von Kremer was unaware of the medieval Sīn, but in 1903, the Dutch orientalist Michael Jan de Goeje made the connection between the two, calling attention to “le nom mystérieux que les Tsiganes, du moins ceux de l’Orient, donnent à leur langue. Kremer . . . le prononce sîm, mais Djaubari, auteur du 13e siècle, écrit plus d’une fois sîn.”71 The discrepancy between the two names—Sīm and Sīn—was inadvertently solved eighty years later when Everett Rowson interviewed nearly 100 Cairenes, mostly entertainers and homosexuals, who had some knowledge of Sīm. “More educated speakers,” he reported, “say siim and are puzzled by siin, while the reverse is the case for the less educated, and particularly those of the latter who live east of Port Said Street. I recognized only one speaker who recognized both variants—a well-educated silversmith who works in the heart of the Khan al-Khalili.”72 In a later publication Rowson acknowledged de Goeje’s citation of al-Jawbarī but cautioned that an isolated thirteenth-century usage of the term Sīn “require[d] further investigation.”73 In the decades between de Goeje’s and Rowson’s publications, much research was carried out on Sīm. Enno Littmann in his book Zigeuner-arabisch established links between the lexica of the Ḥalab and the Banū Sāsān in Abū Dulaf ’s poem, noting that they shared terms for bread (mashmūl), father (qarūb), woman/wife/ mother (kudda,), sister/girl (samqūna), brother/boy (samqūn), eye (ḥazzāra), and to sleep (dammakha).74 At the time of his writing, few other Banū Sāsānthemed texts, such as Ḥillī’s and ʿUkbarī’s poems, had been edited, so based on his restricted evidence, he ultimately qualified the Ḥalabi dialect as an Arabic thieves’



2. Sīn

43

cant. However, with the recent edition of even more Sāsāni texts, we see additional cognates: outsider (khushnī), horse (ṣuhlī), donkey (zuwill), meat (maḥzūza), region (qawnti), knife (khūsa), garment (sarme/sarmel), Christian (qannāwī), ugly (shalaf), beautiful (bahīl), to say (qajama), and to steal (kanasha). The high correlation of medieval and modern terms suggests that Ḥalabī Sīm/Sīn is the modern counterpart of medieval Sīn. The dissemination of the modern Sīm beyond nomadic Nile tribes only became clear to researchers through a 1926 article published by Littman’s colleague Paul Kahle, who between 1908 and 1914 had investigated a dialect called Sīm that was understood by Cairo’s shadow play artists, storytellers, singers, actors, and other entertainers. He produced a list of ninety-five terms and their variants and indicated which words had cognates with Ḥalabī Sīm. To show how Sīm functioned syntactically and grammatically, he recorded two samples of the shadow play artists’ conversational prose, alongside translations into colloquial Egyptian Arabic and German.75 In these selections of spoken Sīm, one sees that this paralanguage functions in the same way that it did in thirteenth-century literary prose. The Sīm/Sīn lexicon is embedded in an Arabic grammatical structure, as one sees in the following sentence. Sīm: badahtu qabalan li-rashfat al-sūg sawwagtu bi-arbiʿ ibārīm wa-rakhkhaytu maʾaḥlī bi-ibrīmayn. Egyptian Arabic: raḥtu qabalan li-qahwat al-ḥashīsh ḥashishtu bi-arbiʿat qurūsh wa-akaltu ḥilw bi-qurushayn. English: Before that, I went to the coffeehouse, where I smoked marijuana that cost four coins and ate a sweet that cost two.

The Sīm and Egyptian Arabic samples share adverbs, prepositions, numbers, and verbal forms, whereas they diverge in the vocabulary. In spite of Kahle’s work with medieval shadow plays, including an edition of Ibn Dāniyāl’s trilogy, he made no strong arguments about the connectedness of the Banū Sāsān to the early twentieth-century shadow play artists’ speech. Still, in some of his later works, he showed further occurrences of this language in shadow theater. In the seventeenth-century shadow play Liʿb al-manār (The Lighthouse Play) by Dāʾūd al-Manāwī, one of the characters cries out, “elmeḥázz rabaṣ!,” which one of the editors’ informants identified as Sīm.76 If Sīm existed among shadow play artists of the thirteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries, it also existed in the intervening centuries for which we lack direct evidence. Hopefully, future studies of shadow plays will offer more historical data on this mixed language. When Rowson compared his own word lists with that of Kahle, he found a significant enough convergence to conclude that the older “shadow play Sīm” was simply the Sīm of entertainers.77 In the late 1980s Dwight Reynolds lived among oral poets in the lower Delta village of al-Bakātūsh. These poets identified themselves as Ḥalab, but their fellow villagers referred to them as Ghajar. Reynolds identified three main components of their language: Arabic, onomatopoetic vocabulary, and Ḥalabi words like lamgūn (boy) and konta (village). However, the

44

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lone onomatopoetic word he cited—taftūfa (cigarette)—may be related to taftafa (Ar., “to spit out”) or may even derive from the Domari term for tobacco, dīf.78 ʿAlī ʿĪsā devoted a chapter in his 1988 book on “secret languages” to lughat al-ʿawālim, or the language of entertainers. Many of the vocabulary words cited are Sīn. Female dancers are known as kūdyānah, which likely derive from kudda (pl. kidād), defined in Abū Dulaf ’s poem as “woman” or “wife.”79 Rāqiṣah bahīlah means “a skillful female dancer.” Bahīl signifies “beautiful” in the medieval and modern Sīn.80 ʿĪsā translates kūdyānah shalaf as “tired female dancer,” but we know that shalaf in medieval and modern Sīn means “ugly.”81 Between 1988 and 1990 Karin van Nieuwkerk conducted anthropological fieldwork among entertainers in Egypt, noting specifically that the regional Sīms of entertainers in Alexandria, Tanta, and Cairo were mutually intelligible.82 In her book she acknowledged that the entertainers’ Sīm had ten words in common with the Ḥalabī words that Littmann recorded, but she does not investigate this convergence.83 Van Nieuwkerk, for instance, noted that Cairene female performers considered it a bad omen to eat sunflower seeds (libb in Egyptian Arabic) on stage, and one woman who broke protocol was teased as “Sayyida the libb-eater.” Van Nieuwkerk tied this behavior to a food taboo among entertainers. However, the embarrassment is probably related to one of the Ḥalabi words for “penis”—lib, and thus the suggestion of fellating penises before an audience.84 The Sāsāni vocabulary has not only survived among the Ḥalab and urban Egyptian entertainers but also among Central Asian performers and beggars. Along the margins of an anonymous Persian manuscript titled Ketāb-e sāsāniyān ba-kamāl (The Complete Book of Sāsānis) and dated 745/1344, a scribe provided Persian glosses to a number of words in what the manuscript calls zabān-e āsīān, or the language of the Āsīān.85 Based on a series of verses in zabān-e āsīān in the fourth part of the manuscript, this language appears to have functioned as a mixed language with a largely Jewish Aramaic vocabulary inserted into a Persian grammatical structure.86 Anna Troitskaya argued for historical links between the Persianate Sāsānī terms in the Ketāb-e sāsāniyān ba-kamāl and two Central Asian dialects spoken by itinerants, beggars, and entertainers. The first dialect was called Abdoltili (literally, “language of itinerants”) spoken by Central Asian artists, musicians, qalandars, and dervishes, and the second was Arabcha, the language of the Lyuli peripatetics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Troitskaya found that nearly half of the Arabcha vocabulary derived from Abdoltili, which in turn has links with the language of the Banū Sāsān.87 She found that Abū Dulaf ’s lexicon matched the words in the Ketāb-e sāsīān for buttocks (hurra), warrior for the faith (maysar), work (hādūr), lazy (tanbal), and deaf (barkūsh). Bosworth, inspired by the connections Troitskaya drew, explored the semantic history of the Sīn words for “bread” or “loaves” in Abū Dulaf and al-Ḥillī’s Sāsāni poems. This fundamental word had resonated through so many other minority languages over the centuries, signaling a deep linguistic history. In the tenth century Abū Dulaf used the word mashmūl (pl., mashāmīl) to mean “loaf of bread,” and in the Persian manuscript and in modern Abdoltili and Arabcha, mashmūl is



2. Sīn

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a “pilaf,” all words designating staple grains.88 In the language of the fourteenthcentury ghurabā’, the word for bread was shumūl.89 Among the nineteenth-century Egyptian Ḥalabi Sīn-speakers, shamalna meant “we ate,” and esh-shimleh meant “eating.”90 That a staple word was preserved among Sīn-speakers for centuries is not surprising, and I have documented more holdovers between medieval and modern Sīn in an earlier publication.91 But ethnographers and sociologists in the twentieth century have also recorded variations of these words in languages in northern Africa, Central Asia, and western China. The anthropologist Olaf Günther has recorded shamul as the word for rice among the Mugati tribe of Central Asia.92 The semi-nomadic Äynu in China’s Xinjiang province today uses shamul to mean “food.” It therefore comes as no surprise that in the nineteenth century two explorers recorded the following: “Choumoul—aliment, nourriture (chamoul en tsigane).”93 All in all, Troitskaya argued for a “relationship between the argot of the 14th century Central Asian and Khurasanian Sāsānīs and the modern jargons, Abdoltili and Arabcha in Central Asia, those of the dervishes and gypsies of eastern Persia, and that of the Abdāls of eastern Turkestan.”94 The diffusion among culturally similar groups of this basic food term implies a long shared history or perhaps that Sīn, Mugati, Abdoltili, and Arabcha derive from an unidentified ancestral language. In Persian, too, sāsī and sāsānī mean “beggar” and has since at least the eleventh century, when the word derived from the Banū Sāsān.95 In contemporary Maghrebi Arabic, the term sāsī means “beggar.”96 The westward movement of the term sāsī was definitely accompanied by migrations of Sīn-speakers, seeing as some contemporary northern African dialects also feature Sīn vocabulary. Among the papers of the French philologist Georges S. Colin (1893–1977) is a 238-page dossier of field notes and drafts of unpublished articles on northern African “Gypsy argots.” In one Maghribi community he recorded phrases and sample sentences about eating that use shamala. For instance, “ouach brit techmel?” means “what is there to eat?”97 In the mid-twentieth century the French ethnographer Jean Lapanne-Joinville recorded key terms of a Moroccan dialect called Ghawṣ that, unrecognized by him, included the Sāsāni words for woman (lkudda), man (lḫedd or lkudi), foot/leg (medrāžāt), bread (šmūl), money (meṭṭūṭ), and to speak (iqžem).98 This last term is particularly suggestive, because the triliteral root q-j-m does not appear in classical Arabic lexicons, and the Sāsāni term qajmānī means “my sayings.”99 In a nineteenth-century Algerian dictionary the infinitive qajama is defined as “dire, parler, causer,”100 and in Tunisia today qajmi signifies “notional and structured codes.”101 Further studies of the dialects of northern African peripatetics will shed more light on the depth and scope of language contact between Sāsāni and other nomadic groups. So far, I have only found mention that among the peripatetic Beni Addes tribe of Algeria, techmel means “you eat,” though this absence of data may be due to lack of available language documentation.102 Still, one can reasonably assume that the Ghawṣ-speaking population in Morocco and the Banū Sāsān were drawn together through similar lifestyles. From Marrakech to Casablanca, Lapanne-Joinville found that Ghawṣ was spoken by itinerant male and female singers, sex workers, and vagrants, but in ʿAbda and Safi no one understood this language. His main

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informants were residents of Casablanca and members of the Awlād Bū ʿAzīz tribe, who lived approximately twenty kilometers south of the coastal city of El Jadida.103 Is it sheer coincidence that this para-language—alternatively called Sīm, Sīn, or lughat Banī Sāsān—and its vocabulary have historically been reproduced in communities of peripatetics and entertainers? Or is it possible that we can begin to trace the formation and migrations of a distinct community through this ancient language?

Conclusion: Literary and Historical Implications In this chapter I have carefully laid out arguments related to a language the surviving traces of which span the tenth century to the present day. First, Sīn vocabulary is of mixed etymology, notably Arabic, Persian, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek lexical elements. There are also many words of as yet unknown etymology. Second, the ghurabā’ encompassed tribes from at least two language groups: Indo-European (Romani and Persian) and Semitic (Arabic and Sīn). Even today, Strangers divide themselves along these linguistic lines. In Egypt, for instance, they speak three main languages: the Ghajar speak Arabic with a strong Indo-Aryan (Romani or Domari) vocabulary, the Nawar speak a mixed language of Arabic with a significant Persian substrate, and the Ḥalab speak a specially morphologized Arabic with Sīn vocabulary. Last, the Sīn para-language of the medieval ghurabāʾ has survived today in the dialects of peripatetics and entertainers in Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Studies of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic dialectology, both historical and contemporary, will shed more light on the history and patterns of this ghurabāʾ language and its community of speakers. Methodologically, researchers may be on firmer ground with historical linguistic analyses, rather than through investigations of social categories, as the naming of ethnic groups was unstable across time and space or was too vague (e.g., aswad, turk, ʿajam, kurd). Poets and grammarians, who had vested personal and professional interests in language, may have transcribed additional samples of these minority languages in their works. Last, more extensive documentation of the contemporary languages of peripatetic groups will allow firmer conclusions about the historical migrations of the ghurabāʾ.

CChapter 3 GHARĪB LITERARY CULTURES IN MAMLUK CAIRO

Premodern ghurabā’ cultivated rich oral, manuscript, and print cultures in many parts of Afro-Eurasia. In fact, much of it has been studied before as singular or mysterious developments disconnected from larger social contexts. In this atomized approach historians have frequently dismissed evidence of literacy among poor and marginalized ghurabā’, like the South Asian Zuṭṭ, as unlikely. In Chapter 1, I analyzed the early third-/ninth-century verses of an anonymous Zuṭṭī poet, who called on his fellow Zuṭṭ to take up arms against the Abbasids. A healthy dose of skepticism may lead one to ask whether the recorded verses represent verbatim speech, but exaggerated doubt made one Arabist question whether a Zuṭṭ could have attained sufficient literacy to compose formal poetry. “A song which they allegedly sang has been preserved but as this song is in classical Arabic (not the spoken language) and classical metre it is unlikely that any Zotti, buffalo herdsman or highwayman, would have written it.”1 To make such a statement, one must presume that the pastoral knowledge of livestock herders and the political awareness of social rebels represent no kind of knowledge at all. Indeed, pastoral knowledge is often transmitted orally through poems, tales, and work songs so that one may reasonably expect literary sophistication from the most talented pastoralist orators. Similarly, positioning anti-caliphal actors, like the Zuṭṭ, as outlaws assumes the legitimacy and lawfulness of Abbasid policies. The Zuṭṭ challenge to the state is not only delegitimized as illegal but also as one rooted in a broadly ignorant culture. Bruno De Nicola has been investigating a parallel tendency, namely the reluctance of historians to reconcile the Mongols’ nomadic lifestyle and reputation for brutality with their artistic and literary patronage, polyglotism, religious tolerance, and adoption and promotion of blockprinting and movable-type printing in their administration.2 In spite of the long Arabic polemical tradition between people of the pen and the sword, “[i]n everyday life many forms of cooperation and overlap between the worlds of pen and sword existed.”3 The unthinkability of poor people, nomads, warriors, and herdsmen cultivating cultures of literacy and print can no longer be a sustainable historiographical position. In the first half of this chapter, I examine gharīb oral culture and its relationship to the resurgence of shadow theater in thirteenth-century Cairo, ultimately reinterpreting Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb as an

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ethnographic study of professional ghurabā’ and a reimagining of a gharīb literary gathering. In the second half I focus on the life and work of a single gharīb poet, Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, who resided in Cairo’s Bāb al-Lūq quarter.

Gharīb Oral Culture The classical Arabic lexicon distinguished between two types of learned social gatherings: egalitarian, collegial gatherings (mujālasāt) and royal salons where social hierarchies were rigidly maintained (majālis).4 Accounts of majālis hosted at the court of Mamluk sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–16) describe communal meals, record the names of attendees, and detail debates on law, theology, poetry, and political thought. Participants conducted their discussions in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, and the ideas advanced in these salons largely set the intellectual agenda in elite Cairo and the social etiquette practiced shaped elite habitus.5 Similar gatherings of nonelites had long attracted participation from people across society. Much earlier, in ninth-century Baghdad, court elites joined with local literati to form learned communities unattached to the caliphal court. One group nicknamed the “elegant and licentious demons of ʿAskar [a Baghdadi neighborhood]” held assemblies where they felt free to recite licentious mujūn poetry and to compose texts on a wide range of subjects.6 The Egyptian poet al-Nawājī (d. 1455) observed that “the salon of one of the merchants and commoners (al-tujjar wa-l-ʿawwām) feels more joyful and more literary (akthar adaban) than that of a king or vizier,” and the poetry anthologies he compiled reflect his embracive attitude.7 Couplets from leading elite Mamluk writers, like al-Ṣafadī, and gharīb craftsmen, like Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, figure prominently in Nawājī’s compendium Marātiʿ al-ghizlān fī waṣf al-ḥisān min al-ghilmān (Pastures of Gazelles: On Beautiful Young Men). As Muhsin al-Musawi keenly observed, “[i]n assemblies, poetry recitation often calls for comments and invokes discussions that, on many occasions, draw the attention of a biographer, critic, or bibliophile. In other words, it generates its own public sphere in the ongoing formation of a republic of letters.”8 The majlis was a rich site of knowledge production, cultural formation, and the dissemination of ideas. Like sultans and their subjects in courts and communities throughout West Asia, the ghurabā’ also held multilingual learned salons in which they performed poetry and likely shadow theater in Arabic and Sīn. Jawbarī noted that among the ghurabā’ astrologers of the thirteenth century are those who sell the amulet. They have poetry in Sīn, dūbayt poetry, and others than this. . . . They express many things—countless and unlimited things—in Sīn! They hold learned salons (majālis) that are not for the kings, as well as amazing large gatherings. And if there were no fear of making this book too long, I would recount innumerable anecdotes.9

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The private majālis of the ghurabā’ were distinguished by the use of Sīn and the exclusion of non-gharīb elites, but these talents were not only shared among themselves.10 In public some ghurabā’ specialized in oratory, earning their livelihoods as jongleurs and preachers. In fact, Sāsāni myths valorize rhetorical skills. Because the mythical founder Shaykh Sāsān was himself a preacher, public orators formed the most honored community within the Banū Sāsān.11Ḥillī observed ghurabā’ who “recited poetry from the back of a camel, declaiming in a loud voice,” and others who “acted as a popular preacher and storyteller, making people absorbed and enraptured by [their] stories and verses.”12 What were the specific stories and poems recounted in the private salons and public performances? Although transcripts or summaries of these performances have not been preserved, Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb brilliantly reproduces a gharīb literary salon, offering unprecedented insight into this obscured aspect of gharīb oral culture. The title character Gharīb, who oversees the majlis, breaks the fourth wall of theater by inviting the live audience to enter “a private gathering” (majlis al-īnās) of ghurabā’.13 After Gharīb delivers the opening monologue of the play, the other title character ʿAjīb al-Dīn the preacher speaks.14 Following these introductions, twenty-two male and one female ghurabā’ emerge singly to offer tales and poems— in Arabic and Sīn—about their own professions and lives. In ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb Ibn Dāniyāl captured some of the essential aspects of thirteenth-century majālis and ghurabā’ oral culture—namely, their multilingualism, the many types of people in attendance at these events, and the linguistic agility of the participants. The appearance of ghurabā’ is ordered from the most prestigious laborer (preacher) to the least (camel driver) and can be roughly grouped as: 1. Medical workers: ʿUsayla the seller of medicinal pastes15; Nubāta the herbalist who sells opium, cumin, pellitory, alyssum, and anacardium nut (balādhur)16; Miqdām the eye surgeon17; and al-Ṣāniʿa, O, Girls, the madam, tattooist, and circumciser of girls18 2. Occultists: Shamʿūn the magician19; Hilāl the astrologer; and ʿAwwādh the seller of blockprinted charms and amulets20 3. Entertainers: Ḥuwaysh the snake charmer21; Ḥassūn the acrobat; Shibl the lion tamer22; Mubārak the Indian elephant trainer23; Abū l-ʿAjab the goat trainer; Abū Qiṭaṭ the cat and mouse trainer24; Zaghbar the dog trainer25; Abū l-Waḥsh the tamer of bears26; Nātū the Nubian clown27; Shadhqam the sword-swallower; Maymūn the monkey trainer28; Waththāb the tightropewalker from Bakhtiyār29; and Jarrāḥ the beggar with self-inflicted wounds 4. Laborers: Jammār the torch-bearing night watchman30 and ʿAssāf the camel driver. All of these trades depend on a settled client community for financial patronage and support. An independent village of ghurabā’ could not have sustained itself in isolation with these types of trades. Where are the butchers, bakers, and textile workers? This assortment of professions provided the first clue that the ghurabā’

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must have lived in or close to cities where they plied their trades, a point that will be followed up in Chapter 4. These imaginative trades were certainly visible to Ibn Khaldūn, who lived in Cairo a century after this play was written and considered them a mark of a more developed civilization than his native northern Africa: “Thus, we learn that there are Egyptians who teach dumb creatures like birds and domestic donkeys, who produce marvellous spectacles which give the illusion that objects are transformed, and who teach the use of a camel driver’s chant, how to dance and walk on ropes in the air, how to lift heavy animals and stones, and other things.”31 Finally, Gharīb reappears at the end of the play to deliver the closing lines, addressed to ʿAlī the puppet master (rayyis).32 Although no shadow play artist appears onstage in ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb, the rayyis ʿAlī b. Mawlāhum looms large in Ibn Dāniyāl’s trilogy, for it was he who asked Ibn Dāniyāl to compose these new scripts: You wrote to me, O artful master and debauched degenerate—may your screen remain high and your privacy inviolate—to say that people have turned a deaf ear to the shadow play and ceased to respond to it because of its hackneyed repetition, and to ask me to compose for you in this genre something that will be an innovation for the characters in the puppet box. . . . I have composed for you some licentious plays, pieces of high, not low, literature, which, once you have made the puppets, divided the script into scenes, assembled your audience, and waxed the screen, you will find to be entirely novel and truly superior to the usual shadow play.33

ʿAlī functions, like Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, as the named but unseen figure who precipitates all of the action onstage, having commissioned the shadow plays and ultimately staged them. The shadow play artist behind the screen was a thrillingly potent figure. The Egyptian Sufi poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1234) compared him to God and the shadow figures to humans on earth. Lo from behind the veil mysterious the forms of things are shown in every guise, of manifold appearance. . . . All thou beholdest is the act of One. In solitude, but closely veiled is He. Let him but lift the screen, no doubt remains: The forms are vanished, He alone is all; And thou, illumined, knowest by His light Thou find’st His actions in the senses’ night.34

The poet’s verses convey how transformative was the experience of sitting shoulder to shoulder in a darkened space, watching silhouetted figures passing before a lighted screen, listening to music, and absorbing a tale. At the performances that Ibn al-Fāriḍ attended, he saw puppets of birds, camels, military sea battles, and

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hunters.35 Unfortunately, these shadow plays, unique testimonies to a vibrant oral culture, only survive in four manuscripts that were copied two to three centuries after their initial composition. In considering the Ibn Dāniyāl trilogy, Konrad Hirschler felt that plays for shadow theater “seem at first glance to be rather unlikely candidates for a written tradition.”36 Such a scarce number of manuscripts did not suggest a vast audience for the written version of the plays, and furthermore, for whom were these plays copied? The scripts themselves contain stage directions, as well as Ibn Dāniyāl’s direct address to shadow play performers, making it apparent that these scripts likely circulated among a niche group of literati, that is, those “practitioners of shadow plays who used written versions of texts in order to prepare their performance.”37 Few copies survive because a small, specialized group was copying them. There is indirect evidence from the modern era that it was gharīb shadow play artists who at some point became key practitioners of this art and were instrumental in sustaining the written tradition. In 1932 the book collector Aḥmad Taymūr Pasha (1871–1930) bequeathed at least two latenineteenth- or early-twentieth-century shadow play manuscripts to the Egyptian National Library: Sirmāṭa al-fann by al-Ḥabashī (The Book of the Art, MS Taymūr shiʿr 922) and Al-Sirmāṭa fī azjāl khayāl al-ẓill (The Book of Zajal Poems for Shadow Plays, MS Taymūr shiʿr 970).38 Their hybrid Sīn-Arabic titles suggest that the intended audience was shadow play artists, most likely in Egypt. Sirmāṭa is a term unrecorded until 1914, when Kahle learned that in the Sīn spoken by Cairo’s shadow play artists, singers, storytellers, and actors, it meant “book,”39 and it is related to words for “amulet” (sarmāṭ) and “to write” (sarmaṭa), which are attested in the medieval works of Abū Dulaf, Ḥillī, and Jawbarī. In the early modern period yet another shadow theater-related word of uncertain etymology, kadas, appears in literature but not in dictionaries. Paul Kahle asserted that the term derives from Coptic or Greek but did not specify any further.40 However, the term dates at least as far back as the sixteenth century.41 In 998/1589 the Aleppine weaver Kamāl al-Dīn used the phrase kadasī māhir (“a skillful shadow play artist”) to describe a man who had so impressed Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–95) that he had him summoned to Istanbul.42 The term appears many times in the title and the text of a manuscript of poems for shadow plays that Paul Kahle purchased in Egypt. Called Dīwān kadas, it was copied by Dā’ūd al-ʿAṭṭār in 1707 CE. Kahle proposed that kadas signifies shadow play poetry or script.43 If Sīnspeaking artists were writing to and for one another, then their books and other associated material culture could be key sources for the history of gharīb performances and culture. Chief among these would be Kahle’s collection of leather shadow puppets and shadow play manuscripts that he purchased in Egypt. The puppets were created in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century but due to their authentic use of Mamluk heraldic symbols were likely based on earlier Mamluk models.44 Distinctive literary traditions emerged from the ranks of the ghurabā’, who were operating in spaces not linked to elite cultures: in shadow theater, among street astrologers. Their visualization in cityscapes—specifically in storybooks and in gharīb neighborhoods—will be explored in the remainder of this chapter.

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Maqāmāt Illustrations The ghurabā’ were represented with considerable accuracy not only in shadow theater but also in another visual medium—book illustrations. The window for medieval Arabic illustrated book art was short, lasting only from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. From this period the single illustrated work that has survived in the greatest number is Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt, even though the earliest ones were painted only in the thirteenth century. Each individual maqāma takes place in a different Asian or Egyptian city, and these ostensibly urban scenes from thirteenth to fourteenth century illustrated that Maqāmāt contain some of the most recognizable examples of Arabic book arts today. The art historian Alain George has proposed that the shadow theater directly inspired illustrations of Maqāmāt manuscripts. The wooden frame and cloth screen used in shadow theater, plus the design of the leather figures, influenced illustrations in maqāmāt (picaresque tales) manuscripts. It is no coincidence that the two main characters in maqāmāt were a wandering Sāsāni trickster and a naive Arab traveler. A fascination with the ghurabā’ inspired nonghurabā’ to represent them in Arabic maqāmāt, foreshadowing the early modern Western European trend of depicting Romani subjects in art and literature.45 Illustrated maqāmāt manuscripts form our earliest depictions of the ghurabā’, and these works form much of what we know about medieval Arabic book illustration. The subject matter of the shadow plays overlapped with that of the maqāma works, and the mutual influences are perceptible in maqāma illustrations. Among the earliest manuscripts from the thirteenth century, Oleg Grabar has identified typologies of the male figures: Arabs (bearded, robed, turbaned), Bedouins (like Arab males but with a face veil), slaves (short robes, high boots, and braided hair), Indian sailors (dark skin, loincloth), judges (like Arab males but sporting longer beards and ṭaylasāns), and beggars or Sufis (tattered clothes or a short robe, long tight trousers, conical hat). Significantly, the Sasani figure in al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt, Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, is represented in the beggar costume “when he cannot clearly be identified by his action.”46 The conical hat he wears has been differently interpreted as a qalansuwa ṭawīla or a ṭurṭūr. Four of Abū Zayd’s attendants in the Istanbul manuscript wear this ṭurṭūr, and in other manuscripts, Abū Zayd and his son wear a ṭurṭūr. Nātū, a Nubian performer in ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb, appears onstage wearing a ṭurṭūr and carrying a drum and spears.47 These visualizations of ghurabā’ as illuminated figures behind cloth screens and in illustrations of the picaresque tales of the Maqāmāt were as familiar to Mamluk audiences as were the living, breathing ghurabā’ they represented. In the remainder of this chapter, I will more closely explore the lived environments and experiences of the Mamluk Cairene gharīb community, focusing especially on the biography and compositions of a local gharīb writer.

Bāb al-Lūq, a Gharīb Neighborhood in Mamluk Cairo In 1260, a mamluk soldier named Baybars fought alongside the Mamluk sultan Qutuz in the Battle of Ayn Jalut, eventually routing the Mongol army in a decisive

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victory. Qutuz was assassinated shortly after the battle, and Baybars ascended to the throne. Many refugees fled from territories under Mongol rule into Mamluk lands, and Baybars undertook the resettlement of these populations in Greater Cairo. In particular, migrants from Mosul started arriving in Cairo in 1260. At the time Baybars established two new areas for Iraqi refugees in Cairo’s northern neighborhood of Ḥusayniyya and in an area west of Zuwayla Gate, even beyond the Egyptian Canal (Khalīj al-Miṣrī), that came to be known as Bāb al-Lūq or Khuṭṭ al-Lūq. In the Fatimid period al-Ḥusayniyya had consisted of residential quarters, a slave market, non-Arabs, and housing for two military regiments, the Wazīriyya and the Armenian Rayḥāniyya.48 Between the years 1293 and 1700, members of the ruling class seldom constructed residences in Ḥusayniyya or in the western suburbs of Cairo, preferring to build in Cairo proper or in the southern suburbs.49 Ḥusayniyya and Bāb al-Lūq quickly gained reputations as havens for socially and professionally marginalized peoples. An advice manual composed in the 1280s for a Mamluk ruler prescribes surveillance of areas “likely to be rendezvous to evildoers . . . especially, certain public halls in the Ḥusainiyyah quarter, called Halls of Chivalry (ka’ât al-futuwah) which were frequented by turbulent persons.”50 The reputation of the Bāb al-Lūq neighborhood was sufficiently well established at this time that in Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play Ṭayf al-khayāl the title character reminisces about seedy get-togethers in Bāb al-Lūq, and the author of a late fourteenth-century maqāma made Bāb al-Lūq the meeting point for a trio of tricksters.51 When Bāb al-Lūq does appear in chronicles and travelogues, it is often to highlight the irregularity of its residents and attempts to regulate their behavior. At least twice in the fourteenth century, Mamluk sultans sent troops to the quarter to destroy hashish crops and stores of wine. In 724/1324, Qadādār, the governor of Cairo, confiscated large amounts of hashish from Bāb al-Lūq and destroyed the plants in a bonfire. The process of confiscation lasted a full month. The Mamluk amir Sūdūn al-Shaykhūnī (d. 798/1396) did the same.52 These crackdowns extended to performers in Bāb al-Lūq who bear a striking and perhaps not incidental resemblance to the ghurabāʾ in the shadow play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa described an elaborate swindle by a Cairene named Shuʿayb, who in 1343 claimed to have dug up the grave of a Companion of the Prophet near Bāb al-Lūq. This holy site became the site of his sermon deliveries, drawing crowds. Shuʿayb charged visitors for tours of the grave and even performed healing miracles at the site. Nightly celebrations were held. Eventually, local authorities intervened to break up the revelry.53 Around this same time, in 744/1343–4, Āl Malik, the viceroy of Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, ordered Cairene officials to take severe measures against organizers of ram and cock fights, healers (muʿālijīn), wrestlers (muṣāriʿīn), sword fighters (muthāqifīn), boxers (mulākimīn), many different types of gamblers (muqamirīn), monkey and bear trainers, and other types of entertainers.54 In spite of these continued reprisals, the neighborhood flourished. By the end of the fourteenth century, “the quarter of al-Lūq (khuṭṭ al-lūq) . . . was filled with buildings, and the riff-raff from among the people, as well as their mobs, inhabited it. The place is known today as Bāb al-Lūq.”55

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Writing in 831/1427–8, al-Maqrīzī observed that the social composition of Bāb al-Lūq had changed little since its seventh-/thirteenth-century founding. The vast squares of Bāb al-Lūq consist of five connected squares, which are now known together as “the vast square of Bāb al-Lūq.” Here, public performers gather and draw crowds around them (aṣḥāb al-ḥalaq), entertainers and craftsmen (arbāb al-malāʿib wa-l-ḥiraf), such as magicians, shadow play artists, snake charmers, those who incite disgust or horror (muta’affafīn) and such. They gather here for your delight and your unrestricted corruption. Previously, just before the year 780[/1378–9], the people would gather in al-ṭarīq al-shāriʿ al-maslūk from Ṭabbākh Mosque to Qadādār Bridge.56

The residents and frequenters of Bāb al-Lūq practiced the same trades described in the shadow play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb, suggesting that the ghurabāʾ of Cairo lived and worked in Bāb al-Lūq. Though their settlement in the city was established, they suffered occasional reprisals. From time to time in the fifteenth century, Mamluk sultans ordered the expulsion of ghurabāʾ from Cairo, accounts that read ambiguously in chroniclers’ reports. Al-Maqrīzī noted that “on the 28th [of Muḥarram 821/7 March 1418], it was decreed [by Sultan al-Mu’ayyad] in Cairo that every gharīb must return to his homeland. In Cairo the ghurabā’ and the non-Arabs (al-ʿajam) had swelled the ranks of the various orders of the Qalandariyya.”57 If ghurabā’ here signified generic foreigners, then there would have been no need to specify non-Arabs as well, as non-Arabs were foreigners by definition.58 As such, I choose to understand ghurabā’ as indicative of a particular social group. However, this brief report includes another ambiguous passage in which the sultan orders every gharīb to return to his homeland. How does one reconcile the idea of a material homeland for ghurabā’ with the group’s symbolic rejection of landed identities? It appears that some ghurabā’ considered themselves in exile from a homeland, like refugees. The wording of Al-Mu’ayyad’s decree is nearly identical to a portion of Gharīb’s opening monologue in ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb: “May God have mercy on our Shaykh Sāsān. He was the best of men, the model for writers, and the close companion of ghurabā’. May God gather every beloved in heaven and return every gharīb to his homeland.”59 Interpreting gharīb as a member of the Banū Sāsān social group also places a future anecdote in useful perspective. In 841/1438 Sultan al-Ẓāhir Barsbay issued a much less ambiguous order for all able-bodied beggars to leave Cairo, leaving disabled beggars in place.60 Although the chronicler did not specify ghurabā’, their propensity for feigning illness makes them the most likely group to have been affected by this order. From cracking an egg in one’s shirt to give the appearance of a wound leaking pus to rubbing onion juice under one’s eyes to draw tears, the ghurabā’ had long boasted about their tactics to defraud passersby.61 But in Shaʿbān 862/June–July 1458 the tone around the criminality of the ghurabā’ shifted. Several instances of arson in Cairo were blamed on foreigners, prompting Sultan Ināl to order every gharīb to leave the city immediately. Once again, no one actually left the city, but it shows the state’s

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willingness to scapegoat this group of people, which an accusation without punishment suggests.62 No such order seems to have been issued for other social groups, like Jews, Christians, or Franks, so local frustrations with the ghurabā’ must have been high. Rising resentments may have spurred some ghurabā’ to migrate from Cairo into new territories. As will be shown in the next chapter, ghurabā’ had settled in northern African and Andalusian cities by the 1300s, but Latin sources only mention individual “Egyptians” from 1370 onward. Not until 1417 do they appear in organized bands with designated leaders, self-described as pilgrims from Egypt. The history of Romani migration into Latin Christendom may be connected to anti-ghurabā’ policies in West Asia or Egypt, though additional research would be needed to confirm the connection. Scattered mentions in Mamluk chronicles about Bāb al-Lūq’s social problems only communicate an outsider’s view of this neighborhood and its residents. Can this perspective be weighed against the writings of Bāb al-Lūq’s residents, for whom this quarter may have felt central, rather than marginal? In fact, from the wild, new residential quarter of Bāb al-Lūq emerged the poet Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār (d. 749/1348–9), who self-identified as a gharīb, and who serves as an important fourteenth-century witness to his home quarter. Al-Miʿmār even wrote a couplet in which the speaker says: “Let us remember a day in Bāb al-Lūq, when I was suffocated with intoxication.”63 He lived among the ghurabāʾ in Bāb al-Lūq, wrote licentious mujūn verses in Arabic interspersed with Sīn, and penned a couplet about speakers of Sīn.

Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, a Gharīb Poet Of al-Miʿmār’s two contemporary biographers, only one, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363), seems to have ever actually met him. His second biographer, Ibn Shākir al-Kutubī, also died in 1363 but spent his whole life in Damascus, so it is unlikely that the two ever met. In any case, Ṣafadī’s three biographies of al-Miʿmār are short on contextualizing details. The earlier two biographies that appear in Aʿyān al-ʿaṣr and Wāfī bi’l-Wafayāt are striking for their indeterminacy. Ṣafadī mentions no teachers and offers neither a birthdate nor birthplace. In both entries al-Miʿmār is named simply Ibrāhīm, without parentage or an honorific title. Only a trade is attached to his name, but even that is not precisely known. According to the entry in Aʿyān, “Ibrāhīm the weaver is also called the specialist for repair and restoration work (al-miʿmār) and is also called the stonecutter. He is ghulām al-n.w.rī, a charming commoner, and a poet free from the constraints of syntax and morphology. . . . As such, he is a rarity in Bāb al-Lūq.”64 In his own poetry, al-Miʿmār consistently referred to himself as a repairman, though he made no claims of great skill in this craft. In one poem he complained about a bitter winter that has left him without food or strength: “Have mercy on al-Miʿmār, whose house foundation has collapsed / and whose roof has fallen on him from therains.”65 The designation of weaver is curious but may have resulted from casual associations. A qaysariyya (covered bazaar) dedicated to cotton and linen was built in Bāb

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al-Lūq in 740/1339, where a hippodrome had once stood. Whatever Ibrāhīm’s involvement with weaving may have been, this detail drops out of all later biographies.66 Ṣafadī’s last biography in Alḥān al-sawājiʿ reads in part: Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī, the shaykh Burhān al-Dīn, known as Ibn Ghulām al-N.w.rī and as the Repairman and as the Stonecutter. May God have mercy on him. He died in the year 749 in Cairo during the Egyptian plague. When I arrived in Cairo in the year 745, he wrote to me, during the time of King al-Ṣāliḥ Ismā’īl, son of King al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn.67

Following this, Ṣafadī recorded the two epigrams that Ibrāhīm had sent him. Given the brevity of their acquaintance, it is little wonder that the biography is a bit thin, but their communications did permit Ṣafadī to update his entry. In the latest iteration, Ṣafadī added Ibrāhīm’s father’s name (ʿAlī) and revised his nickname from “Ghulām al-N.w.rī” to “Ibn Ghulām al-N.w.rī.” Later biographers maintained this longer version. Still, “Ibn Ghulām al-N.w.rī.” is a confounding sobriquet. The term ghulām could mean “young boy,” “slave,” or even “hireling,” and naming one’s son Ghulām Rasūl showed one’s hope that he would be devoted to the Prophet Muḥammad.68 But in the 1200s certain metalworkers from Mosul signed their work as ghulām of a master metalworker, which may have indicated their status as manumitted slaves apprenticed to a master craftsman. Other Mosuli metalworkers indicated their relationship to the master by signing tilmīdh (pupil) or ajīr (apprentice).69 In al-Miʿmār’s case his father was probably enslaved by a man with the honorific title Nūr al-Dīn. An alternative vocalization of al-N.w.r.ī could be “son of a slave of the Nawar,” where al-Nawarī refers to a member of the Domarispeaking Nawar in Greater Syria and Egypt.70 In the third and latest biography, Ṣafadī referred to him as Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī and omits the description of him as a weaver. Probably writing slightly later than Ṣafadī, Ibn Abī Ḥajalah (d. 776/1375) noted that “Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm b. Ghulām al-N.w.rī [is] of Ḥijāzī stock, though he was born, lived and died in Cairo (miṣr). [He is] Jamāl al-Dīn, known as The Repairman/Restorer (al-Miʿmār).”71 Writing considerably later, the Meccan historian al-Fāsī (d. 832/1429) repeated the claim of al-Miʿmār’s west Arabian origins but did not include the names of any ancestors.72 None of his biographers offered an estimate of his age upon death. There is no historical evidence tying Ibrāhim al-Miʿmār to a specific construction project, but it is tempting to wonder whether his career as a repairman was linked to the construction frenzy initiated by al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qālawūn during his third reign as sultan, which lasted from 709/1310 to 741/1341. In this period the area between Bāb al-Lūq and Munsha’at al-Mahrānī—an area lying west of al-Khalīj al-Nāṣirī—was teeming with construction projects because “all hands were turned to building as if the people, without exception, had all been summoned by some call to come and build, for people do as their masters do.”73 Could al-Miʿmār have been employed on these projects that were conveniently located near his home? Even if not, one of the most important details of his

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biography is that he resided in Cairo’s Bāb al-Lūq quarter, which in his lifetime was situated near a dung heap.74 If we accept Ibn Abī Ḥajalah’s claim that al-Miʿmār was a native Cairene, then how did he end up in this quarter? Whether he was born there to refugee parents or moved there later in life, the sheer fact of his residence in Bāb al-Lūq strongly implies social disadvantage. Al-Miʿmār’s chief legacy resides in the letters and poems he composed, many in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and with relaxed attitudes to unconventional grammar. Ṣafadī admitted that “when it comes to his maqāṭiʿ-poems, he ignores case endings and the morphology of verbs, although he [normally] rarely makes errors.”75 The grammarian and lexicographer Shams al-Dīn b. al-Ṣā’igh (d. 725/1325) was less discreet about al-Miʿmār’s limitations. He marveled that al-Miʿmār had composed a praise poem to Judge ʿAlā’ al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn Faḍlallāh al-ʿUmarī (d. 769/1368). “He (al-Miʿmār) made this although he does not have any ʿarabiyyah (good Arabic)!” With an allusion to his disadvantaged upbringing, al-Miʿmār retorted: “How should I get a donkey cart (also ʿarabiyyah), when I haven’t even obtained the money for a donkey in this world?”76 Since he lacked the wherewithal to purchase a lowly pack animal, he could never have afforded the education necessary to refine his speech. Al-Miʿmār’s biographers signaled his social class by not only drawing attention to his speech but also by asserting that he defied their low expectations for nonelites. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (773/1372–852/1449), who was born decades after al-Miʿmār’s death, tempered praise of the poet with belittling remarks about his class. “Even though he was a commoner, Ibrāhīm was intelligent and talented and had a pleasant character.”77 Without an education al-Miʿmār lacked the important social and scholarly networks that could have led to patronage of his literary talents. Al-Miʿmār lived in straitened conditions in Bāb al-Lūq, was unwilling or unable to write standard Arabic, and to compensate for his lack of scholarly networks, he joined a band of ḥarāfīsh strongmen who were loyal to the Mamluk amir Ṭashtamur. Al-Miʿmār’s oeuvre is incomprehensible if removed from his biographical context. Recent scholarship obscures these details in service of a narrative that portrays al-Miʿmār as a socially respectable figure. “Al-Miʿmār,” Thomas Bauer writes, “was an ascetic and frugal man, who avoided contact with the powerful and did not seek wealth. He was at his home in Bāb al-Lūq when he died of the plague in the year 749.”78 His poverty is reframed as an ennobling spiritual practice and his lack of networks as intentional social alienation. The biographical revisionism continues surrounding his chosen trade. Based only on al-Miʿmār’s selfidentification as a craftsman, Bauer consistently translates miʿmār as “master builder” and concludes: “Even if we know little about al-Miʿmār’s life, we can be certain of the poet’s membership in the urban middle class.”79 Not all Mamluk craftsmen could sustain households with their earnings, for we have seen that Ibn Dāniyāl barely eked out a living as an ophthalmologist. Why cast al-Miʿmār as a middle-class artisan who composed poetry on the voluptuous themes of beer, hashish, wine, penises, and unrestrained sexuality? If members of the respectable middle class celebrate intoxicants and same-sex practices, then Mamluk society

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could be conceptualized as “an urban, tolerant, and cosmopolitan culture,” where “people enjoyed life, sex without guilt.”80 Mamluk Cairo starts to feel like a socially progressive polity, familiar to modern middle-class scholars, but not accurately capturing social dynamics of the past. Al-Miʿmār’s biography makes clear that he composed his poetry on the social and physical margins of Cairo, and that his verses reflected the culture of the mostly ghurabā’ residents there. While al-Miʿmār did not inherit networks, he did solicit the support of the patron class. In addition to introducing himself to Ṣafadī, he composed a panegyric ode for Judge Ibn Faḍlallāh al-ʿUmarī that ended with a subtle request for a reward, but we do not know what effect this appeal had on the judge.81 If the judge associated al-Miʿmār with the Banū Sāsan of Bāb al-Lūq, then he may have rebuffed the request. Members of his social class and even of his family held the Banū Sāsān in low esteem. His older brother Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad (d. 749/1349) even wrote: “The street people, the astrologers, and the rest of the factions are linked to Sasān. Each one takes people’s money through trickery and devours them with language. Everyone is a human being, except for those from this tribe, who are, in fact, Satan and definitely not human.”82 Even without the support of the judge, al-Miʿmār worked in a flexible trade and may have supplemented his irregular income by entering into the patronage network of the Mamluk amir Ṭashtamur (d. 1342), who was nicknamed Green Chickpea (Ḥummuṣ Akhḍar). In one of his couplets, al-Miʿmār admits: “My patron (mawlā) is Green Chickpea (ḥummuṣ akhḍar),”83 a nickname Ṭashtamur acquired around 709/1310 when, as a young man, Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn (r. 1293–4, 1299–1309, 1310–41) appointed him the governor of Aleppo. Green chickpeas are harvested earlier than tan ones.84 By 727/1326 Ṭashtamur, like so many Mamluk amirs before him, had raised a private militia by “ma[king] large benefactions to the harafish, who are a large organized body, hard-faced folk and lewd.”85 The Qalawunid dynasty enjoyed consistently strong support from the ḥarāfīsh, and Ṭashtamur, being a loyal appointee of Qalāwūn’s son, naturally sought allies of the regime.86 Begging was a chief occupation of the ḥarāfīsh, though occasionally the sultan recruited their labor for other projects. In 732/1322–3, they were employed to work the canals in Cairo, and in 748/1347–8, the sultan needed craftsmen for general works, so he paid the ḥarāfīsh and other workers in silver coins and bread loaves to carry out the building projects.87 During Ṭashtamur’s lifetime the ḥarāfīsh numbered in the thousands, and Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār may have counted himself among them. Whatever his role in Ṭashtamur’s group, al-Miʿmār felt comfortable criticizing Ṭashtamur’s aggressions in this verse about popular disapproval of his behavior: “When Ṭashtamur was appointed and became hostile, the people said in their own words: // ‘The harvest of the aggressive chickpea is near, but Egypt has other beans.’”88 But it was not just the people of Cairo who were growing tired of him. Eventually, Sultan al-Nāṣir Aḥmad (r. January–June 1342) had Ṭashtamur summarily executed. Were the ḥarāfīsh a community within the ghurabā’? Their lifestyle and urban residence suggest some overlap between these groups. William Brinner concluded that during the Mamluk period “the ḥarāfīsh were an organized group of the urban

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poor found in Cairo and Damascus and, at least temporarily, in Homs, Hama, and Aleppo. They lived from begging . . . and were to be found in the streets and around the mosques in considerable numbers.”89 Since the publication of that article, Ibn Dāniyāl’s poetry diwan has been edited, which includes his thirty-four-verse poem on the ḥarāfīsh order (ṭarīqat al-ḥarāfīsh). Ibn Dāniyāl explained in verse 26 that “whoever among you calls himself ḥarāfīsh is, / like myself, all alone.” The following verse continues in the voice of this ḥarfūsh and is entirely in Sīn, implying that the ḥarāfīsh, like the ghurabā’, understood this language. This Sīn verse is also reproduced in the Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play about the ghurabā’, strengthening any argument of their association with the ḥarāfīsh.90 The remaining verses in the poem describe the lifestyle of an unhoused beggar who sleeps on furnaces for warmth, lacks the money to afford a simple burial shroud, and predicts his death from exposure to cold temperatures.91 (In fact, the ḥarfūsh must have slept outdoors regularly. In 894/1490, the chronicler Ibn Iyās noted that “many of the ḥarāfīsh died because of the bitterness of the cold.”92) From the perspective of his biographers, al-Miʿmār is simply a commoner, but a close examination of his poetry reveals considerable familiarity with the culture and language of the ghurabā’. First and foremost, he referred to the ghurabā’ mixed language as Sīn, the name used by its speakers. Among these ruffian mobs are   tribes that have besmirched the descendants of Sasan They talk about us in Sīn,   so I castigate them with loud cries / zayn and qāf. fī dā l-manāḥīs al-awbāsh   aqwām ʿurar sāsā aṭrāf yataḥaddathū fīnā bi’l-sīn   wa-asubbuhum bi’l-zayn wa’l-qāf. 93

One reads in the second verse the names of three Arabic letters: sīn, zayn, and qāf. In similar poems the three letters often form an Arabic word. However, s-z-q is not a Semitic root. Rather, al-Miʿmār has deployed his cherished technique of tawriyyah, or double entendre. Sīn here signifies the name of a language, and the following two letters form the Sīn word zaqq, which means “shouting” or “crying out.”94 Al-Miʿmār’s familiarity with local vernacular earned admiration from his biographer Ibn Abī Ḥajalah (d. 776/1375), who noted that “he would hear the most current sayings as he circulated among camel-drivers (al-jammāl) and porters (al-ḥammāl) and would weave it into verse on the spot, pouring it out into a wondrous mold in his peculiar style (uslūb gharīb).”95 Still, this naming of the Sīn language is extraordinary for being only the second known mention in a pre-nineteenth-century Arabic source, the first being in Jawbarī’s thirteenth-century Kashf al-asrār . In addition to this esoteric pun, al-Miʿmār interspersed Sīn words in his Arabic poetry. The insertion of foreign vocabulary into a poem is known as macaronic verse. In her investigation of Umayyad and Abbasid poets who placed Persian

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words in Arabic verse, Lara Harb found that from the seventh to the tenth century, poets used this technique to construct “a Persian Other . . . inferior with respect to the point of view of the speaker. Far from challenging Arab superiority, the Persian insertions reinforce the foreignness of the Persian category.”96 As Abbasid power waned in the tenth century and Persian dynasties, like the Buyids, exerted control over Abbasid territories, the mujūn poet Ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 391/1001) felt greater license to challenge the old symbols of prestige and abjection.97 Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, working centuries later in the mujūn tradition, deployed Sīn in his macaronic verse to invert the presumed superiority of the Arab Muslim and inferiority of the gharīb. He does so to astounding effect in a couplet about a gharīb man who takes a young Maghribi boy to a place in Bāb al-Lūq called “The Pit” (al-jūrah) and begins to have forcible anal intercourse with him. After 2,000 thrusts, the youth complains to the older man of pain, insults him using a Sīn term, and begs him to stop. He [the boy] turned and said to me: “Don’t you have any pity? Oh, you son of a dancer, get off of me!” I cried out to him: “Hold out a little more, let me finish. I beg you, O son of a freeborn woman!” dār qallī mā ʿindak ḥinnā yā bn al-zablaḥ qūm ʿannā nādaytu aṣbir lī sunnā dakhīlak āwald al-ḥurrā 98

The term zablaḥ means “to dance” in the Sīm of twentieth-century Cairene shadow play artists, but al-Miʿmār is clearly using this word as a noun. He could have meant “male dancer,” a profession that has been historically associated with sexual promiscuity or availability. (It is this association that among Sīn-speakers in modern Cairo makes the insult “son of a female dancer” a “serious term of abuse.”99) In al-Miʿmār’s verse, the epithets “son of a dancer” and “son of a freeborn woman” establish the two characters’ distinct social classes. In an inversion of these hierarchies, the dominant male of dishonorable parentage penetrates the youth of honorable stock, born to a free mother. Al-Miʿmār and another Cairene poet named Sumayka (Little Fish) exchanged defamatory verses over years. In one poem al-Miʿmār accuses Sumayka of “dancing, begging, and prostituting himself [like a zablaḥ] (yatazabalaḥ) / as though he could get money for it. / But I know that he met with no success, this Shame, Son of Shame.”100 Sumayka, he charges, has failed to earn money in the lowly trades of the gharīb. Al-Miʿmār continued to produce unusual scenes in his poetry, often using Sīn to highlight a person’s status apart. In the first line of a zajal poem, the speaker groans: “Oh my, I am in a plight // because of my sweetheart and wife (min ʿilqī wa’l-kuddah). I empty my poison into both of them.” As Hakan Özkan reminds us, an ʿilq was the passive partner in male–male sex, and the term kuddah is Sīn for woman or wife.101 The speaker of this zajal claims both marriage to a gharīb woman

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and an extramarital sexual relationship with a man. Referring to his wife with a Sīn term suggests that the man is also gharīb. Continuing in this vein, in al-Miʿmār’s bullayq poem about hashish, the speaker refers to his genitalia with the Sīn term kaydhī (my penis).102 Yet another couplet centers a rarely discussed gharīb figure in Arabic literature—the ṣāniʿa, or the woman who tattoos and circumcises girls. “O, friend! A beggar woman (sāsiyya) passed us by, ugly, with her comely eye. / So, I said to the boys: ‘Don’t get too close, for this laborer is the ṣāniʿa!’”103 The only woman that Ibn Dāniyāl included in his mosaic of ghurabā’ professionals was the ṣāniʿa. The invocation of this profession, which is otherwise nearly absent in premodern Arabic literature, is itself an indication of al-Miʿmār’s proximity to the ghurabā’. In a Sudanese beer-themed zajal/bullayq, composed in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, al-Miʿmār situates himself as the narrator. In the last stanza he laments his social isolation: He has the gift of speech, and if you (pl.) did justice to him, you would praise him. But I think they don’t know him because he is a gharīb. wa-lū kalām law tunṣifūh kan tūṣifūh aẓunnuhum mā yaʿrifūh lannū gharīb104

Al-Miʿmār inhabited the physical margins of Cairo, unknown because he was a gharīb. His residence in Bāb al-Lūq, his menial labor as a repairman, his affiliation with the ḥarāfīsh, his identification of Sīn by its users’ name and not those of outsiders (e.g., the language of the ghurabā’ or the language of the Banū Sāsān), as well as his use of Sīn in his Arabic verses, all lead me to interpret this last line as an admission of his affiliation with the Sīn-speaking ghurabā’. Though this chapter has focused on gharīb literary culture in Mamluk Cairo, it is important to acknowledge the resonances of the figure of the gharīb beyond Arabic-speaking realms. The Armenian bishop Mkrtichʿ Naghash, who lived in Diyarbakir around 1420, composed a mournful poem that centered the perspective of a man who is so violently ostracized that even Christian clergy refuse to recognize his humanity. Composed in Middle Armenian, which, unlike classical Armenian, absorbed vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, Naghash called the unnamed speaker a gharīb. Michael Pifer reads Naghash’s employment of the Arabic gharīb over Armenian equivalents, like “emigrant (pandukht), foreigner (ōtar), or sojourner (nzhdeh),” as a way to convey distance from the Armenian reader and to a poignant sense of alienation.105 Naghash’s gharīb leads a sad bitter life, trapped, wandering in foreign lands, where, in a probably unintended echo of the last line of al-Miʿmār’s poem on alienation, the residents of this foreign land “do not

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recognize the gharīb, they do not know him.”106 Local residents verbally and physically abuse the gharīb on city streets and deny him shelter. As he lies dying, no clergyman will come to him until God moves one priest to feel compassion, offer the gharīb communion, and save his soul. Naghash represents the gharīb as a universally reviled person without a fixed domicile, undeserving of eternal Christian salvation, not as an emigrant scholar, pilgrim, merchant, soldier, or student who has left his natal home with purpose, as any member of the latter category would have been gladly received in foreign parts. Naghash’s characterization of the precariousness of the gharīb and the hostilities he encounters from laymen and clerics suggests that he is not evoking a generic traveler but a person reviled by all segments of society. It points rather to an identity that had its clearest expression in a specific social group of outsiders who were in Arabic known as ghurabā’, explaining why Naghash retained the term gharīb in his poem. Al-Miʿmār himself died during an outbreak of bubonic plague in 749/1348–9. His final resting place is not mentioned in any of his biographies. The plague may have temporarily disrupted normative burial practices, so even if we could locate the ghurabā’ cemetery, there is no guarantee that he would have been interred there. But a century after al-Miʿmār’s death, we learn that the burial grounds for the ghurabā’ lay just north of Bāb al-Lūq in the Azbakiyya quarter, southeast of the pond of the same name.107 Its placement makes it a likely candidate as a cemetery for Bāb al-Lūq’s residents.

Conclusion The multivalence of the term gharīb makes it a tricky one to investigate historically, but contextualizing clues about language, profession, and place may allow readers to distinguish between “gharīb as generic foreigner” and “gharīb as member of a community of ghurabā’.” If the Arabic term remains untranslated in non-Arabic texts, as in Naghash’s Armenian poem, then we may interpret it as a reference to a member of the ghurabā’ community. Similarly, if the Sīn language is somehow connected to this term, as when the shadow play character Gharīb recited verses in Sīn, then we should understand these invocations of gharīb to have a meaning more specific than “foreigner.” Other than linguistic cues, any association between gharīb and low-status professionals (i.e., repairmen) or poor city quarters (i.e., Bāb al-Lūq) may also indicate the specific community of ghurabā’. The community’s conservative maintenance of the ghurabā’ name marks an important, though overlooked, development in medieval Afro-Eurasian history. Not only did various groups carry the ghurabā’ name intact throughout AfroEurasia, but core Sīn vocabulary, like mashmūl (bread), also appears to have traveled widely. The stability of the ghurabā’ name and of the Sīn language over the centuries provides a solid ground from which to launch future studies of this community or to produce a unified history of ghurabā’ peoples across AfroEurasia.

CChapter 4 HOUSING, NEIGHBORHOODS, AND CEMETERIES OF URBAN GHURABĀ’

In the preceding chapter I argued that the ḥarāfīsh formed a distinct community of ghurabā’. Ibn Dāniyāl associated them with professional begging and the Sīn language, two key aspects of gharīb culture. According to Ira Lapidus, ḥarāfīsh beggars were found in Mamluk “Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, Mecca, Homs, and Hama. They lived in houses, booths, mosques, and on the streets. In Jerusalem there was even a place called the steps or way of the ḥarāfīsh. Some of them, however, seem to have lived or roamed in rural districts outside the cities.”1 The available sources were mostly composed by city dwellers, who speak little to the experiences of rural ghurabā’ and ḥarāfīsh. Although we know in considerable detail how the Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’ worked, performed, and begged on city streets, their other modes of inhabiting a city are less well understood. This imbalance in presentation means that the carnivalesque aspects of their lives are routinely spotlighted, obscuring more mundane features of daily life, like housing and mortuary customs. In this chapter I will reconstruct the households, neighborhoods, and cemeteries of the ghurabā’ in Syria, northern Africa, and Andalusia. Minority quarters of Jews, Christians, West Africans, Kurds, Ethiopians, and Armenians were an enduring feature in premodern Mediterranean cities. The range of neighborhoods attests to the complex composition of Muslimcontrolled spaces. If historians remain sensitive to the meaning embedded in the plans of houses, the orientations of streets, and the paths and gates connecting neighborhoods to surrounding quarters, they can better visualize the construction of minority cultures and their interactions with other settled groups.

Maṣṭaba Housing Several literary sources describe the communal homes of the Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’, where residents prepared meals and cared for their sick. Abū Dulaf (d. second half of the tenth century) claimed that among the members of the Banū Sāsān is “the one who shelters in maṣāṭīb [pl. also maṣāṭib; sing. maṣṭaba], showing modesty in his shrinking-back from sight.”2 Abū Dulaf did not gloss the term maṣāṭīb in this verse, suggesting that it was not a Sīn term and that his Arab audiences would

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have understood its meaning in this specific context. In classical Arabic, a maṣṭaba was also an architectural term, designating either a stone bench positioned outside of mosques or a raised platform. Because of the resemblance of these shapes to ancient Egyptian burial structures, maṣṭaba also came to mean an ancient Egyptian tomb shaped as a flat-topped pyramid. In classical Persian it primarily signified “the place of the strangers (gharībān), of the beggars, and of the destitute and wretched,” and Abū Dulaf intended this same meaning.3 Abū Dulaf further described a type of resident-worker in these communal households, namely “the one who prepares broth in a cauldron in the maṣṭaba of the young men. These [young men] are a group of people who boil up broth in the group’s home (dār al-qawm), and sell it to the sick and enfeebled members of their band.”4 By selling their broth, residents of the maṣṭaba distinguished it from a public kitchen or hospice, which would have fed people for free. Assuming that the sick people and the young men lived together in the maṣṭaba, it appears that they depended on each other for income and sustenance. It was not a voluntary charity, like the pious endowment (waqf) or the Ottoman public kitchen, but a voluntary community with shared duties and mutual obligations, more like a monastery or convent. In fact, the name for this concept was futuwwa, or brotherhood. Claude Cahen defined early futuwwa as “young adults living in small communities, coming from varied social, ethnic circles and, free from any sort of attachment to family, profession or tribe, associating together to lead in common the most comfortable life in an atmosphere of solidarity, mutual devotion and comradeship.”5 The maṣṭaba combined elements of a futuwwa organization with those of a support home for the destitute. In later centuries, we still read references to ghurabā’ group homes that are populated with beggars and disabled people. In an anonymous sixteenth-century folktale, a king dispatches a servant woman to “the dwellings of the strangers” (manāzil al-ghurabā’)—the exact nature of the housing is unspecified—to find a storyteller to entertain him. “[W]hen she did as he told her she found a large group of blind men, as well as others suffering from various handicaps, together with beggars.”6 Even when the group name changed from Banū Sāsān to ghurabā’, their structures of social support and their housing patterns endured. They lived in clusters of dwellings that may have organically developed together. Later in this chapter, we will examine evidence that in some cities, the ghurabā’ lived in specific neighborhoods named for them. In still more verses Abū Dulaf explains that the isolated youths—presumably orphaned, unhoused, or exiled—came to live in a barely habitable house with other young men. “And there is nothing in the house, only the fabric of the house itself, or a poverty-stricken rush mat” (v. 117). These youths live under the supervision of an older male beggar leader, who “constrains the lonely, beardless youth (yaluzzu al-shawdhar) with trickery and deceit” (v. 115). According to Abū Dulaf ’s own commentary to this verse, Al-shawdhar is the beardless youth, and yaluzzu means that the Arabs amongst the beggars take him round with them, and [one of the beggars] trains him in their ways. [One of the beggars] says, “This is a futuwwa brotherhood, and it



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is not permissible for you to go round by yourself. Either you must become a servant/apprentice (ghulām) to one of our number, or else leave the house of the youths (dār al-fityān).” But when he goes along with one of the beggars, the latter cooks for him a stewpot whose contents will send him into a drugged stupor; this stewpot is called, after its contents, al-khushbūy.7

As members of the futuwwa, these fityān were apprenticed to older beggars. Another of Abū Dulaf ’s verses and accompanying commentary confirm that this mentoring arrangement often involved coercive sexual encounters. Among the Sāsānis was “the one who trains young men in the beggars’ ways (fattā) and who unloosens the fastenings of their garments” (v. 87). However, Abū Dulaf undercut any idealization of the futuwwa by revealing how the fityān were sexually assaulted, sometimes after having been plied with intoxicants. [v. 118] And there is nothing in store for the beardless youth (shawdhār) except betrayal and treachery, [v. 119] And the fact that he gives him wine (yuṣmīhu) until you see him totally drunk. [v. 120] And then the penises of the beggar leaders (kaydhāt al-bahālīl) go into him, without his being aware of it.8

The older men’s exploitative mentorship, rape, and substance abuse of young men in the futuwwa are related in the most harrowing terms. This man-boy relationship was a fixture in this community of Sāsānis, and the public likely recognized this combination as indicative of the Sāsāni lifestyle. In fact, Abū Dulaf claimed that in Sāsāni circles the phrase jarrār al-ʿiyālāt meant “the man who hires children and women and uses them for begging purposes.”9 As mentioned in Chapter 2, the trope of adult male beggars accompanied in public by young boys and teenagers surfaced in Ibn Dāniyāl’s Sīn poetry: “I see the man and the boys begging, but I give them not a single silver coin.” Of course, this line does not suggest sexual exploitation, but the sight of a male beggar overseeing young boys must have been a commonplace one. Jawbarī’s Sīn sample (“My handsome boy has a face more beautiful than any other”) also confirms the familiarity of this image in Sīn circles. Other literary references reveal that the disabled and impoverished residents of informal housing maintained formal social structures. Members of the Banū Sāsān organized the maṣṭaba as a communal residence for indigent people in vacant buildings or ruined structures, and each commune had its own leader, a figure known in Sīn as a qārūb or bahlūl.10 Al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1023) related a story about al-Kūfī, a thief whose hand had been amputated in punishment, who “grew up in maṣāṭib, along the banks of the waterchannels, along the waterfronts, and in brothels,” and “spoke to us about some of his friends from the masṭaba.” 11 Al-Tawḥīdī also knew of a man named Ibn Fashīshā (Son of a Gentle Fart), who headed a maṣṭaba in Rayy.12 As the head of a household, the beggar leader was effectively the head of a family federation. 13 In later sources these community leaders were formally recognized as heads of craft guilds, in which begging was

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the craft. Now a role with political recognition, the qārūb becomes more visible in chronicles and travelogues. In 841/1438, the Mamluk sultan Al-Ẓāhir Barsbay requested that the head of the organization of beggars stop his members from begging. “The sultan . . . summoned the ‘sultan of the vagabonds’ and the shaykh of the beggars (shaykh al-ṭawā’if ), and obligated them to prevent the professional beggars from begging in the streets, and to make them find employment.” 14 In 1670s Egypt the beggars’ guild formed a taxable unit of laborers. Evliya Çelebi grouped them among the lowest-status guilds, along with the youths of Bāb al-Lūq, the torchbearers, sex workers, dealers in Black slaves, donkey drivers, castrators, and scavengers.15 Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, in mid-nineteenth-century Damascus, observed that “every guild has its head or shaykh, who manages the corporate affairs of its trade and, as its representative, directly communicates with the government. The head of the beggars guild is called shaykh al-ṭawā’if, who not only has just beggars under him, rather he also had other classes of itinerant riffraff, like the livestock-tending Zuṭṭ and the basket-weaving (topfstrickenden) Qurwat.”16 This self-formed community of beggars and marginal laborers was collectively known as the Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’. These social formations endured into the modern period, became legible to broader society, and eventually acquired official legal status. Al-Ḥarīrī, writing in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, produced even richer depictions of beggar leaders presiding over a premodern maṣṭaba. In his thirtieth maqāma, al-Ḥārith is in Cairo and accompanies a friend to the well-appointed home of the leader of the Sāsāni beggars, “a mansion high of structure, wide of area, which testified to the builder’s wealth and exalted station.” As the two men approach the entrance, al-Ḥārith notices details that undermine the opulence. “I saw its vestibules adorned with tattered garments, and garlanded with begging-baskets hung round, and there was an aged man sitting on a cloth of piled stuff, upon a handsome bench.”17 Al-Ḥārith asks the old man about the owner of the mansion, who responds: “It has no distinct owner and no manifest master, it is the maṣṭaba of the importune beggars and low artisans, and the den of ballad-singers and rehearsers of the traditions.”18 The maṣṭaba appears to have been under the control of the inhabitants and not a rented property. Upon entering the maṣṭaba, al-Ḥārith is surprised to see that the reception room is decorated with patterned divans, rolled-out carpets, rows of cushions, and hanging curtains. It emerges that the leader of the Sāsāni beggars, who is none other than Abū Zayd, is hosting a wedding feast for his son Abū l-Darrāj Wallāj b. Kharrāj and the bride Qanbas bt. Abī ʿAnbas. Into this opulent space Abū Zayd makes an entrance and then delivers a wedding speech. He explains to the assembled guests that his son has offered Qanbas a shockingly modest dowry of “a wallet and a ferruled stick, together with a kerchief and a pitcher.” He concludes the speech with a prayer that God “may multiply your offspring in the maṣāṭib and guard your union against the maṣāṭib,”19 proclaiming the space as one both nurturing of families and destructive toward marriages. Could this line serve as Ḥarīrī’s circumspect reference to sexual



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Figure 4.1  Scene outside the house of the king of the Sāsāni beggars, folio from Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, Iraq, thirteenth century. Opaque watercolor on paper, 13.2 × 9.8 in. (33.5 × 25 cm). John Rylands University Library, Manchester, Ms. Arabic 680, fol. 97v.

violence or culturally irregular sexual practices taking place in the residence? After calling the beggars’ home a double-edged curse, he then invites his guests to enjoy the feast. The scene oscillates between extreme opulence (a sumptuous feast in a richly decorated mansion) and evidence of poverty (ragged clothing, beggar baskets, a pile of old rags, and Qanbas’s modest dowry), perhaps a nod to broad suspicions that the ghurabā’ were feigning physical disability and financial hardship. 

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Historical Implications These unique communal living arrangements happened voluntarily and without the sponsorship of local institutions. As such, they are not analogous to the inns found throughout the Mediterranean, like the funduq or qaysariyya, which rented short-term lodgings to more affluent travelers, pilgrims, and merchants.20 The maṣṭaba was a home (dār) intended for an extended family that was reconfigured as a commune, and it existed alongside another type of collective residence for the poor. In Mamluk Cairo and Jerusalem the ḥawsh or ḥūsh (pl. aḥwāsh) was a large courtyard building, usually single story, constructed of mud bricks, rather than with sturdier and costlier limestone, gypsum, or fired brick. Its undersized rooms were arranged around a central courtyard that served—with dire health implications— as both “a communal eating area and toilet.”21 Nimrod Luz found evidence in latefourteenth-century estate inventories that a Sudanese man, a Turkmen man, and a Damascene woman lived at the same time in one Jerusalem ḥawsh. When they died, they had no family members in the city, suggesting that they were either passing through the area or were estranged from the usual familial networks. A typical ḥawsh resident, he concludes, was a lower-income transient who could not afford better accommodations.22 The ḥawsh arrangement clearly appealed to many residents, as it endured as a form of housing infrastructure for centuries. In late Ottoman Cairo, the Ghajar lived in aḥwāsh in a quarter that was named for these buildings. In the nineteenth century they were “found inhabiting a squalid quarter, called, after them, the ‘Hosh el Ghagar,’ behind the great mosque of El Hassan, at the foot of the citadel rock.”23 Some years later, von Kremer confirmed that “[t] hese fortune-telling gipsies live in a building called Hōsh Bardak, situated under the citadel and opposite the mosque of Sultan Hassan.”24 The maṣṭaba, by contrast, was not established as a commercial venture but appears to have been a home owned by no one, but with a hierarchy of residents. While it may have served as a temporary shelter for transient populations, there is plenty of evidence of long-term residence. Al-Kūfī claimed to have grown up in maṣāṭīb, and the young boys whom beggar leaders exploited were presumably groomed there for some time. These permanent or semi-permanent domestic spaces organized communities on the economic margins of society but are largely invisible in documents, chronicles, building inscriptions, and the archaeological record. Still, the side effects of these living quarters were apparent. An unintended consequence of the maṣāṭīb may have been made visible during the plague pandemics that periodically ravaged European, Asian, and African cities after 1347. All manifestations of plague—bubonic, pneumonic, septicemic, and gastrointestinal—in humans are caused by the Yersinia pestis organism.25 The mechanism of transmission is straightforward. Fleas that had the Yersinia pestis bacterium in their digestive tracts transmitted the sickness to rats, when they fed on their blood. When rats died in too great a number to sustain the flea population, the disease jumped from animal to human hosts. The plague first broke out in West Asia in 1348, killing off nearly half of urban populations. The plague would reemerge periodically, and many eyewitness



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accounts survive from these centuries of pandemic. During the plague that struck Cairo in 790/1388, one resident observed that “the greatest number of deaths was found among the mamluks in the barracks” in the Citadel.26 It is estimated that roughly 10,000 royal mamluks, the most important fighters for the empire, lived in that single building.27 Through many subsequent plagues, survivors made the same observation. Between 819/1416 and 919/1513–15, plague broke out in Egypt at least fifteen times, and contemporary chroniclers deployed stock phrases to describe the devastation. David Ayalon found that “[i]n almost every epidemic the following formula or one resembling it, is used: wa-fataka al-ṭâʿûn bilmamâlik wal-aṭfâl wal-ʿabîd wal-jawârî wal-ghurabâ,”28 which translates to “the plague devastated the mamluk soldiers, children, male and female slaves, and the ghurabā’.” Why these groups and not others? The reasons for any person surviving or succumbing to a plague infection in a time without antibiotics are complex. Immunologists caution against oversimplifying immunological responses to single variables, since “innate and/or acquired mechanisms” developed in response to climate, nutrition, general physical health, war, economic crises, living conditions, and coinfection would have influenced any health outcomes.29 The historian Michael Dols reasoned that domestic slaves likely suffered from poor physical health and nutrition, weakening their immunological resistance to plague infection. Additionally, if plague outbreaks disrupted food supplies, leading to food shortages in cities, enslaved people may have suffered disproportionately from hunger. Having understood ghurabā’ to mean “foreigners,” Dols speculates that some “racial groups” had natural immunity to plague, and others had greater susceptibility.30 However, if we understand ghurabā’ as a recognized social group, then the material conditions of their lives could have exposed them more than other Cairenes to plague outbreaks. Like the thousands of royal mamluks living in a single building, the ghurabā’ inhabiting maṣāṭīb lived in cramped conditions and were likely quartered near their animals, which would have enabled fleas and lice to spread the plague efficiently through a concentrated population.31 Other factors, like standing water or poor ventilation, would also have made it hard to rid one’s living quarters of a flea infestation. These material conditions in maṣāṭīb may have been one of several factors that contributed to their high rates of mortality during plague outbreaks. Certainly, many Cairenes lived in multigenerational housing or in crowded homes, but mass deaths of the most elite soldiers were noteworthy because they threatened the security of the city, children for the stark injustice of young lives cut short, slaves because their deaths brought the operations of urban society to a near standstill, and ghurabā’ because mass death humanizes those who have previously been treated unsympathetically. The ghurabā’ consisted of Roma and Roma-adjacent groups. Because their medieval history has been consistently divorced from any West Asian or northern African contact, studies of the Roma and plague overlook a non-European component. A recent study compared the genomes of Romanians of Romani and non-Romani heritage. Geneticists observed that these two groups shared certain genetic traits that developed as an immune response to plague or influenza. Northwest Indians, the presumed ancestors of the Roma, lacked this particular

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trait. They reasoned that all three groups must have been exposed to influenzas in their long histories, on the assumption, perhaps faulty, that the Roma had reached Europe by the year 1000 and that plague had never reached India.32 It is equally possible that Roma living in West Asia acquired the immune response there and later migrated into Europe, but the acknowledgment of Romani Asian and African heritage is only now beginning. Geneticists, like historians, have had to draw scientific conclusions from scant evidence, but these insights into Romani medieval history make new hypotheses possible.

Ghurabā’ Quarters and Cemeteries Were the maṣāṭīb of beggars and the aḥwāsh and tents of indigent people clustered on certain streets, such as will be seen on the Darb al-Ghurabā’ (Ghurabā’ Road) in fourteenth-century Marinid Fez or in an area called the Ḥārat al-Ghurabā’ (Neighborhood of the Ghurabā’) in Damascus as early as the twelfth century? Did the many Romani and Ghorbat neighborhoods in early modern West and Central Asia, northeast Africa, and southern Europe have premodern pasts? In Central Asia most cities include separate quarters for Mugat, and in some, like Tashkent and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, these quarters have housed Mugat since at least the Middle Period.33 Can we recover traces of gharīb history in geographical toponyms? An examination of geographies, chronicles, literary prose, and poetry shows that medieval neighborhoods and cemeteries in Muslim-majority cities from Andalusia to Syria bore the name ghurabā’. In general, gharīb grave sites were attached to gharīb settlements. Here, our Strangers were housed in long-term accommodations and developed their community institutions, like futuwwa, and cultural practices, like oral literature. Some of our earliest and most compelling evidence for their own residential neighborhoods and burial grounds comes from Aleppo and Damascus. While there is evidence that some premodern gharīb groups were semi-nomadic or nomadic tent dwellers, these patterns of movement may have attracted less attention amid tribes of Kurds, Turkmen, and other nomads. The premodern Afro-Asian ghurabā’, unlike early modern European Roma, did not live in wagons, even after wheeled transport, which had disappeared from the Middle East before the seventh century, was reintroduced by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. Richard Bulliet has speculated that the Roma must have started living in caravans after encountering that lifestyle in eastern Europe. Spanish Roma do not use caravans, suggesting that they may have emigrated to Iberia by way of northern Africa, never encountering caravan transport.34 Neighborhoods in premodern Middle Eastern cities were frequently named for their occupants’ profession, ethnicity, language, or religion, and these were generally voluntary forms of segregation.35 Majority-Muslim cities, such as Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Fez, had both Jewish and Christian quarters. However, the divisions were not fixed and absolute, as we know that Muslims lived in the Jewish quarter of certain cities. Cairo had a Frankish quarter called ḥārat al-rūm; Jerusalem had one for Armenians and another for northern Africans;



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Karkh, the southern district of Baghdad, had quarters named for cloth merchants, butchers, soap boilers, reed weavers, cooks, and canal diggers.36 As city populations expanded beyond the medieval walls, the names of new neighborhoods served as approximate indicators of concentrated settlement. If these are ordinary settlement patterns in the premodern Middle East, then we may find evidence of quarters specifically for the ghurabā’. Perhaps the biggest impediment to this research has been resisting the self-presentation of the ghurabā’ as landless wanderers. The shadow play about the ghurabā’, ethnographic poetry describing their ruses and movements, exposés of the Banū Sāsān, and maqāmāt literature about the wandering Sāsāni rogue all emphasized the detachment from territory and indifference to property ownership. Even when homes are described, the impression is that the homes are rudimentary dwellings, sparsely equipped, or of unspecified ownership. But what would have precluded clusters of maṣāṭīb or other types of housing from forming? In the mid-1650s, the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi noted that the Egyptian town of Rosetta had forty Muslim quarters, seven Christian, and three Jewish quarters, adding that “there are no Armenian, Frankish or Gypsy quarters, though such people do come and go to conduct trade.”37 Remarking the absence of these quarters suggests that it would have been perfectly reasonable to expect them there. In fact, Evliya Çelebi wrote in 1668 that Istanbul’s Balat quarter was “where the Gypsies settled when Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror transferred them from [the southwest Anatolian town] Balat to Istanbul.”38 Later, while traveling in Komotini in Thrace, Greece, he met Roma communities and recorded their basic vocabulary in the local Romani dialect. His transcriptions are the earliest written record of a Balkan dialect of Romani. Although Andrew Boorde’s Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (London, c. 1562) is often cited as the earliest record of any Romani dialect, in 1515 a Bavarian monk jotted down a list of sixty-one Romani words, related to the Bosnian Ghurbet dialect.39 Similarly, we have seventeenth-century attestations for gitanerías, or gitano quarters, in Spain. In 1633 King Philip IV issued an ordinance ordering “the aforementioned . . . to leave the barrios where they live as gypsies, split up, and mix with other householders, and they are not to meet, either publicly or in secret.”40 These settlements existed alongside other minority settlements, namely those for Jews (judería) and Muslims (morería). While these neighborhoods segregated occupants from the majority culture, they were also spaces where people could stably reproduce their culture, professions, and religious and social institutions. In the Ottoman capital the Roma had their own burial grounds. In seventeenthcentury Greece Evliya Çelebi observed that the Roma “celebrated Easter with the Christians, the Festival of Sacrifice with the Muslims, and Passover with the Jews. They did not accept any one religion, and therefore our imams refused to conduct funeral services for them but gave them a special cemetery outside Egri Qapu.”41 The religious establishment’s wariness of gharīb religious sincerity may, as shall be seen, account for the presence of separate cemeteries and burial plots through West Asia.

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Damascus Ghurabā’ Quarter Early in the morning on Saturday, February 13, 1300, the Mongols intensified their attacks on Damascus after declaring the city in their possession. First, they climbed onto the rooftops and shot arrows into the streets. Then, they began looting the northwest quadrant of the walled city, from Paradise Gate to the Citadel. “That is to say, they looted the Post Gate of the Umayyad Mosque, the Rabʿ compound, and the Darb al-Silsila street, from the hospital to the Ḥārat al-Ghurabā’ quarter and the Naṣr Gate as well as the entire area surrounding the Citadel.”42 The chronicler traced the Mongols’ movements from the northern central edge of the city at Paradise Gate, southward and then westward, eventually surrounding the Citadel. From this description, we see that the Ghurabā’ quarter bordered the southern edge of the Citadel and to its east was flanked by the Nūriyya hospital. At this time, the city walls did not extend south of the Citadel for approximately half a mile so that the western edge of this quarter merged with open meadows. As such, the Ghurabā’ quarter was an extramural community, unprotected from Mongol or any enemy incursions, a space unincorporated in the city. The besieged residents, students, and staff fled the city, salvaging as many of their possessions as they could. Strangely, the Mongols left the city the next day, and the expelled Damascenes returned to their homes by Monday, February 16, 1300. A century and a half before the Mongol attack, Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176) had already written about this area of the city. In his monumental history of Damascus, he placed the ḥārat al-ghurabāʾ within the old city, just south of the Citadel, but offered no concrete descriptions of the quarter.43 His work is centered on institutions and not ethnographic descriptions. It is possible that no madrasas existed in this quarter during his lifetime. The first madrasa to be constructed there was the ʿAdhrāwiyya, founded in the twelfth century by a woman named Sitt ʿAdhrā bint Shāhanshāh.44 Her Uzbek freedman Ṣārim al-Dīn Jawhar established his own madrasa, the Ṣārimiyya, in 602/1205–6.45 The origins of the Sharīfiyya Madrasa are more obscure. The founder is unknown, and it was established sometime before 684/1285–6.46 Last, the Qijmāsiyya, named for Qijmās al-Isḥāqī, the Mamluk governor of Damascus, was founded in 890–2/1485–7. Ibn Ghānim (d. 1339) taught in a madrasa in this same quarter, though his biographer declined to specify which one.47 The social lives, recreational spaces, and burial grounds for the ghurabā’ were near the ḥārat al-ghurabā’. To the north of the Citadel, beyond the city walls, lay an open plain, which was known locally as ḥāra taḥta al-qalʿa, or the Quarter under the Citadel. After the Mongol raid in 1300, a sprawling marketplace sprang up in this area, the Sūq Taḥt al-Qalʿa, anchored by an important horse market (Sūq al-Khayl).48 In the mid-1400s, it had grown to include merchants of junk, copper, knives, waterskins, animal hides, wickerwork, secondhand clothes, woodwork, and other wares catering to soldiers living in the Citadel barracks. In addition to these



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military customers, the bustling marketplace also attracted revelers and pleasureseekers. The Damascene writer al-Badrī (d. 1489) described Taḥt al-Qalʿa as “a watering hole for the stranger (gharīb) and a place of pasture for the local (qarīb).”49 The juxtaposition of contrasting terms—gharīb and qarīb—suggests that the terms can be understood generically. However, al-Badrī continues by describing the people drawn to the grounds, many of whom plied trades typically held by ghurabā’. As for the open space called “Beneath the Citadel,” one can hardly see the actual ground there because of the tremendous number of people, both the food pedlars and petty traders (mutaʿayyishīn) and those receiving charitable allowances. Interspersed amongst them, one finds those who make up the public performers (arbāb al-ḥalaq), horoscope casters, jesters, those who do amusing tricks, reciters of stories and tales, and indeed, everything in which the ear can delight and the eye rejoice, and which the soul can desire—all these folk continuing their activities morning and evening, without cease, but above all, in the evenings.50

The Damascene notary Ibn Ṭawq (1430–1509), a contemporary of al-Badrī, lived “near the al-Qaṣab Mosque at the Ṣārūjā Market, outside the northwest section of the city wall.”51 From this neighborhood that abutted the eastern edge of Taḥt al-Qalʿa, Ibn Ṭawq occasionally recorded his observations about local ghurabā’. In a brief diary entry on Saturday, 10 Jumādā I 889/June 5, 1484, he portrayed the ghurabā’ as rowdy late-night partiers. I did not go to the madīna. At the end [of the day] there was a circumcision celebration for the son of Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Sālim, the son-in-law of Muḥibb al-Dīn ibn Sālim. We stayed the night at his home, but we did not sleep until morning. It was madness, when many ghurabā[’]—men, women and young boys—came together.52

The ghurabā’ created the raucous atmosphere that kept the celebrants from sleeping, aligning with Badrī’s statement about the ceaseless activity at the Taḥt al-Qalʿa. Ibn Ṭawq did not enter the walled city of Damascus that day, so the celebration must have taken place in the extramural settlement north of the city, probably near Ibn Ṭawq’s own neighborhood. Just a few months earlier, in Dhū l-Ḥijja 888/January 1484 this same Ibn Sālim had invited a troupe of shadow play actors headed by a man named Naʿīṣ (or Nuʿayṣ) and harpists to perform at his home until the wee hours of the morning, performances that Ibn Ṭawq considered “an innovation and an abomination.”53 On top of that, it was rumored that women and wine had been present at these gatherings.54 Ibn Ṭawq does not disguise his disapproval of Ibn Sālim’s indulgence in wine and his propensity to consort with ghurabā’, musicians, shadow play artists, and women. In late Jumādā I 895/1490, Ibn Ṭūlūn, a chronicler who lived in the Sāliḥiyya quarter north of the walls of Damascus, complained about oppressive actions by state actors, while also blaming the ghurabā’ for contributing to the chaos.

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Roma in the Medieval Islamic World In these days Damascus and its hinterland suffered from innumerable cases of oppression and corruption. They drove their sheep and horses through the orchards and plantations of the people. They took down their buildings and doors for the wood, also stealing what they could find and joined in it [the theft] by great numbers of ghurabāʾ from Egypt, Aleppo, Hama, and other places.55

In these few snapshots the ghurabā’ are associated with carousing, same-sex social mixing, property theft, and practicing the improper arts of shadow play theater and music. Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, who lived in Cairo’s Bāb al-Lūq, apparently wrote a poem praising Damascus’s Taḥt al-Qalʿa, but I have not been able to locate it in his edited Dīwān.56

Cemeteries Cemeteries preserved the social values and hierarchies of the living communities to which they were attached. Chief among these was the spiritual primacy of Muslims. Segregated urban neighborhoods were upheld in death, with segregated burial grounds outside of city walls. Cemeteries were typically located in places that would not require religious minorities to lead a funeral procession through Muslim-majority neighborhoods. So, if Damascus included a quarter for ghurabā’, why not also burial grounds? In the sixteenth-century Ottoman Levant, we find “the frequent mention of ‘the Graveyard/Tombs/Side of the Strangers’ as a topographical feature in both Damascus and Aleppo” but no evidence for the earlier existence of this name.57 These tombs of the ghurabāʾ are located to the north of the city, outside of Bāb Farādis, or the Paradise Gate, which lies due east of Taḥt al-Qalʿa. This site had served as a burial ground since the pre-Islamic Roman period. Under the Umayyads, two more cemeteries were established outside of city gates.58 Dana Sajdi perused Ottoman biographical dictionaries for mentions of people interred in the tombs of the ghurabā’, seeking to understand Levantine notions of the stranger and the familiar. Counter to her expectations, she found that well-known, long-term residents of Damascus were buried in ghurabā’ plots, whereas newcomers, even those with antisocial habits, were buried in a plot for commoners.59 For example, Badr al-Dīn al-Hindī al-Naqshbandī had moved from Shāhjahānābād (Old Delhi) in northwest India with his cousin Hidāyat Allāh in 1094/1683. When he died in 1726, he was buried in the ghurabāʾ tombs in Marj al-Daḥdāḥ cemetery.60 How did this well-known Muslim man come to be buried in a place for strangers? My own examination of seventeenth-century biographical dictionaries turned up only six additional men interred there: (1) the poet Aḥmad al-ʿInāyātī al-Nābulusī (d. 1014/1605),61 (2) the Shiʿi amir of Baʿalbek Mūsā b. Ḥarfūsh, (d. 1016/1607–8),62 (3) Muḥammad al-Hindī (d. 1018/1609), (4) Abū Bakr al-Sindī al-Shāfiʿī (d. 1018/1609),63 (5) Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn b. Sulaymān al-Usṭawānī al-Ḥanbalī (d. 1020/1611),64 and (6) Taqī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Bāqī b. ʿAbd al-Bāqī al-Ḥanbalī al-Baʿalī (d. 1071/1661).65



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By virtue of their inclusion in local histories, these men must have cultivated respectable reputations in Damascus. So, like Sajdi, I conclude that one’s nativeness or strangerhood had no bearing on these burials. Rather, this area had once been a burial place for ghurabā’, probably since the Ayyubid or Mamluk period. Over time the name turab al-ghurabā’ remained, but its grounds were no longer restricted to the ghurabā’.

Aleppo Speakers of Arabic may have already noticed that the modern-day Nilotic tribe that still speaks Sīn is known as the Ḥalab, which is the Arabic word for Aleppo. The nomenclature is puzzling, because, as Dwight Reynolds pointed out in his ethnography of Egyptian Ḥalab epic poets, the Ḥalab have no collective memory about an Aleppine heritage.66 Scholars have put forward a range of explanations. Ḥaliba means “to milk,” and a ḥalba is a circle, but neither of those words hold particular significance for the Ḥalab. In any case, in the Nubian Kenzi dialect, which is spoken in Egypt, “halaba” means “wandering gypsy, blacksmith, peddler.”67 Although the information in this section on Aleppo does not establish any firm connection between the modern Ḥalab tribe and the city of Aleppo, the wealth of information on ghurabā’ in this city may make us rethink the relation between the tribe and the city. Is it possible that Aleppo had a reputation as a center of gharīb life?

Ghajar and Ghurabā’ in Aleppo Ten years after his encounter with ghurabā’ at Ibn Sālim’s home, Ibn Ṭawq made what is the earliest known reference to the Ghajar, an Arabic term still used today to designate ghurabā’.68 On Monday, 11 Shawwāl 899/July 15, 1494, he wrote, “after  noon, the first of the Aleppine pilgrimage arrived, Turkmen and  Ghajar. I did not go to the madīna.”69 In Aleppo Turkmen and ghurabā’ lived in ḥārat al-qurbāṭ, a variation on ḥārat al-ghurabā’, in the Bānqūsā neighborhood that lay outside of the medieval walls, northeast of the city, and housed mobile populations, like Tatars, Bedouins, Kurds, Arab, and Turkmen nomads.70 Silk Road caravans approaching Aleppo from the northeast would enter the city through the Bānqūsā quarter. So, the proximity of ghurabā’ and Turkmen may have made it easier for these groups to coordinate pilgrimage travel. Furthermore, broader society made similar judgments about their religiosity. The Turkmen were a nomadic Central Asian group that many Mamluk observers considered to be “rebels” and “thieves” who appeared indifferent to organized religion, and the Damascene historiographers discussed earlier alluded to similar judgments of the ghurabā’ or Ghajar.71 It is possible that they traveled separately from others, who wanted to avoid the taint of mingling with irreligious people. While the sources give no indication that the ghurabā’ were pastoralists who observed seasonal migrations,

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the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca gave occasion for regular travel to the Hijaz. While these ghajar could have joined the pilgrimage as a pious duty, it could also have served as a lucrative market for blockprinted amulets and pilgrimage certificates or an occasion to capitalize on pilgrims feeling charitable to the poor. As Aleppo is north of Damascus, we can assume that the Aleppine caravans passed by or through Ibn Ṭawq’s neighborhood in their southerly travels. In early 998/1589, nearly 100 years after Ibn Ṭawq’s diary entry on the Ghajar of Aleppo, an Aleppine weaver named Kamāl al-Dīn recorded his observation of an eastern man singing in seven Asian languages, one of which was “the language of the ghurabā’.” Kamāl al-Dīn himself lived in Aleppo’s Brokers’ Quarter (ḥārat al-dallālīn), a northeastern suburb of the city near the ḥārat al-qurbāṭ, and he seemed to have composed all of his notebook entries in Aleppo. As such, his brief testimony about ghurabā’ language likely stemmed from his placement in the city. Just west of the ḥārat al-qurbāṭ and due north of the city walls lay the Turab/Turbat al-Ghurabāʾ (Tombs/Tomb of the Ghurabā’). Since the invading Mongol armies had lain siege to Aleppo in 1260, these northern and northeastern settlements had struggled to thrive. Heghnar Watenpaugh has captured the desolation of the suburbs: “In the late 16th century, it was one of the least prestigious areas of the city. It was covered in ruins—dilapidated, unused structures. . . . Unlike the manicured orchards to the Northwest of the city, where one went out for picnics, this northeastern part of Aleppo was surrounded by decayed cemeteries that housed the forgotten dead.”72 Writing in 1923, the Syrian historian Kamāl al-Dīn al-Ghazzī claimed that the ghurabā’ buried their dead there until it was abandoned, probably in the Ayyubid period. At the end of the eighth/fourteenth century, people returned to the area and began constructing buildings there.73 Ibn al-Ḥanbalī (d. 1563) located the construction of Jāmiʿ al-Mīdānī during his lifetime near the tombs of the ghurabāʾ.74 The antinomian holy man (majdhūb) Abū Bakr ibn al-Wafāʾ (d. 1583) made his home here in the sixteenth century, a lifestyle choice that only confirmed or heightened his reputation for otherness.75 Eventually, the Wafā’iyya Sufi lodge named for him was built in this area, and Kamāl al-Dīn’s notebook ended up in the possession of a caretaker of the institution in 1151/1738–9. The notebook, like Kamāl al-Dīn, remained in the northern suburbs for much of its existence. The remaining testimony about ghurabā’ in Aleppo comes from European observers. Without a local informant they did not make reliable arbiters of gharīb, Kurdish, or Turkmen identity. Seemingly, any brown-skinned person living outside of a city was a so-called “Gypsy.” The following testimonies may not actually document any ghurabā’, but the European unfamiliarity with tent dwellers illustrates their unfamiliarity with nomadism and the diverse human composition of these landscapes. In 1574 the German botanist Leonhard Rauwolf traveled from Aleppo toward the Euphrates River, encountering tent-dwelling, cattle-herding nomads who “were in their shape like to our Gypsies” and “go like unto the Gypsies from place to place.”76 While traveling in northern Syria in the early 1700s, Richard Pococke observed communities of people he called “Chingani,” who claimed to practice Islam, lived



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in tents or subterranean caves, engaged in livestock-related trades, like weaving saddle covers or selling cattle, and who submitted to Ottoman legal and fiscal authorities. The Chingani, who are spread almost all over the world, are in great abundance in the north of Syria, and pass for Mahometans; they live under tents, and sometimes in grots underground; they make a coarse sort of tapestry or carpet work for housings of saddles, and other uses, and when they are not far from towns, deal much in milch cattle, and have a much better character than their relations in Hungary, or the gypsies in England, who are thought by some to have been originally of the same tribe. These and the Turcomen, with regard to offences, are under the pasha and cadi, though they have a sheik to every encampment, and several great ones over them; but with regard to taxes they are immediately under the grand signor, whose tribute is collected yearly by an officer over each of these people, one being called the Turcoman-Agasi, an office of great credit, and the other the Chingani-Agasi, who go round the Turkish dominions to collect the taxes from these people.77

Pococke used an anglicized version of the Turkish term Čingene to refer to peoples known locally as ghajar or ghurabā’. This word eventually passed into European languages to refer to Roma and Roma-adjacent groups, for example, Hungarian Czigány, Slovak Cigán, French Tsigane, Italian Zingaro, Danish Sigøjner, and German Zigeuner. During his residence in Aleppo in the eighteenth century, the Scottish physician Alexander Russell also used a version of this Turkish word in his own memoirs about Aleppo. Chinganas are a race of people, who are generally esteemed to be the same with our Gypsies. They very much resemble Arabs, and, like them, live under tents; but they are not acknowledged by them, or esteemed orthodox Moslems. They are extremely poor, and some few are lodged in tents round the skirts of the town all the year round, and hire themselves for labourers, and other menial offices; but the greatest number come thither in the spring from all parts, to assist in reaping the corn.78

For Russell these Chinganas physically resembled Arabs, held the same status Roma did in Europe, and lived in tents. He is careful to distinguish the Chinganas from the Arabs in religious devotion and in their connections to rural communities of Chinganas. Their networks are outside of the city. Russell reemphasized this last point: “The Chingana’s, who came as usual from these parts [the villages in the Pierian mountains] about the middle of April, to be hired for reaping corn, brought it [the plague] with them to Aleppo.”79 Russell relayed the local community’s doubt as to their devotion to Islam. He also describes an impoverished, tent-dwelling local population and a broader community of Chinganas who come together to assist with the spring corn harvest.

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Fez The Marinid ruler Abū l-Ḥasan (r. 731–49/1331–48) endowed the Dār al-Makhzān madrasa in Fez, the endowment deed for which states that income from the inn on Darb al-Ghurabā’ (Ghurabā’ Road) will be used to maintain the madrasa. This same document indicates that the inn was located at the city’s lone slaughterhouse, located downstream from the last bridge on the Fez River, near the point where the river enters the walled city in the southwest.80 What traveler would be enticed to stay at an inn on the grounds of an abattoir, a space known for messy grounds and bad smells? Perhaps livestock farmers came to town to have their animals butchered and the meat brought to market, but an excavation of al-Basra, a northern Moroccan site that was inhabited from 800 to 1200 CE, offers another possible explanation. A team of archaeologists found caches of bone tools at the site of a metal workshop and argued that metalworkers fashioned tools from animal bones, and that metalworkers and animal processors lived close together in a mutually beneficial arrangement.81 Butchers were able to sell a waste product—large bones—to metalworkers who fashioned them into bone anvils or burned them for fuel. Bones had no value for cooks, as broths were made with pieces of meat, not with animal bone.82 Some ghurabā’ worked with metal, which provides a justification for the placement of the Darb al-Ghurabā’ on the same road as the slaughterhouse. As will be shown in the following chapter, the ghurabā’ astrologers were innovative metalworkers, carving tin stamps that they used to blockprint text on paper and fashioning lead containers to hold the rolled-up paper amulets. Additionally, the undesirability of living near a slaughterhouse lends credence to the idea that the Darb al-Ghurabā’ could have served as home to a northern African cluster of Strangers. In the premodern period cemeteries, residential neighborhoods, and even streets were named for specific communities, including the ghurabā’. Some modern-day placenames may be toponymic holdovers. In the 1980s, Ghajar families clustered on the outskirts of an Egyptian village south of Cairo, along a single street that was named for them. “In Settohom, there are more than twentysix nuclear sawafa families grouped in one street called Sharia El Ghoraba (the street of foreigners or strangers).”83 In 1986 and 1987, Sīn-speaking Ḥalab epic storytellers built homes on the edge of the village of al-Bakātūsh in the Nile Delta. “Where they first began to build houses is now known as ‘the poets’ alley’ (ḥāret al-shuʿarā), although not all the residents of the alley are poets.”84 The toponym persisted even as poets moved away from the area. One Sidi Bubakr, who was a majdhūb, was buried in Faddan al-Ghuraba’ (Area of the Ghurabā’) in Fez in 1169/1755. This area is located outside the southernmost medieval gate, Bāb al-Futūḥ, and adjacent to the Logbab cemetery.85

Andalusian Cities In 1420 an anonymous Catholic writer in central Spain composed a list of forty signs of the apocalypse. The eleventh sign is the migration of impoverished



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Egyptians and Israelites into new lands, where they will remain and behave like animals. The writer implored his readers to “note that in our time, not many years ago, from those lands they came to these parts of Spain, passing through Toledo, and through Ocaña, and to this province, even up to the court of the king, our lord. These [people], by looking at the hands of the children and men and women, revealed great secrets and things hidden that for many people were fulfilled.”86 Impoverished people from Egypt and Israel traveled through central Spain, telling fortunes by reading palms, eventually gaining an audience with King Juan II of Castile (r. 1405–54). Aaron C. Taylor interprets this passage as evidence of Romani groups in central Spain in the 1410s, offering a significant revision to the generally accepted date of 1425 as the first European Christian reference to the arrival of Romani to Iberia. In January 1425 King Alfonso V of Aragon issued a safe-conduct letter to Count John of Little Egypt (“don Johan de Egipte Menor”), whose title and origin mirror the introductions other leaders of Romani companies made in Europe.87 In the hundred or so safe-conduct letters issued to Romani leaders in the fifteenth century, the men invariably hold noble titles like duke, earl, and count, and hail from Little Egypt.88 Europeanists have largely assumed that the Roma entered Europe in the early 1400s by migrating westward from Ottoman territories into eastern, then central and Western Europe, erasing Africa as a place of origin. Given this presumed trajectory, how could Roma have reached central Spain before 1420, undetected by northerly communities until 1425, when the first record of them in northern Spain appears? Taylor proposed that some Roma must have entered Spain from northern Africa, thereby explaining the apparent discrepancy in the records. Indeed, as early as the twelfth century, Arabic and Hebrew sources indicate the presence of ghurabā’ charlatans in Andalusian cities. In twelfth-century Almohad Andalusia the term ghurabā’ carried many semantic meanings. One derived from the prophetic hadith “Islam began as a stranger and shall return to being a stranger just as it began.”89 For a particular subset of Almohad society, the statement encapsulated the piety of their spiritual alienation from all other Muslims. In examining the writings of twelfth-century Andalusi Maliki scholars, philosophers, and Sufis, Maribel Fierro found that Mudéjares (Muslim subjects who remained in Iberia after the Christian Reconquista) and Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity) produced religious literature elaborating on their pious estrangement, designating themselves ghurabā’.90 Later, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a gharīb designated any Muslim living under Christian rule. Muḥammad b. Qāsim al-Ruʿaynī, an Arabic translator who served Portuguese monarchs, signed his translation of a 1486 royal letter to the residents of Azemmour as “your sincere brother, the gharīb Muḥammad b. Qāsim al-Ruʿaynī, preacher to your brothers, the ghurabā’ [illegible word] in his time.”91 After Portugal’s monarch Manuel I (r. 1495–1521) expelled all Muslims in 1496, al-Ruʿaynī continued his work as a translator for the court. In 1504 he signed his Arabic translation of a royal Portuguese missive as “your devoted and sincere servant, the humble slave of God, al-Ruʿaynī,” eliminating explicit references to his Muslim identity.92 In this same year an anonymous jurist from Oran sent his legal

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opinion to a community of ghurabā’ in Granada. He advised these ghurabā’—here signifying crypto-Muslims—to conceal their faith in order to preserve their lives.93 Alongside these significations of religious identity and devotion, there was also a second, nonreligious meaning for gharīb. The botanist Abū l-Khayr al-Ishbīlī referred to disreputable itinerant healers in twelfth-century Seville as ghurabā’.94 These medical quacks may have sold herbs and medicinal pastes, treated eye ailments, and circumcised girls, such as the healers in Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play. With this sense in mind, it is plausible that the fourteenth-century ghurabā’ cemetery in Granada served as a burial ground for Sīn-speakers and public entertainers and not as a burial ground for spiritually alienated Muslims. Fernando Velázquez Basanta has located this cemetery across the Rio Genil on the site of the former San Antón el Viejo hermitage, which was founded in 1534.95 This site, located far from the city center, was the most remote of Granada’s seven cemeteries.96 The circumstances surrounding a famous poet’s burial in the Granadan ghurabā’ cemetery illustrate its position as a space for people who existed outside the moral community of Muslim Granadans. In 1306 the Marinids, a Fez-based dynasty, ousted the ʿAzafī ruling family from the Maghribi city of Ceuta, which they had controlled since 654/1256–7. They transported the captive family first to Málaga and then to Granada, where Sultan Muḥammad III absorbed them into his household. In March 1309 a palace coup deposed the ruler, and members of Banū l-ʿAzafī fled.97 The poet Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh al-ʿAzafī, a member of Banū l-ʿAzafī, barely escaped with the clothes on his back. He died on 28 Dhū l-Ḥijja 708/June 8, 1309; he “was buried in the cemetery of the ghurabāʾ from the small quarter across the river, in front of the Najd Castles (wa-dufina bi-maqbarati l-ghurabāʾi min al-rubayṭi ʿabra l-wādī tujāha qusūr najd).”98 He died without honor, fleeing not fighting, and the removal of his corpse to the cemetery of the Strangers signaled this moral disgrace to local observers. Additionally, if the ghurabā’ had separate burial grounds because Muslims, Christians, and Jews doubted their religious affiliation, then burial in these ghurabā’ plots would have also desecrated the corpse.

Conclusion Most of the evidence in this chapter supports a dispersed community of mostly poor ghurabā’ in Egypt, Syria, northern Africa, and Iberia, with little evidence of regular nomadism. Only one fifteenth-century observer may have encountered ghurabā’, whom he called Corbi, in rural northern Iran. On the whole, the ghurabā’ specialized in trades that were dependent on the patronage of settled client communities. They themselves did not establish self-sufficiency as hunters, foragers, or farmers. Anthropologists and sociologists, like Georg Simmel, Joseph Berland, and Aparna Rao, have studied people who act as cultural brokers, developing expertise in unique economic niches, like printing amulets or making sieves, and surviving on these trades.99 They all named this theoretical figure “the stranger.” They did not



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intermarry, fight with, or live among the majority group. The historian Yuri Slezkine takes twentieth-century Russian Jews as a prototype of these “professional internal strangers,” who “were the symbolic equivalents of eunuchs, monks, and celibate or hereditary priests insofar as they remained outside the traditional web of kinship obligations, blood friendships, and family feuds.”100 Their outsider status allowed them to mediate between groups without threatening the social order, and most importantly, they valued this status and showed no desire to relinquish it. In her ethnography of poor Cairenes in the late 1960s, Unni Wikan contrasted her subjects with those of the Nawar whose “lifestyle . . . is seen by many sedentary people as disgraceful and far from praiseworthy, but if the gypsies themselves have a system of values which praises this style, they are not poor in their own eyes.”101 Seen on their own terms, these neighborhoods were spaces that allowed them to maintain their craft practices, like animal training or magic, and to raise their children to speak and understand Sīn, and to hold their literary salons with little interference from akhshān (non-ghurabā’). As discussed earlier, money earned from begging went directly to the beggars. They were free people, who did not pay taxes, rent market stalls, or need to repay with interest money that they had borrowed. In considering the perspective and lived environments of the medieval ghurabā’, we can see these combined factors allowed them to flourish culturally while maintaining social and physical distance from the majority society. Some ghurabā’ certainly lived in maṣāṭīb, or communal homes, likely as squatters in crumbling or precariously built housing. The gharīb poet Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār complained that the roof of his home in Bāb al-Lūq had collapsed on him. Others lived in tents, as travelers observed on the outskirts of Aleppo. Still others lived more desperately, unhoused, sleeping near public kilns to stay warm. In the tenth century Abū Dulaf suggested that while some of the Banū Sāsān did sleep outside, other only pretended to have done so. “Al-qaṣr is the kiln or furnace into which one of the group of beggars crawls and rolls about in the ashes. He then comes out covered in dusty ashes, and leads people to think that he has been obliged to seek refuge there because of the intense cold and his lack of clothing.”102 Furthermore, as Ibn Dāniyāl wrote in the thirteenth century of a Sīn-speaking ḥarfūsh: “you see me when I sleep—furnace ashes are my mat, my bowl is under my cheek.”103 Whether by decree or choice, the ghurabā’ tended to cluster in an unwalled area of town. This common placement implies lower status and later migrations to the city. These quarters had different levels of amenities. The Damascene Ḥārat al-Ghurabā’ had mosques and madrasas, whereas Bāb al-Lūq in Cairo had little else besides a cotton market and a trash heap. The cemeteries serving these populations were all located near their quarters, placed so that no processions of ghurabā’ mourners needed to pass through other quarters.

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CChapter 5 BULHĀNS ILLUSTRATED SHIʿI ASTROLOGICAL BOOKS

Several passages in earlier chapters have hinted that the Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’ of Iraq and Iran generally inclined toward Shiʿism. Taken singly, each of these instances can be read as particular to a certain place or time, but the preponderance of evidence rather suggests that professing pro-Alid or Shiʿi beliefs was a defining marker of the Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’. The Zuṭṭ led a sustained Alid revolt against the Abbasids in the early ninth century. In eighth- and ninth-century lower Iraq, Shiʿi merchants purchased cloth from the Shiʿi Zuṭṭ, suggesting that the Zuṭṭ operated within local sectarian networks of patronage. The tenth-century poet Abū Dulaf claimed that the Banū Sāsān performed (or feigned) Shiʿi piety by public mourning al-Ḥusayn, carrying around tablets made of clay from his tomb, declaring themselves Kaysanis (extreme Shiʿis), and reciting poetry in praise of ʿAlī.1 The last verses of Abū Dulaf ’s poem on the Banū Sāsān praise the family of the Prophet and Iraqi sites of Shiʿi pilgrimage. They are the family of the Messenger of God, the pre-eminent and proudhearted ones. At Kūfa and the two sides of Karbalā’, how many tombs [of sayyids and saints] are there! And at Baghdad and Sāmarrā, and Bākhamrā by the weir.2

Al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī was martyred on the plains of Kufa in 61/680 and was then buried in Karbalā’. The tombs of the seventh and ninth Imams, Mūsā al-Kāẓim (d. 183/799) and Muḥammad al-Jawād (d. 220/835), are in Baghdad. The tenth and eleventh Imams, ʿAlī al-Hādī (d. 254/868) and his son Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (d. 260/874), are buried in Sāmarrā, which is also where the twelfth Imam Muḥammad al-Mahdī (d. 260/874) is believed to have gone into occultation. In the southern Iraqi city of Bākhamrā, the Alid claimant Ibrāhīm b. ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ḥasan b. al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī died in 145/762, leading a rebellion against the Sunni Abbasids. His tomb became a Shiʿi pilgrimage site.3 Furthermore, Abū Dulaf ’s patron Ibn ʿAbbād was a Buyid vizier who gave financial support to Shiʿi shrines and circulated with in a network of Alids, Shiʿi

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legal scholars, and Muʿtazilis.4 The circa eleventh-century Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāṣim al-Baghdādī (The Imitation of Abū l-Qāṣim al-Baghdādī) features Sāsāni, Shiʿi characters. Both al-Hamadhānī and Ibn Dāniyāl lift entire sections of this work into their maqāmāt and shadow plays.5 Li Guo, in his analysis of a thirteenthcentury shadow play about the Banū Sāsān, concluded that “the mysterious group known as the Banū Sāsān in medieval Cairo consisted of refugees from Mosul, who probably harbored a Shi’i inclination.”6 Ibn Dāniyāl’s play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb is dedicated to a shadow puppet master unusually named ʿAlī b. Mawlāhum. Some Shiʿis refer to ʿAlī as their mawlā, in keeping with the hadith: “Of whomsoever I am the mawla, ‘Alī is his mawla.” This association makes for several ambiguous moments in the play. When the characters call out to their master ʿAlī (ya rayyis ʿAlī), they could be addressing the local puppet master or the Prophet Muḥammad’s cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. The community of torchbearing watchmen (mashā’iliyya) chant an Alid song (“You think me a khushnī, but by ʿAlī, no! By ʿAlī, no!”).7 At the end of the play, Gharīb addresses ʿAlī, who “is near to every dāʿī.”8 The fourteenth-century Ketāb-e sāsāniyān was composed by extreme Shiʿis who attributed divinity to ʿAlī. The Shiʿi character of the ghurabā’ found elegant expression in their book arts. The ghurabā’ were not only represented in medieval Maqāmāt book illustrations but by the first half of the thirteenth century, ghurabā’ astrologers had developed a new book genre—large-scale, illustrated, and illuminated Shiʿi Arabic astrological books, known as bulhāns, for professional use. These bulhāns proved enormously influential in the development of monumental book painting and in divinatory practice. By the 1540s a new genre of large-scale Shiʿi divination book was adapted into new languages at the Ottoman Turkish, Safavid Iranian, and Mughal Indian courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Known as the fālnāma genre, these works featured oversized paintings of Abrahamic prophets, including the Prophet Muḥammad and his family, Shiʿi shrine sites, planets, historical battles, and scenes of death and the afterlife. Astrology was a learned, gharīb field, and its practitioners had a reputation for advanced literacy and scientific knowledge. In Abū Dulaf ’s tenth-century rendering, a gharīb astrologer used state-of-the-art divining equipment. “And [of our number is] the one who makes use of astrological tables (zīj), and who observes the flames in the brazier, and who utilizes a revolving celestial globe (jafr).”9 Jafr is a Sīn term; the Arabic for celestial globe is kura al-nujūmiyya. Because surviving globes are made of delicately worked precious metals and command high sums on the contemporary art market, it is easy to consider them elite artifacts. However, an eighth-century Arabic translation of a Sanskrit astronomical treatise mentions celestial globes made of wood, which would place them within reach of ordinary astrologers, like most street diviners.10 The full range of a gharīb astrologer’s professional accoutrements is described in literary works, all of whose authors assume the centrality of books and a bit of trickery to this practice. Hilāl al-Munajjim, the gharīb astrologer in Ibn Dāniyāl’s thirteenth-century shadow play, arrives on stage carrying the tools of his trade: “his book, his sand tray, his stool, and his astrolabe.”11 Similarly, in a unique sixteenth-

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century anthology of stories, a Baghdadi woman instructs her husband ʿUṣfūr, a simple weaver, on how to impersonate a gharīb astrologer: She said: “Take some old notebooks and sit on a carpet in the road calling out: ‘The divining gharīb astrologer (al-ḥāsib al-munajjim al-gharīb)! Who wants his fortune told?’ People will come swarming round you.” “And if anyone asks me what’s in the books, what am I to say, when I can’t read a single word?” he asked. She said: “If anyone asks you that, say: ‘I am not a writer; I am an astrologer and a diviner.’” . . . [S]he told him that she would give him a shawl and a head cloth. She collected old notebooks for him and gave him an old carpet and a chair, saying: “This is all you need.” . . . Next morning he took the carpet and the rest of the stuff and went to the highway where the astrologers sat and prayed with his hand on his heart: “O Lord, Guide of the perplexed, guide me in my perplexity.” He was sitting on a road that led to a certain bathhouse and cried out: “I am the astrologer, the diviner, the learned gharīb!” On hearing this people rushed from all sides. They saw how he was dressed and what he looked like, with his long beard hanging over his navel, which he had dyed with henna. He was wearing the shawl (buqja) and the head cloth and looking like an old pimp.12

The consultation of books was central to an astrologer’s habitus, as evidenced by ʿUṣfūr’s doubts that an illiterate weaver such as himself could successfully impersonate an astrologer. Practitioners of the complex science of astrology were presumed to possess advanced literacy and numeracy, as evidenced by their hefty tomes and scientific instruments. If we understand astrology as a learned, interpretive craft, then the “old notebooks” in these sketches figure as fundamental tools of the trade. Although they go unnamed in this sketch, the notebook of the gharīb astrologer was called a bulhān, and its contents were arranged in a particular order.  Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sources describe the bulhān as an illustrated book developed by and for gharīb astrologers. Ḥillī depicted the bulhān as a professional tool for the gharīb street astrologers: “And the accomplice deputed to watch the onlookers has told me / what they were actually saying, whilst they imagined that I was reading from my bulhān.”13 The author glosses the Sīn term bulhān as “a book of illustrations and decorations” but does not elaborate on the astrologer’s grift.14 While any number of literary sources gesture vaguely to the use of books in astrological practice, the only other premodern author to mention this particular book genre by name was Jawbarī. His thirteenth-century exposé on the Banū Sāsān has the most revealing details about the bulhān, which he first mentions in the introduction to Chapter Twelve. The gharīb astrologers clearly valued those among them who augmented their selling routines with crafts like printed amulets, bulhāns, and compartmentalized boxes built either from scratch or by modifying an ordinary box.15 Jawbarī listed the various types of astrologers according to prestige, of which the lowliest were those who composed messages with invisible inks and those who determine the best time to perform an action or embark on a venture.

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Know that this tribe [of astrologers] calls itself al-ghurabā’. They have aḥwāl. And they have tricks that are unequalled and indescribable. Among them are those who sell the amulet. And they have poetry in Sīn and dūbayts and others. . . . They have masters of birth horoscopes, of decorative and illustrated books (bulhān), and of fortune-telling and of boxes with secret compartments (al-maqālib). And among them are masters of al-jarīda and of lot-casting. Among their crafts is casting gems, which is linked to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. And among them is casting of birds, and casting of cities (mudun) and casting of food, casting of circles, and casting of mandalas, and casting of names, and casting of planets and casting of much that we do not mention for fear of extending this too long. Among them are those who make predictions using paper. They immerse it in water, and they bring it out with writing on it. There are also masters of paper, who heat it to make the writing visible with bashāra and hadhr. Know that the masters of paper are the lowest of all astrologers, as are the astrologers who predict the most auspicious hour for an action.16

One gets a sense, and not for the first time, of strict social hierarchies among the ghurabā’. If they leave an impression of poverty and chaos, they ordered themselves more rigidly. Preachers held the most prestige among them because Sāsān was a preacher. Ibn Dāniyāl ordered his shadow play characters in order of most to

Table 5.1  The Kitāb al-bulhān and Its Offshoots Book Title

Dimensions Date and Place

Kitāb al-Bulhān by ʿAbd al-Ḥasan al-Iṣfahānī

24.5 × 16 cm

fourteenth-century Arabic Iraq

Maṭāliʿ al-saʿāda wa-manābiʿ al-siyāda Maṭāliʿ al-saʿāda wa-manābiʿ al-siyāda

27.6 × 17 cm

990/1582, Istanbul

Ottoman Morgan Library and Turkish Museum M. 788

31 × 20.5 cm

990/1582, Istanbul

Ottoman BnF MS suppl. Turc 242 Turkish

Dresden Fālnāma 66.5 × 48 cm Dispersed Fālnāma 59 × 45 cm

Language Accession Number Oxford MS Bodl. Or. 133

1540s Persian Late 1550s or early Persian 1560s 1575–99 Persian

Mscr.Dresd.Eb.445 Leaves scattered across many collections Topkapı Palace Museum TSM H.1702 1603–17 Istanbul Ottoman Topkapı Palace Museum Turkish TSM H.1703 1610–30 Golconda, Persian Nasser D. Khalili Collection India MSS 979

Persian Fālnāma

58 × 42 cm

Turkish Fālnāma

50 × 40 cm

Khalili Fālnāma

41 × 28.4 cm

Ḥamzanāma

68.5 × 53.5 cm 1562–77 India

Persian

200 or so leaves scattered across many collections

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least prestigious. Male beggars held positions of authority over smaller troupes of young boys and women. Even their literary salons were not of the informal variety. This passage also brings into sharp focus how differentiated was the expertise of the astrologers. A crowded field of astrologers may have driven the hyperspecialization, perhaps only possible in large cities that could accommodate a public with varying tastes for these displays. Jawbarī devoted Section Eight of Chapter Twelve to those astrologers who told fortunes with “decorative and illustrated books” and to the construction of these books. It begins: On revealing the secrets of those who earn a living with bulhān and who discuss the horary astrology of Twelver Shiʿism (mas’alat al-ithnā ʿashariyya). To be more precise, they produce a large book made of half-sheet Baghdadi paper (kitāb kabīr qiṭaʿ al-baghdādī) that is then illustrated and gilded. At its beginning come descriptions of climes and their marvels and what is in them. After that, they place in it representations of jinns and their kings, minions (aʿwān), seals (khawātim) and spears (ḥirāb).17

Half-sheet Baghdadi paper measures an astounding 73 × 50 cm, the original size of a folio in the monumental Qur’ans produced for the Ilkhanid ruler Öljeytü in the early eighth/fourteenth century.18 It seems that bulhāns of considerably smaller size were also produced, as is evident from the only known extant specimen: a late fourteenthcentury Jalayirid Iraqi composite manuscript of six treatises (Oxford Bodleian MS Or. 133), the first of which bears the title Kitāb al-bulhān.19 A single folio in this manuscript measures 24.5 × 16 cm, almost exactly one-ninth of the surface area of a half-sheet Baghdadi folio. The discrepancy between the dimensions of the only known bulhān and Jawbarī’s description is so large that I wonder whether Jawbarī was representing a thirteenth-century ideal that was abandoned for practical reasons. Perhaps large bulhāns became too expensive to manufacture, their size had made them unwieldy to handle, tastes had changed, or new market regulations had criminalized bibliomancy by the fourteenth century. Future investigations will hopefully tell us more. But in what will be crucial to a later argument, it is worth noting that the illustrations in fālnāmas, a related genre of illustrated astrological texts, were as large as 66.5 × 48 cm, nearly the exact dimensions of a half-sheet Baghdadi folio.20 (Table 5.1). With close attention to detail, Jawbarī continues by composing a precise description of the codicological and formalistic elements of the bulhān. After that, they have chapters on seasons and images of constellations. Then they show the lunar mansions (manāzil qamariyya). And altogether it is a gilded image. After that, they show the twelve zodiac signs (burūj), each sign having three decans (wujūh), and five terms (ḥudūd), nine novenas (nawbahrāt), three triplicities (muthallathāt), thirty degrees (daraja) and twelve aspects (ḥāla). Putting this all together makes a beautiful gilded image.21

The contents of the Kitāb al-bulhān (Oxford Bodleian MS Or. 133, fols. 1r–93v) hew quite closely to the topics, though not the sequence, that Jawbarī outlined.

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Some of its illustrations have been lost, and some pages disordered. In fact, it is only by comparing this manuscript to sixteenth-century Turkish translations that were stably maintained in a royal library do we know the original sequence of the Bulhān sections.22 On the title page of the Bulhān, in a hand later than the main copyist’s, someone has summarized the book’s contents. The Kitāb al-Bulhān contains the Nativities of Abī Maʿshar al-Balkhī, precepts about the seasons, time periods (azminah), astrological conjunctions (ittiṣālāt), earthly rotations, change of the world-years, interpreting bodily tremors as portents of future events (ikhtilājāt al-aʿḍā’), the nature of the stars (kawākib), poetry in the rajaz metre, divination (fāl), selections and events from tales and marvels, and what is connected to them.23

The entire composite manuscript Oxford Bodleian MS Or. 133 consists of six works on astrology, astronomy, and lettrism: I. Kitāb al-bulhān (fols. 1r-93v) ●●

●● ●●

●●

●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

1r: Title page bearing a notice of sale dated Shaʿbān 812/1409-10 and an ownership statement from Yaḥyā b. Muḥammad in Edirne in 1019/1610-1f 1v: blank 2r: Latin inscription by Nathaniel Palmer of Fairfield, who donated the manuscript to the Bodleian Library in 1717 2v-25r: Kitāb al-mawālīd (Book of Nativities) by Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī, illustrated with zodiac images 25v-27r: planets 27v: lunar stations 28r-33r: demons (jinn) 33v-38r: wonders and marvels 38v: season of spring 39r-43v: wonders and marvels 44r-45r: seasons of summer, autumn, winter 45v-46v: wonders and marvels 47r-49v: climes 50r-74r: astronomical and astrological tables 74v-80v: on predicting the future 81r: a 20-line document in Ottoman Turkish 81v-93v: illustrations of twelve zodiac constellations, plus Orion and Eridanus

II. Al-Durar wa’l-yawāqīt fī ʿilm al-raṣad wa’l-mawāqīt [Pearls and Sapphires: On Astronomical Observations and Time-keeping] by Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Abī ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Aḥmad (fols. 94v-130r; author named on fol. 97v): copied in Shaʿbān 734/1334 by Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Baṣīr24

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III. Kitāb al-fāl [The Book of Foretelling] (fols. 131-163): copied by al-Ḍiyā’ al-Irbilī between 800/1398 and 806/1404. On fol. 131r, a notice of sale from al-Ḍiyā’ to Ḥaydar b. al-Ḥajjī ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad in Shaʿbān 812/1409-10. On fol. 131v, several faded impressions of a teardrop-shaped Ottoman seal bear the name Muṣṭafá. IV. Al-Qurʿat al-mubārakah [The Blessed Divination] (fols. 163v-169r): copied Sunday, 13 Dhū l-Ḥijja 806/1404 V. Untitled, anonymous work on properties of letters of the alphabet (fols. 170r-173v) VI. Untitled treatise on zodiac signs and their ruling planets (fols. 174r-176r): copied by Ḥaydar in Ramadan 839/1436 The title of Kitāb al-bulhān has been universally confounding. Jawbarī and Ḥillī have clearly defined the bulhān as an illustrated astrological book with specifically ordered content and formatting, but the word itself is not Arabic, leading some to imagine if the scribe intended another word. The postclassical Arabic root b-l-h signifies “simple-mindedness,” and though its use is not attested in the fourteenth century, researchers have based their translations of the title on this word. (I do not know the etymology of bulhān, so I have chosen not to translate this term.) D. S. Rice translated it as “well-being.”25 Eva Baer and David A. King both chose not to translate bulhān, and while they wondered whether the scribe intended to write burhān (proof), they did not insist on this interpretation.26 The art historians Persis Berlekamp and Stefano Carboni have respectively translated bulhān as “dumbfoundment” and “surprise” and on this basis argued that it should be classified as wonder literature, typified by Qazwīnī’s thirteenth-century work ʿAjā’ib al-makhlūqāt (The Wonders of Creation).27 Even without knowledge of Sīn, this categorization comes as a surprise given Syrinx von Hees’s convincing argument that the literary genre of ʿajā’ib wonder literature is a thoroughly modern construction. Specifically, modern readers of Qazwīnī have overinterpreted occasional mentions of dragons to the exclusion of the preponderant theme of earthly and celestial wonders. For medieval observers Qazwīnī’s ʿAjā’ib al-makhlūqāt served as an encyclopedia of natural history and a celebration of God’s creative capabilities.28 Rather than trying to fit the Kitāb al-bulhān into modern categories, one need only recognize that the bulhān is a distinct manuscript book genre, originating with the ghurabā’ and defined by specifically ordered textual and pictorial content. The identities of the copyist-illustrator and his patron are also mysterious. ʿAbd al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan al-Iṣfāhānī (of family origin) al-Baghdādī (by birth) al-Burhānī (by creed, an adherent of Aristotelian demonstrative logic) copied and illustrated Kitāb al-bulhān for his patron Ḍiyā’ al-Dīn Ḥusayn al-Irbilī sometime in the late eighth/fourteenth century. I could find no other record of either man. The name ʿAbd al-Ḥasan is so unconventional that it is not attested in other premodern sources. Typically, such compound ʿAbd-names pair ʿAbd with a name of God, like ʿAbdallāh (servant of God) or ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (servant of the Merciful), but Ḥasan is not a traditional name of God. Because his male ancestors

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have distinctly Muslim names for three generations, his is not a case of a new convert mixing up traditional formats. We stand on firmer ground when we come to the text and images. Abū Maʿshar’s (d. 886 in Iraq) book Nativities formed the foundational text of any bulhān. His renown as an astrologer-philosopher stems from his novel blending of Aristotelian and pre-Islamic thought.29 He envisioned astrology as a universal science of divine origin that had been promulgated by prophets in Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hellenic, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. His Nativities, which forms the literary basis of the Bulhān, specifically examines planetary influence on human existence, from the creation of the planet to its destruction and provides a firm basis on which to identify dispersed bulhān leaves or even entire bulhāns. However, while investigating the 1502–4 catalog of the Ottoman Imperial library, A. Tunç Şen and Cornell Fleischer realized that “it is safe to assume that some of the items listed in the inventory under different or generic titles might have also contained the works of Abu Maʿshar.” A composite manuscript that contains Abū Maʿshar’s work on nativities has the generic title Kitāb taqwīm al-adwiya fī l-ṭibb (The Book of the Table of Medicaments in Medicine).30 Even so, we can identify promising leads. An illustrated fifteenth-century manuscript of Abū Maʿshar’s Kitāb al-mawālīd (Book of Nativities) has a marginal note in a hand distinct from that of the main scribe, in which the writer seems well versed in gharīb astrological practice. “Then you write a haykal for him from the circles. A talisman for him from the eye.”31 This work may once have formed part of a bulhān. Of the manuscript’s forty miniatures painted in Cairo by Qunbur ʿAlī Shirāzī, four depict the demon kings Iblīs, Ṭārish, a four-headed king, and the Red King.32   The remaining thirty-six images portray the five terms of each zodiac sign. Since similar components are found in the Bodleian Kitāb al-bulhān, this unidentified fragment could plausibly form part of another bulhān. Although Jawbarī claimed that a typical bulhān measured approximately 73 × 50 cm, the dimensions of the three known bulhān specimens do not begin to approach these monumental proportions. The Kitāb al-Bulhān at Oxford University measures 24.5 × 16 cm, plus the Maṭāliʿ al-saʿāda at the Morgan Library measures 27.6 × 17 cm, and the BnF copy is 31 × 20.5 cm. These dimensions make it plausible that a 27 × 19 cm heavily damaged image of a demon riding an elephant, which shares a layout with the demon portraits in Kitāb al-bulhān, was once a dispersed leaf.33 Excavated at Fustat, it reads at the top: “Jazrafīl riding an elephant.” It lacks the apotropaic symbols and magical script that Jawbarī mentioned and that are visible in the Kitāb al-bulhān and in the later Ottoman Turkish translations, though they may have been drawn on those sections now damaged or torn away. This leaf has been folded, and its tears have been repaired, perhaps suggesting its use as a charm. The reverse has no text or images, but it may have had some relation to the bulhān genre or was one of the enlarged miniatures that street astrologers used for divination. The Bulhān’s section on constellations (fols. 81v–93v) consists of twentysix images—double images of twelve constellations, plus one each of Orion and Eridanus—that were drawn long before Iṣfahānī composed his treatise (I) and must

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Figure 5.1  The Red King, folio from Kitāb al-Bulhān, Iraq, late fourteenth century. Opaque watercolor on paper, 9.6 × 6.3 in. (24.5 × 16 cm). Bodleian Library, Oxford, Or. 133, fol. 31r.

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Figure 5.2  The Red King, folio from Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī, Kitāb al-mawālīd, Cairo, c. 1300. Opaque watercolor on paper, 14.2 × 10.2 in. (36 × 26 cm). BnF, Paris, Ms. arabe 2583, fol. 3v.

have formed part of the Bulhān at an early stage. Julian Raby furthermore places these constellation drawings in the Seljuk period between 1180 and 1220 CE, where he believes they originally formed part of a manuscript of al-Ṣūfī’s Treatise on the Fixed Stars.34 Arabic foliation is visible at the top center from folios 1 to 79 on what are also foliated in modern Latin script as 1 to 79. No foliation appears on folio 80, where it was presumably cropped off. The Arabic foliation reappears at the start of Kitāb al-fāl on fol. 131, which is numbered ٩٣. The missing thirteen folios must

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be the entirety of the constellation images. Comparing this manuscript to other Seljuk-era copies of this treatise, Raby judges it more casually produced. There is no underpainting, no pencil outlines, so it was probably drawn freehand. Following the constellation paintings comes the second-oldest portion of this composite manuscript, a text on astronomy and timekeeping (II), which probably was not bound with Kitāb al-bulhān (I) when Iṣfāhānī presented it to Irbilī. Its folios bear no Arabic foliation and interrupts the continuously foliated Ia-Ib-III sections. Traces of the previous binding on the astronomical treatise (II) are visible on fol. 130v. Furthermore, it was copied in 734/1334, before the Bulhān was produced. Because the Bulhān lacks a colophon, we do not know when Iṣfāhānī completed it (I), but after Ḍiyā’ received it, he appended two additional treatises (III and IV) that he had finished copying in 806/1404. Some years later, in 812/1409–10, al-Irbilī sold this manuscript to one Ḥaydar b. al-Ḥājjī ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad. The two men who brokered the sale had Iraqi nisbas, so Ḥaydar probably bought it in Iraq. In any case, Ḥaydar later completed a treatise on zodiac signs (VI) in Aleppo in Ramadan 839/1436 and was probably the one to bind it with the earlier works.

Uses of the Bulhān How would such a book have been used? Jawbarī explains how a typical astrologer would have publicly displayed his bulhān to attract a crowd around him, then told horoscopes to members of his audience. In Jawbarī’s telling, a gharīb astrologer would often direct an accomplice to eavesdrop in a crowd, then would relate the overheard information to the astrologer, who in turn pretended to read these personal details aloud from his bulhān. Then he [the astrologer] explains the presentation and places the book on a chair and puts the chair in front of himself. Then he opens it page by page and says, “This is the description of such-and-such climes and their countries. And these are their wonders.” He speaks about them, then he opens another page and says, “These are more wondrous and strange. This is a description of suchand-such climes and their wonders and marvels.” Then he discusses them. He continues in this way until he gathers [the people] round. Once he has assembled them—into what is the hankāma,35 which means the circle of observers—he opens to the first of the zodiac signs, then says, “This is the sign of Aries in the first decan, and this is the second, and this is the third. He whose house is Aries and Mars is in his detriment. He whose house is Aries and Mars has a cloak of honor and a useful lesson. His wife has died. The ruler of Aries and Mars will die tonight, and a son will be born to him. Whoever says, ‘my star is Aries and Mars,’ verily he is described here.36 Approach that I may explain to you your star and your degree and what are your best days, what is completed and what will come to pass regarding women, crafts, clothing, food, scents, oils, illnesses, and medicine.”

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Roma in the Medieval Islamic World When he stood, he asked: “What is your name?” He said: “So-and-so.” He asked: “And your mother?” “Such-and-such a woman.”37 This senseless jabber is not possible. One can only calculate the right star through an astronomical or artificially calculated nativity or something similar to the qadrī or ḥawarī nativity. Even though these are not precise, they are better than the pablum to which the khushnī [non-gharīb] have attached themselves. Then he asks, “What is your name and your father’s name?” And he responds: “So-and-so.”38 So, he says: “You are of the second decan of the such-and-such degree.” This is just senseless jabber and deceit, for it is completely false. One can only calculate something using what we have before us from working a birth chart.39 

The astrologer enticed a crowd around him by displaying his bulhān, which, like shadow plays and performances with tamed animals, offered urban dwellers an unusual viewing experience. The scale of the book illustrations attracted large crowds. The book elegantly synthesized distant earthly (“climes and their marvels”) and supernatural realms (“jinns and their kings”) to which they otherwise had no access. On folio 47v, the man depicted in the third clime may represent a northern Italian wearing a liripipe hat. Botticelli’s “Portrait of a Young Man” painted between 1470 and 1475 sports a liripipe, but the fashion originated in Italy in the fourteenth century, just when the Kitāb al-bulhān was being composed.40 Venetians would have been familiar figures as traders and dragomans in Mamluk cities but finding an accurate depiction of contemporary Venetian fashion in Jalayirid Iraq must have been an unusual occurrence. The bulhān book genre has not been previously recognized for what it represents: an influential Shiʿi literary innovation that expanded its influence far beyond the sphere of street peddlers. Because of its unusual and copious illustrations, the manuscript has long attracted the attention of art historians, though it seldom features in historical studies. It features playful architecture in the unusual colors of mauve, orange, blue, and green, and one scene even has Chinese-style clouds. But most astoundingly, it contains the only personifications of the four seasons in Islamic art. D. S. Rice suggested that European models directly inspired these images of seasons.41 In 1968, Eva Baer noted that among known Islamic manuscripts, only the Oxford Kitāb al-bulhān and two sixteenth-century Turkish translations of it have images of “planet-children.”42 As richly unconventional as this manuscript is, it also promises more discovery. Many image and text details are concealed by white strips of paper pasted to the page. This book would make an excellent candidate for extended conservation work.

Translations and Adaptations Although researchers can only identify one full copy of an Arabic bulhān and perhaps fragments of another, there are several copies of later iterations of this book genre that enhance our understanding of earlier bulhāns. Nearly two centuries after the production of the Oxford Kitāb al-bulhān, the Ottoman sultan Murad III

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Figure 5.3  Aries constellation, folio from Kitāb al-Bulhān, Iraq, late fourteenth century. Opaque watercolor on paper, 9.6 × 6.3 in. (24.5 × 16 cm). Bodleian Library, Oxford, Or. 133, fol. 2v.

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(r.  1574–95) commissioned Muḥammad b. Amīr Ḥasan al-Suʿūdī (d. 1591) to translate the bulhān into Turkish. (This is the same sultan who in Aleppo in 1589 summoned a skilled shadow play entertainer to Istanbul, which may indicate an enduring interest in popular culture.) Ultimately, two illustrated manuscripts, both entitled Maṭāliʿ al-saʿāda wa-manābiʿ al-siyāda (The Ascension of Propitious Stars and the Sources of Sovereignty), were completed around 990/1582. One copy was given to each of Murad III’s daughters: Fatma Sultan (d. 1620) and Ayşe Sultan (d. 1604). Two separate workshops painted these manuscripts. Ustad ʿOsman led the team that worked on Fatma’s manuscript. Napoleon Bonaparte brought Fatma’s manuscript to Paris, where it remains at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS suppl. turc 242). Ayşe’s codex was painted by Vali Jan and his workshop artisans, and it is today held in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (M. 788).43 Unlike the Arabic manuscript, both Turkish volumes contain portraits of Sultan Murad III, privately contemplating his bulhān.  The Topkapı Palace library inventory, compiled in 1502, lists an Arabic abridgement of Jawbarī’s Kashf al-asrār among its holdings.44 While it is possible that Murad III learned about the bulhān from Jawbarī’s work, it would not have been the likeliest point of introduction. By the time Murad had ascended the throne in 1574, this trend of large-format images used in fortune-telling and divination had already been spreading in Muslim society for some decades. By the 1540s a Shiʿi book genre known as Fālnāma, or the Book of Omens, had emerged in the Safavid Empire and was only translated into Turkish in the early decades of the 1600s. The Fālnāma is distinguished by its large, single-page paintings on the right-hand page of the open book or the verso sides of the folios. Divination poetry was inscribed on the facing recto side of the folio so that one would first see the image, then read one’s fortune afterward. The size of the paper pages and the weight of the paint would have made them heavy to turn, slowing down one’s use of the book. Five copies of such books can be studied today, but we know about their likely uses from seventeenth-century travelers’ reports who observed street diviners using paintings in Istanbul and Isfahan. In 1630, Evliya Çelebi met Hoca Mehmed Çelebi, the head of the Istanbuli bibliomancers’ guild, who told fortunes with paintings (falciyan-i müsaviran). He displayed in front of his shop the images one by one, drawn on large, cut, and firm Istanbuli paper. These images were drawn by the inimitable masters of the past and bore the approved attribution of their pens. They depicted all the heroes . . . and the kings of old, a multitude of apostles and prophets as well as countless fortresses, wars, and combats and the most marvelous naval battles and carnages of ships at sea. . . . The passers-by would seek their fortune by giving a silver coin (akçe) and randomly selecting one of the images. Hoca Mehmed Çelebi would then consult the image selected, and according to whether it depicted wars and combats, or Yusuf and Zulaykha, or Leyla and Mejnun, or Farhad and Shirin, or Varqa and Gülshah, or the enmities or joyful gatherings convened by felicitous kings of old, he would recite his own views in improvised verses—like “Farhad came to the seeker of this augury (fal) / So it is by toiling that happiness will come to your heart”—and anyone who heard them would be overcome by laughter.45

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Figure 5.4  Portrait of Sultan Murad III with bulhān, folio from Sayyid Muḥammad ibn Amīr Ḥasan al-Suʿūdī, Maṭāliʿ al-saʿāda wa-manābiʿ al-siyāda, Ottoman Istanbul, 1582. Opaque watercolor on paper, 12.2 × 8.5 in. (31 × 21.5 cm). BnF, Paris, Ms. suppl. turc 242, fol. 7v.

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The audience reacted with amusement at these predictions, suggesting that Istanbulis treated them with all the seriousness that modern patrons give to predictions in “Chinese” fortune cookies. The Istanbuli crowd seemed unconvinced of the bibliomancer’s supposed magical abilities, but they indulged him for a shared moment of poetic recitation and lighthearted entertainment. Like images in bound Fālnāmas, these paintings were mostly inspired by classical works of literature or mythical history, which would have affected observers differently than the bulhān’s images of jinn and Abrahamic stories. In fact, the same characters and themes found in Mehmed Çelebi’s paintings are to be found in the five known copies of the Fālnāma.46 Near the Ali Qapu palace in Isfahan, the French jeweler Jean Chardin, who lived in the city for nearly a decade, observed astrologers whose divinatory practice more closely echoed that of the ghurabā’. “They, too, used large books made up of about fifty old illustrations (marmousets), some representing signs of the zodiac and others with images of prophets and saints. After reciting a number of verses, the diviner quickly opened the volume and with an ‘inspired appearance’ (contenance inspiré) told the seeker what ever pleased him.”47 In both Istanbul and Isfahan, painters and astrologers used large-formation pictures singly or bound into a book to tell fortunes to passersby. The images described by Evliya Çelebi and Jean Chardin continue the artistic trend and mode of seeing established by the ghurabā’, who were expert at capturing people’s attention in public space and enticing them to pay for the privilege. In elite spaces, like the palaces of Abbasid Samarra or in Safavid Isfahan, could one behold monumental Qur’ans or mural paintings. For most early modern observers, seeing book art on this scale would have only been possible with street astrologers. Researchers have not previously connected the Fālnāma genre to the bulhān, because Jawbarī’s explanation about the codicology of the bulhān had not reached a wide audience. The Fālnāma seemed to arise spontaneously in 1540s Iran, but in fact, it has clear connections with the earlier book genre. For one, the sixth Shiʿi imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq is considered the traditional author of the Fālnāma, placing it in the same Imāmī-Shiʿi tradition as the ghurabā’ astrologers who made bulhāns and “prophes[ied] using gemstones, which is linked to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq.” The five Fālnāma known today were created in royal environments as a distinct genre.48 Ordered by date of production, they are: 1. The Dresden Fālnāma (Mscr.Dresd.Eb.445) includes fifty-one illustrations that were completed in Iran between 1540s and 1570s and constitute the largest images in this genre. They vary in size from 48 × 36.5 cm to 66.5 × 48 cm. However, an early twentieth-century dealer cut these illustrations from the surrounding margins. Had they been left intact, they might have approached bulhān dimensions.49 2. The leaves of the Persian Dispersed Fālnāma were removed from their binding sometime before 1913 and sold to collections around the world.50 The illustrations, measuring roughly 59 × 45 cm, were produced in Qazvin at the end of the 1550s or in the early 1560s.

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3. The Persian Fālnāma at the Topkapı Palace Museum (TSM H.1702) was completed in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The illustrations here measure about 39 × 24.5 cm and are set in wide margins, which brings the total size of the folios to 58 × 42 cm. 4. Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–17) commissioned an Ottoman Turkish Fālnāma (TSM H.1703), whose illustrations measure approximately 50 × 40 cm. 5. The Khalili Fālnāma (Nasser D. Khalili Collection MSS 979), likely produced at Quṭb Shāhi’s Shiʿi court in Golconda, India, between 1610 and 1630, features opulent illuminations. Its thirty-five folios are the smallest of these five books, measuring 41 × 28.4 cm. The images in the Dresden Fālnāma date to the 1540s, “confirm[ing] that the tradition of large-scale pictorial auguries must have predated the dispersed Falnama, attributed to the late 1550s and early 1560s.”51 The Khalili Fālnāma, produced in southern India between 1610 and 1630, constituted “part of the Qutb Shahi dynasty’s larger initiative of promoting political power and assimilation into the Safavid empire (1501–1736).”52 It has been understood as the bookend of a ninety-year tradition. However, if we exclude the bulhān tradition from this chapter of book production, the large-scale auguries seem to have been a shortlived phenomenon, instead of the enduring shift in presentation of divination procedures that they represent. By understanding the codicology of the bulhān, we can pinpoint a much earlier emergence of this artistic tradition. The bulhān not only preceded the Persian-language fālnāma tradition by centuries, but its influence also continues into sixteenth-century India in different forms. The Ḥamzanāma is a collection of elaborately mythologized tales on the life of Ḥamza, the uncle of the Prophet Muḥammad, who died in 625 at the Battle of Uhud. The Sunni Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) commissioned approximately 1,400 illustrations about Ḥamza’s adventures. The paintings made on cotton cloth were then affixed to a paper backing. Ḥamzanāma may never have been bound into a book. The 200 or so paintings held in public and private collections measure an astonishing 68.5 × 53.5 cm, and if one includes the margins, the dimensions increase to 73.7–78.7 × 61–63.5 cm.53 John William Seyller has recognized the links between “the overall structure and figure scale” of the Fāl- and Ḥamzanāma.54 Though the latter has nothing to do with divination, they emerged in the same artistic climate.

Conclusion The Shiʿi ghurabā’ exerted considerable influence on astrological paintings of the premodern period. It may have been due to their singular and influential contributions to Islamicate astrological practices that the collective Arabic and Persian terms for the occult sciences of astrology, alchemy, and divination are, respectively, ʿulūm gharība/ʿulūm-i gharībe. These phrases translate to “strange sciences,” which some consider evidence that these fields were “unusual, rare or difficult, i.e., elite.”55 While ʿUlūm gharība certainly carries this connotation, at the

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same time, the name may have also referenced the contributions of Shiʿi ghurabā’ astrologers, alchemists, and magicians to occultist literature and practices. George Saliba even allows that “members of a major segment of medieval Islamic society, namely the Shiites, were especially attracted to astrological predictions.”56 The ghurabā’ must have emerged sometime after the twelfth century as the most prominent Shiʿi practitioners of the occult sciences. Although there has not been research into the age of the phrase ʿulūm gharība, I suspect that this moniker for the occult sciences came into use after the late twelfth century, when the Banū Sāsān became known as the ghurabā’. The bulhān, a spectacular expression of Shiʿi astrological practice, underwent several adaptations since its earliest attestation in the thirteenth century and held considerable fascination for Muslim readers and viewers over the centuries. Though apparently originating in a street culture, the bulhān also captivated audiences beyond urban marketplaces and alleyways. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultan Murad III (r. 1574–95) commissioned two Turkish translations of the bulhān for his daughters. Until now, the bulhān has not been proposed as a direct influence on the large-scale Turkish and Persian illustrated astrological manuscripts that emerged in the mid-sixteenth century, but the chronology of development, the similarities in content, and their uncommon size support the view of the ghurabā’ as important shapers of visual experiences and tastes. Known as fālnāmas, or books of divination, these exquisitely produced books circulated among royal elites in Ottoman Turkey, Safavi Iran, and Mughal India.

Figure 5.5  Ex libris of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain, folio from Le Livre de la chasse, Paris, after 1492. Vellum, 15 × 11.4 in. (38.1 × 29 cm). Morgan Library and Museum, New York, MS M. 1044, fol. 1v.

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Figure 5.6  Blockprint of the Spanish royal coat of arms, folio in Kitāb al-Bulhān, Iraq, late fourteenth century. Opaque watercolor and blockprint on paper, 9.6 × 6.3 in. (24.5 × 16 cm). Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Or. 133, fol. 39r.

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It was not just the bulhān genre that transformed but also the individual Kitāb al-bulhān now at Oxford University that moved from its production site in fourteenth-century Iraq to Aleppo in the sixteenth century, and on to Edirne in the seventeenth, and finally to Oxford in the eighteenth. In addition to the ownership notes and records of sale inscribed in the manuscript, there are further indications within its pages that its owners actively engaged with the text in innovative way. A woodcut pasted into the upper right corner of folio 39r derives from the coat of arms of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain. It is placed above a colorful full-folio painting of a castle wall and ramparts and a heading that reads: “The Imposing Castle.” It bears a strong resemblance to the Spanish monarchs’ ex libris but has some distinguishing idiosyncrasies.    For one, the blazon does not bear a crown, which is standard for a royal seal, plus the arrangement of the quarterlies with stripes and eagles are flipped horizontally. This blockprint, mostly likely cut from the frontispiece or endpiece of a now untraceable blockbook or incunable, features a pomegranate between the bottom quarterlies, symbolizing Ferdinand and Isabella’s conquest of the Granadan kingdom in 1492. Incidentally, this blockprint on paper and the bulhān are related arts, both introduced into Islamicate society by ghurabā’ in the Middle Period. The last two chapters of this book explore the role of ghurabā’ astrologers in spreading blockprinting technologies throughout western Asia, northern Africa, Iberia, Bavaria, and Bohemia from 900 to c. 1430.

CChapter 6 A NEW NARRATIVE OF PREMODERN AFRO-EURASIAN PRINTING

As professional internal strangers equally dependent on cultural difference and economic interdependence, they speak at least one internal language (sacred, secret, or both) and at least one external one. They are all trained linguists, negotiators, translators, and mystifiers, and the literate groups among them tend to be much more literate than their hosts. —Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (emphasis mine) In each previous chapter I have explored a distinct aspect of gharīb history and, where applicable, the reasons that the topic has been abandoned in West Asian historiography—the modern formation of Romani studies that divorced the study of the Roma from their western Asian and northern African histories, the centuries-long endurance of the Sīn language, the literary culture of the ghurabā’, and the creation of their homes, neighborhoods, and burial grounds in Islamicate cities. In this chapter I pose similar questions of premodern Islamicate print and book history. How does the important technological development of premodern Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Arabic, and Syriac printing remain unintegrated into global histories of print? Orientalists trained in the relevant languages have been aware of print specimens since 1852 when Joseph Hammer-Purgstall (1774– 1856) published evidence from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Andalusian manuscripts that suggest printing activity.1 Granted, early printing vocabularies in western Asia were exclusively in Sīn, a language obscure to most researchers, but the sidelining of this technological development is not solely a question of translatability. Print history is a deeply political field, as the supremacy of Western modernity rests almost entirely on representing print’s origins as uniquely Christian and European and its effects on Latin Christendom as singularly transformative. Given the deep entrenchment of this myth in historical scholarship, in library and museum cataloging practices, and even in the naming of print artifacts, the isolation of Afro-Asian print heritage from that of Europe is even quietly reproduced by historians of Asian and African print. Gentle revisions to the grand narrative are insufficient to correctives. In this chapter I will propose a new narrative centered on the minoritized people—ghurabā’ astrologers from 900 to roughly 1430, then Jews and Christians starting around 1493—who sustained an

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indigenous print culture nearly continuously until 1727, the year traditionally held as the start of “Islamic printing.”

Johann Gutenberg The master narrative in studies of print culture claims that Johann Gutenberg, born into an aristocratic family around the year 1400, independently developed the printing press, ex nihilo, in Mainz, Germany, in a burst of inspired genius. He certainly pioneered the technology of arranging typography using metal movable characters within the structure of a large press. He also developed a special ink with high copper and lead content that would adhere to the metal type. His printing press enabled the wide and rapid dissemination of ideas, ushering in major social revolutions in Europe, namely the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of literacy and modern science.2 An invention of profound and long-lasting cultural significance has prompted scrutiny of its inventor. The purity of Gutenberg’s inspiration functions as a hagiography in service to a larger mythology, in this case the origin myth of European modernity as an endogenous development. It leads to bewildering locutions, like this one from a classical Arabist: “Movable type and the internet are products of the West (though movable type emerged independently in several places across the globe, including Korea).”3 How can both parts of that sentence be simultaneously true? A nonspecialist reader would be forgiven for thinking that movable type emerged at the same time around the globe, yet Asian movable type actually predates Gutenberg by 400 years. Furthermore, such formulations imply that East Asian printing traditions were static and unchanging. In fact, Buddhist communities invested in printing as an inexpensive and efficient means of spreading their religious texts in myriad languages across vast distances. One example illustrates the complexity of some of these achievements. Between 764 and 770 the Japanese empress Shotoku famously commissioned one million prints of the Buddhist sutra Hyakumantō dharani. Thousands of copies of these texts have survived in Japan in small statues that housed them. Composed in Chinese characters, “the texts consist almost entirely of sounds transcribed phonetically from the original Sanskrit.”4 The scribe-carvers merged scripts (Chinese) with languages (Sanskrit) to communicate with Buddhist populations in lands far beyond Sanskrit and Chinese speech communities (Japan). Buddhism, woodblock printing, and movable-type printing in Chinese, Uyghur, Mongolian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Tangut spread along the Silk Roads from the eighth century onward. Islam spread through conquest eastward from Arabia, and many Central Asian communities converted or maintained their ancestral faiths and pledged allegiance to a new Muslim ruler. It is abundantly clear that as Buddhist and Muslim communities deepened their interactions, this contact ushered in a novel print culture in the Sunni Abbasid Empire from 900 to about 1430. The earliest Abbasid prints were of Islamic religious texts in Arabic, but later communities printed in Hebrew, Coptic, and Syriac. Geographically,



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printing spread into northern Africa in the early tenth century, then moving into Andalusia by the eleventh or twelfth century. One can more aptly characterize premodern Asian printing as proceeding continuously from the 700s, incorporating technological developments, like movable type, along the way. That this vast and diverse printing tradition has been consistently marginalized as inferior or irrelevant to global print history illustrates a scholarly commitment to upholding Central European print traditions as unique and disconnected from earlier Asian, African, or southern European histories. In a similar vein one modern biographer of Gutenberg who explored the possibility that Chinese technology influenced Gutenberg insisted on his unfailing admiration for the man and his legacy: “I have not raised the issue of whether Gutenberg may have been influenced by printing in the Far East in order to diminish his reputation in any way.”5 To uphold Gutenberg’s legacy as wholly European and Christian, his biographers have focused on his upper-class upbringing and privileged circles in fifteenth-century Mainz. This account of Mainz erases long-standing Jewish communities and interactions with neighboring Muslim empires. Mainz, known in Yiddish as Magenza, had been home to a thriving Jewish community since the tenth century. When the Sephardic Jewish merchant Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb al-Isrā’ilī al-Ṭurṭūshī visited Mainz in 965, he registered surprise to find Iranian Samanid silver coins minted in the years 301 and 302 AH/913 and 914 CE circulating in the markets, as well as Asian spices like pepper, ginger, and cloves.6 Trade routes between Central Asia and northern Europe are well documented, but this long-distance trade would not have been the only way that residents of Mainz had learned of Islamic empires. Muslim armies conquered Iberia in 750 and were not fully expelled until 1492, so a sophisticated Islamic empire where printing existed dominated southern Europe for all of Gutenberg’s lifetime. (He died on February 3, 1468.) Ottoman Turkish forces seized Constantinople on May 25, 1453, shortly after Gutenberg had begun printing pamphlets and books on his new press. But in 1454, his printing themes started to pivot toward the Islamic East, when he printed copies of his German poem “Eyn manung der christenheit widder die durken” (An Admonition to Christendom against the Turks), in which he exhorted European sovereigns to protect Cyprus against Muslim invaders.7 The following year he used the same punchtype to print his famous Latin Bibles, and in 1456, his workshop again reused this type to print, concurrently in Latin and German, Callixtus III’s papal bull, ordering Christians to say special prayers at noon for those Crusaders fighting Turks in the Balkans.8 Drawing direct, unmediated connections between early medieval China and late medieval Western Europe is fanciful work, but with the spread to Europe of such Chinese inventions as paper, shadow theater, techniques of silk production, porcelain, and gunpowder, researchers have easily demonstrated mechanisms of technological transfer along the Silk Roads or via Indian Ocean trade routes.9 All of these technologies were adopted in Central Asia, Islamic West Asia, and northern Africa before arriving in Europe, so how tenable is it that the printing press was completely disconnected from printing techniques that had existed for

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centuries in Buddhist and Islamic Asia?10 Central to rethinking print is recognizing that the premodern period was a vibrant and innovative stage, not a lost era, in print history. By centering the artistry and technological achievements of minority West Asian and African printers, like the ghurabā’, it becomes clearer that their work was a crucial continuation of Central and East Asian printing and a plausible forerunner of the European tradition. Gutenberg was certainly aware of the world outside of Mainz, but it is not only the odd Europeanist or Arabist who scuttles any suggestion of Afro-Eurasian technological transfer. Historians of the material culture and social milieu of medieval Islamdom have also upheld this viewpoint, by offering limited and misleading assessments of Islamicate blockprinting. According to Jonathan Bloom: Although Muslims knew about printing as early as the tenth or eleventh century, and occasionally used it to make inexpensive amulets or to decorate cotton cloth, book printing came to the Islamic lands a full millennium after the introduction of paper in the late eighth and ninth centuries.11 (emphases mine)

This one sentence incorporates two analytical biases that have stymied Islamicate print studies for years. First, Bloom assesses objects as commodities, measuring their historical or technological worth purely by their market value. Printed books were expensive commodities, whereas smaller printed leaves were evidently not, but as the rich findings of the Cairo Geniza have shown, it pays to engage cultural production wherever we find it. Second, Bloom only considers printing to have arrived in Islamic lands in the eighteenth century, when Muslim printers started to operate presses, sidelining three centuries of handpress books made by Ottoman Jews and Christians. To more fully appreciate the social conditions and technical knowledge of the past, historians should not define printing technologies against the standard of Gutenberg’s printing press. As the historian Kathryn Schwartz has noted of a later period, “these frameworks are ahistorical because they predicate Ottoman printing on the European experience of print.”12 Even with such a call for alternative visions, a steady stream of anxious scholarship seeks to align Islamicate print history with European milestones and developments.13 Instead of arguing that medieval Islamdom was not a mirror of Latin Christendom, let us start from the premise that the history of Afro-Asian printing looked nothing like Europe’s history.

Pre-1500 Blockprinting in East and Central Asia While the diffusion of print is a historically complex process, the key preconditions for premodern textual printing were the availability of paper, a critical mass of urban residents, and institutions of learning, like libraries, temples, schools, or madrasas.14 Chinese paper was invented by 100 BCE, and printed texts emerged in China in the seventh century. In Europe the first paper mills were constructed



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in the late 1200s, and blockprinting took firm root there in the early fifteenth century.15 But this pattern of diffusion did prevail in Islamic West Asia, where paper arrived in the eighth century and blockprinted texts in the tenth. When woodblock printing of texts emerged in Buddhist China sometime before the mid-seventh century, it was used to reproduce short religious works on paper that people carried as charms, then later printed as longer books. Blockprinting on paper and textiles allowed for efficient sharing of Buddhist texts and images in Central and East Asia. Perhaps the earliest blockprint to be identified is a Sanskrit dhāraṇī that dates between 650 and 670 CE. It was excavated in 1974 in Turfan, an oasis settlement along the ancient Silk Roads in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang/East Turkestan. More famously, the Diamond Sutra, printed with woodblocks in China in 868 CE and taken by Aurel Stein from the library cave of Dunhuang, is the earliest dated printed book.16 Movable type developed in China between 1041 and 1049 CE, and the technologies of blockprinting and movable-type printing accompanied the spread of Buddhist populations from China into Japan, Korea, Central Asia, and India.17 In fact, it is possible to trace the movement across Central Asia, as archeological excavations there have only turned up blockprinted texts “in sites on the northern route of the Silk Road (the Turfan oasis, Khara-khoto and Dunhuang), and only in six languages (Chinese, Uighur, Mongolian, Sanskrit, Tibetan and Tangut).”18 All of these Buddhist texts are printed on paper, in black or red ink, ranging in date from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. The Turfan oasis and Khara-khoto are located in an area known as the Tarim Basin, and Dunhuang lies just to the east of this region. Situated along a major trade route, the region attracted a wide range of settlers. Iranian groups like the Saka, Sogdian, and Tocharian people had entered the Tarim Basin before the common era. Buddhists arrived in the first century, and Manichaeans in the fifth.19 The Uyghur Turkic tribal confederation established several small kingdoms in the Tarim Basin in 847 that thrived until the Mongol takeover in the late fourteenth century. The deep writerly and scribal traditions, cultural sophistication, and steppe pedigree of the Uyghurs made them strong candidates for setting up a Mongol state.20 The Sinologist Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin suggested that “[i]f there was any connection in the spread of printing between Asia and the West, the Uighurs who used both block printing and movable type had good opportunities to play an important role in this introduction.”21 Shortly after 847, the Uyghurs adopted the Syriac-Aramaic script, which the Sogdians had been using, for their own Uyghur language. Uyghurs serving in the Mongol Chinese administration were instrumental in the Mongol ruler Temüjin’s (also known as Genghis Khan’s) adoption of the Uyghur script in 1204 to represent the spoken Mongolian language. Prior to this development, Mongolian had remained unwritten. Buddhist printing flourished under the Uyghurs, who brought this expertise and their printing vocabulary to the Mongol courts. The earliest Mongolian word for “printing block,” for instance, is tamgha, an Uyghur loanword.22 In 1908 in the caves of Dunhuang, Paul Pelliot found 960 wooden printing blocks, each one bearing Uyghur “words, phonetic groupings, and punctuation marks . . . engraved on both sides.”23 Some blocks still

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bear traces of ink, confirming their use in printing.24 Housed now at the Musée Guimet in Paris, these Uyghur blocks have been dated to the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Printing Paper Money and Striking Coins Uyghur scribes in the Mongol administration, as well as Chinese precedent, may have inspired the Mongol Ilkhanids of Iran to print paper money, which the Chinese had been issuing since the ninth century. For a few months in 1294, in Tabriz, a city in northwest Iran that served as an Ilkhan capital, the Mongol Ilkhan of Persia Gaykhātū issued blockprinted paper currency (chao) that bore inscriptions in Chinese and Arabic. However, the experiment destabilized local markets, and Gaykhātū was assassinated in 1295 for his efforts. Soon afterward, metal currency returned to circulation in Iran.25 This brief episode, along with the blockprinted talismans of the ghurabā’ and blockprinted endpapers of manuscripts, is often cited in the literature as evidence that printing was an occasional enterprise in premodern West Asia that left no broad cultural imprint. Frankly, I had always considered these phases of printing as isolated from broader technological trends. I only awakened to the connection between the crafts of blockprinting paper money and minting metal coins upon reading an excerpt from the Mongol Ilkhanid chronicler Abū Sulaymān Dāwūd al-Banākatī (d. 730/1329–30), who was himself quoting Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 1318), the vizier to Gaykhātū’s uncle the Ilkhan Ghāzān. In this passage, Rashīd al-Dīn compares Chinese government scribes’ wooden printing blocks to coin dies: And when they have thus taken a copy of all the pages of the book, numbering all [the blocks] consecutively, they place these tablets in sealed bags, like the dies in a mint, and entrust them to reliable persons appointed for this purpose, keeping them securely in offices specially set apart to this end on which they set a particular and definite seal. Then when anyone wants a copy of this book he goes before this committee and pays the dues and charges fixed by the Government. Then they bring out these tablets, impose them on leaves of paper like the dies used in minting gold, and deliver the sheets to him.26

To Rashīd al-Dīn the wooden print blocks are “like the dies in a mint,” and the sight of printblocks resting atop paper calls to mind “the dies used in minting gold.” His comparisons offer a useful perspective on how someone in a multiethnic and multireligious Iranian cultural milieu might have perceived the craft of blockprinting. Both blockprinting and coin minting required the engraving of a block (of wood or metal) that could leave an inked impression on paper or an indented impression in metal once the engraved block had been struck. These associations persisted into the early eighteenth century. In 1727 the Ottoman sultan Ahmed III famously issued an imperial edict (firman) permitting two members of his court to open a press and print secular titles. Within this document



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he states that “printing is like coining money and impressing paper with a signet ring.”27 The first book published on this new press included a personal essay by İbrahim Müteferrika, entitled “The Usefulness of Printing,” in which he expanded the sultan’s comparison. “Printing,” he wrote, “is a type of inscribing analogous to the action of engraving and writing by the pressing of words and lines on a page, it is like coining money or inscribing walls, or like the impression from a signet ring when pressed down upon a document.”28 To trace any developments in printing techniques in premodern West Asia, exploring the analogous crafts of blockprinting, minting coins, etching graffiti, and document sealing will probably yield the most insights. In modern historiography, the association between printing paper currency and minting coins crops up in speculations about Gutenberg’s influences. Timothy Barrett wondered whether the coin punches used in medieval England to make different coin dies inspired Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Others have mused that Gutenberg’s training as a goldsmith and his family’s ties to the Mainz mint probably afforded him opportunities to witness the engraving of dies and the production of die-struck coins, a point to which I will return.29 In the Islamicate context no speculation is needed; die engravers in ninthcentury Umayyad Spain and tenth- and eleventh-century Iran and Afghanistan showed incredible ingenuity in their engraving and even incorporated movable elements of printing into their craftwork. The diameter of Islamicate coins rarely measured more than 3 centimeters, and a single coin had up to 150 words on it.30 As such, a die engraver’s chief skill was situating miniscule letters in a balanced layout on a small field. No premodern coin dies survive, because they were traditionally destroyed at year’s end to prevent forgeries. Even so, coins themselves reveal a lot about production. Thus, George C. Miles found that many Umayyad Spanish coin dies were constructed with punches, that is, engraving tools with letters or word shapes on the end that could be pressed into the softer metal surface of a die. Most punches were portions of letters—strokes, curves, rings—that an engraver could combine to make different Arabic letters. Other punches consisted of an entire letter, and still others carried groups of letters forming words or even groups of words. “There are in addition a great many instances of overlapping or overextending rectilinear marginal segments which appear to me to be unmistakable evidence of the use of long punches for conventional parts of the mint-date formula, especially for the words between bi’sm and the name of the mint.”31 A single punch with the words wa-mi’atayn was used to inscribe a coin die (Hispanic Society of America 14330, no. 122e), and a silver dirham dated 262/875–6 has part of a word punched into it (American Numismatic Society 1917.215.617). Medieval European die engravers used “elemental punches” for serifs, curves, and triangles to make images, as well as punches of single letters. The Islamicate cases are distinguished by their use of long punches and the concomitant development of blockprinting technology used to mass-reproduce texts. And while many scholars and laypeople assume that Gutenberg cast many identical letters in permanent matrices to create his first type—the DonatusKalender (DK) typeface—his working method was closer to that of medieval coin

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die makers. A comparison of the letter i in Gutenberg’s papal bull of 1456 revealed such a range of widths and shapes of the letter that Gutenberg either carved these letters from wood or metal or used many different matrices to cast type. The latter option requires less labor and would thus be more likely. He cast strokes, curves, and other shapes and combined them to make single letters. “Preliminary observations suggest that DK types may have been constructed in a similar way, though from more elemental components corresponding roughly to single scribal strokes rather than entire letters such as O and E. Hence the hyphen would have been made from two such elements, but even simple letters might have been formed from between four and seven elements.”32 Gutenberg used elemental punches and temporary matrices to produce his earliest works, and this method may have been common among European printers of incunabula. Given the uses of elemental punches in Gutenberg’s printshop and among coin engravers, Gutenberg’s early exposure to coin minting may have had a decisive influence on his trajectory as an inventor. Stefan Heidemann has identified Seljuk and Ghaznavid coins whose dies were not entirely engraved by hand, though portions of them had been made with punches. In order to fit more text on a coin face, engravers used punches to produce die with greater efficiency and precision. “Prefabricated punches came into use, mostly ringlets for circular letters, but sometimes whole words were just punched with a single tool onto the die.”33 The circular portion of letters on one Seljuk gold dinar minted in 493/1099 in Walwalij (present-day Qunduz in northern Afghanistan) shows the uniformity of having been cut with a punch. The exigencies of the craft prompted innovations, like word and letter punches, that mirrored movable-type technology. As we shall see in the following section, the miniature text on coins is comparable to the microscript on gharīb-printed amulets. Additionally, the coins were produced with dies of high-tin bronze or iron and the amulets with stamps of wood or tin. Die engravers and printblock engravers both executed metalworking skills. These and other convergences necessarily redirect our attention to metalworkers and engravers who were the prime innovators of print technologies in West Asia. One fascinating example is a tenth-century lead plate that later had an early thirteenth-century North Indian coin impressed into it, creating a reverse design.34 Luke Treadwell has estimated that the average mint required three to twelve weeks of labor in a given year from die engravers. This schedule meant that engravers could work the rest of the year in bazaars or in a court workshop. Others were itinerant workers. The die engraver al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad carved his 1.5-mm-high signature and Shiʿi catchphrases into dies used to mint Buyid coins between 336/947 and 365/975. This dated corpus allows historians to identify key features of al-Ḥasan’s script and to trace changes in his techniques over a decadeslong career, serving at least eleven Iranian mints.35 Later Buyid coins minted between 364/974–5 and 368/978–9 were apparently signed by some of his apprentices, giving a window onto the transmission of artisanal knowledge. Could techniques for making letter and word punches have passed within communities of metalworkers, informing the print-related practices of itinerant and settled artisans?



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West Asian Printing as a Minority Enterprise The earliest Arabic paper documents were petitions composed on Chinese paper between 721 and 790.36 The introduction of paper to the Middle East in the eighth century heralded a new age of literacy, revolutionizing reading and documentary practices.37 Paper became widely available in the central Islamic lands in the ninth and tenth centuries, and printing followed soon thereafter. Leaves and long scrolls blockprinted with Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic, and Syriac texts in green, black, and red inks and dating from 900 to 1444 CE have been recovered at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, as well as excavated in Cairene middens and in port cities along Egypt’s Red Sea coast.38 Less securely, a private collector claims to have acquired—whether archeologically or not is unclear—an Arabic blockprint in Spain.39 No wooden print blocks or metal print matrices from the period have yet to be recovered.40 A handful of blockprinted pilgrim certificates can be dated to the seventh/thirteenth century because of the rulers mentioned in them. Other than this, most of what we know about them derives from archeological context and paper analysis. George Scanlon excavated two blockprints at Fustat in 1980 and, based on the documents found among them, dated them to between 950 and 1050 CE.41 A rare Hebrew blockprint (Cambridge Or. 1080 J50) on oriental paper has been carbon-dated to the fourteenth century.42 Another important change is the printed Hebrew amulet. A late fourteenthcentury blockprinted amulet, bearing a line of black Hebrew text and two rows of black and red tulips, was found among the Cairo Geniza documents.43 This finding raises the tantalizing possibility that the Shiʿi ghurabā’ shared xylographic and other engraving technologies with Jews of medieval Cairo, or at least sold amulets to members of this community. Last, a print at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz (GM 03.1 Schr.) bears a watermark of a bell that places the likeliest production of the paper in Italy between 1436 and 1444.44 Because this is the youngest securely dated specimen and we have neither textual nor material evidence for the production of blockprints after the mid-fifteenth century, scholars can surmise that blockprinting in Islamdom spanned the tenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. This time frame corresponds to textual references to blockprinting, the earliest of which appear in tenth-century Iraqi Arabic poems and the latest that come in a fifteenth-century Egyptian magician’s manual. These printed artifacts are only mentioned in connection with the ghurabā’, and the vocabulary associated with the craft of blockprinting is entirely in their tribal dialect of Sīn. This Islamicate tradition of blockprinting forms an important antecedent to the emergence of blockprinting in northern Europe in the fifteenth century. The blockprints themselves come in a variety of formats. One finds long, thin scrolls, measuring up to 8 centimeters wide, though amulet scrolls could be very long. There were also small rectangular paper leaves. All of them are printed in miniscule letters that measure between 0.1 and 3 centimeters high. The earlier specimens from the ninth and tenth centuries bear Kufic script and later ones naskh.45 The delicate skill needed to produce miniscule, engraved lettering is mind-boggling and brings to mind the labor of coin die engravers. On the basis of

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script alone, the earliest specimens seem to date to the 900s, which also matches with the earliest mentions of these amulets in Arabic sources. In form and content these prints may have been based on Qur’anic rotuli, which were long, thin paper scrolls of varying lengths wound around a wooden rod. They consistently measured less than 15 centimeters wide and up to 2 meters in length. Today, forty Qur’anic rotuli are preserved at the Istanbul Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art and, on the basis of paleographic styles, Solange Ory has dated some of them to the early 900s.46 Although scholars have not yet understood how these rotuli were used, they serve as important context for understanding the phenomenon of printed amulets. It is likely that early printers appealed to consumers by emulating a known Qur’anic format. Of the ṭarsh-printed amulets, approximately seventy are known to have survived. Of these, the dimensions are strikingly small. The stamps clearly were used to mass-produce amulets, as evidenced by scholars’ identification of sets of amulets made with the same stamp.47 Karl Schaefer’s study and edition of Arabic blockprints in North American and European collections features fifty-six known specimens and four lost ones.48 Since the 2006 publication of his monograph, at least two more have been sold in London galleries,49 four identified in collections at the Gayer-Anderson Museum in Cairo, two fragments of a single print at Yale University,50 eight at the University of Utah,51 four in the Tokegawa collection in Spain,52 three at Columbia University,53 several among the deposits in the Qubbat al-Khazna in Damascus,54 and two at the Bavarian State Library.55 The Aga Khan Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have each acquired one blockprint in recent years.56 A paper conservator at the Lambeth Palace Library in London has found two blockprinted parchment fragments bearing red geometric designs and Arabic script. Judging by the ownership history of the manuscript (Arabic MS 573), they must date before 1679.57 Schaefer is currently preparing an update to the original volume that includes these and other specimens. Blockprinting briefly expanded beyond the sphere of amulets in the early thirteenth century, when it was used to stamp ornaments, images, and text on paper pilgrimage certificates. Şule Aksoy and Rachel Milstein analyzed several pilgrimage certificate scrolls retrieved from the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and currently housed at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul. The corpus dates between 607/1210 and 640/1243 and ranges widely in length and width. They probably hung on walls in homes or at mosques. In the early stages handwritten and stamped rolls coexisted, but “[b]y the second quarter of the thirteenth century, it seems, only printed documents were produced.”58 By 1250 the production of blockprinted pilgrimage scrolls appears to have ceased.59 In these scrolls printing blocks were used for large Arabic calligraphy, decorative borders and section dividers, illustrations and their captions, stand-alone motifs, and single and doublines that framed images. Watercolor washes in vibrant colors was also layered over some images. A single scroll could require many printing blocks for the various motifs. Because Muslims from Africa, Asia, and Europe made pilgrimage to Mecca, these blockprinted artifacts are more likely than the locally sold amulets to have survived outside of the central Islamic lands. Pilgrims



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from West or East Africa, India, China, or Indonesia could have brought home blockprinted pilgrimage certificates that have since entered local manuscript collections or have been deposited in local mosques or temples. So, specialists in other fields may have already encountered more such documents. The majority of the printed talismans consists of Islamic Arabic texts, like Qur’anic passages, the ninety-nine names of God, prayers, and supplications. Others bear Hebrew, Coptic, and Greek scripts. Al-Ḥillī’s claim that the Banū Sāsān engraved their stamps with multiple scripts for various confessional audiences is handily supported by physical evidence. A printed Hebrew amulet housed at the University of Strasbourg dates to the thirteenth century, and the University of Utah possesses an Arabic amulet with a border of words in Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic, and Arabic script.60 The Austrian National Library (P.Vindob. A.Ch. 12145) holds a fragment of this amulet produced by the same stamp, showing only the Coptic and Arabic scripts.61 In Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb, ʿAwwādh al-Sarmāṭ (lit., the writer of amulets and charms) delivers a monologue about his trade that accurately reflects the typical language of astrologers. He draws a magic circle (mandal, from Sanskrit mandala “circle”) onto his divining mirror and cures a boy of epilepsy, while uttering spells in Hebrew for a Jewish audience, Greek for a Christian audience, or by invoking fire and light for a Magian audience.62 Significantly, very much of this monologue mirrors text in two amulets at the University of Utah (Lilly Atiya no. 9 and Or. P1559), showing just how thoroughly Ibn Dāniyāl’s depiction of the ghurabāʾ amulet makers was rooted in their actual practices and, therefore, stands as an important document for social historians.63 The texts reproduced in amulets likely did not mirror the religious convictions of the artisans but those of their intended clientele. To sell as many amulets as possible, the astrologers and amulet makers printed motifs and texts that hewed closely to local preferences and tastes. As such, it is important to read these sources as reproducing popular sentiments, not challenging them.64 There are additional clues that Ibn Dāniyāl’s work was rooted in a familiar reality. The astrologer in the shadow play is named Hilāl al-Munajjim, which means “Crescent Moon the Astrologer,” and Ibn Dāniyāl’s native Mosul may have inspired this character. The British Museum houses a brass celestial globe engraved with constellations (British Museum OA 1871.3-1.1) that was signed in 674/1275–6 by the craftsman Muḥammad, son of Hilāl, al-Munajjim al-Mawṣilī.65 In this instance “munajjim” likely signified “astronomer,” which was the craftsman’s profession. The globe dates to Ibn Dāniyāl’s residence in Cairo, which began soon after the Mongols invaded Mosul in 660/1262.

Ghurabā’ Printing As the number of native Sīn-speakers diminishes with each passing generation, historians will lose access to an intricate vocabulary of printing technology. Sīn printing terminology gets coded as corrupted Arabic terms, suggesting to researchers that documentation of this phenomenon is unreliable. In the following

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explanations of Sīn printing vocabulary, details about the manufacture of talismans are revealed. ṭarsh (n.), ṭurūsh (pl.): printing block ṭ*rāsh (n.): engraver of printing blocks; printer or prints

Assuming an Arabic etymology for Sīn printing terms has made the history of Middle Eastern printing appear poorly documented. In Arabic, the word ṭarsh means “deafness”; however, in Aramaic, a language from which Sīn draws much of its vocabulary, the triliteral root ṭ-r-sh means “to beat, batter,” as well as “to deafen.”66 In the modern Sīm of the Nile Ḥalab smiths, mutrash means “Schneide-Amboß,” or a type of anvil for metalworking.67 Is it possible that the word derives from the same root as ṭarsh (print block) because smiths work metal by striking it with hammers? I propose that the Sīn term ṭarsh reflects the production method, namely the striking of the inked stamp onto a printing support to produce an impression. According to the poet Abū Dulaf, members of the Banū Sāsān used engraved stamps to print amulets with the intent of selling them in the open marketplace. Verse 74: Among us [the Banū Sāsān] is one who engraves the ṭarsh without boasting about or publicizing [the production process].68 [Gloss to verse 74:] The engraver of ṭarsh engraves (yaḥfiru) stamps (qawālib) for amulets (taʿāwīdh). People who are illiterate and cannot write buy them from him. The seller keeps back (ḥafiẓa) the design (naqsh) which is on it [the ṭarsh] so that he exhausts his supply of amulets on the common people (nās) and makes them believe that he wrote them. The stamp is called the ṭarsh.69

The secrecy on which the ṭarsh-engravers insisted parallels the closely guarded work materials of coin die engravers, whose dies were destroyed yearly to protect the integrity of currency. To underscore the exclusive claims that the Banū Sāsān had lain to printing in the premodern period, the archetypal Gharīb in Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play emphatically cries: “We [the ghurabā’] have boldly proceeded to praise the printer/prints!”70 The Banū Sāsān was motivated by a desire to deceive the public into believing that the amulets were custom-made handwritten wares and not mass-produced copies. To maintain secrecy (“without . . . publicizing”), the engraver may have worked alone or in small workshops and even separately from the amulet seller. This backdrop of secrecy distinguishes the emergence of print in the Arab world from its emergence elsewhere. In eighthcentury China Empress Wu encouraged the reproduction of Buddhist texts to promote the spread of this religion, and blockprinting was essential for this enterprise.71 As mentioned earlier, Buddhism was the biggest engine for the spread of early printing technologies. Woodblock printing coexisted for decades with letterpress printing and would certainly have appealed to those people who could not have afforded access to a printing press. In fact, after traveling to the Holy Land in 1483, the cleric Bernhard



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von Breydenbach published his memoirs, in which he reproduced the Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, and Greek alphabets with printblocks he had fashioned himself.72 The utility of woodblock printing spread quickly. Similarly, after knowledge of Gutenberg’s press became known, movabletype printing spread rapidly across Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. So, intentionally guarding printing processes from the wider public may illustrate why the technology was not widely adopted in Islamic lands. However, this cannot be the entire story. In the thirteenth century Jawbarī disclosed printing processes as one of the Banū Sāsān’s secrets. His book was an enduring bestseller into the early modern period, and was transcribed into Karshuni, but still the information did not become mainstream.73 According to him, among the revelation of secrets that they [the astrologers] utter concerning the amulet (sarmāṭ) is that they have matrices (maʿārīḍ) that are called ṭurūsh. These are stamps (qawālib), with which one can print amulets (fa-yaṭbaʿ sarāmīṭ) every day—God willing.74

Jawbarī confirms that the Banū Sāsān mounted a large-scale printing operation (“one can stamp/print amulets every day”), for which they engraved their own printblocks and prepared their own colorful inks. Evidence of their prolific production is apparent in fragments of paper where a stamp has been impressed twice on a sheet, but the twin impressions have not been separated into two amulets.75 Larger sheets of paper were printed multiple times, then cut into smaller amulets. Furthermore, at least eight sets of amulet multiples lie in private and public collections around the world:  ●●

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University of Utah A1563r76 and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München A.or. 88.202377; Aga Khan Museum (Toronto) AKM508, dated 1000 to 1100; Andalusian specimen TP1-2;78 and a specimen in the possession of a private collector in California.79 All three amulets were found inside small inscribed lead amulet cases, though only the writing on AKM508’s case is legible, bearing the text of Qur’ān 112:1-4; Columbia University Library Papyrus 705b80 and Indiana University, Bloomington, Lilly Library, Misc. mss. Atiyah Gift no. 9;81 Michaelides E29 and E30;82 Document 43 excavated in Fustat among documents dated between 344/955 and 487/1094;83 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna) P. Vindob. A. Ch. 12.14284 and private collection of Richard Ettinghausen (ca. ninth or tenth century);85 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna) P. Vindob. A. Ch. 12.14686 and Dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya (Cairo) inv. no. 313;87 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna) P.Vindob. A. Ch. 12.14588 and University of Utah A1561 (c. twelfth or thirteenth century);89 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna) P.Vindob. A. Ch. 12.141 and University of Utah A1562.90

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Figure 6.1  Blockprinted amulet. Counterclockwise from upper left, the border has Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and Coptic scripts, with Arabic text in center. Possibly Aramaic language in upper left. Egypt, thirteenth century. Paper and ink, 10.2 × 4.6-4.9 in. (26 × 11.8–12.5 cm). J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah A1561r.



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Printing Ink Immediately after the previous passage about printing amulets, Jawbarī continues: “then they dry saffron, verdigris, and cinnabar (bil-zaʿfarān wal-zinjār walzanjafr) for them.”91 These plants and minerals (“saffron, verdigris, and cinnabar”) confirm the range of colored inks that gharīb printers prepared for their amulets. Two recipes from a fourteenth-century manuscript use these simple ingredients to make red and green inks. 7. Ways to prepare cinnabar ink: Grind the Iraqi cinnabar into a fine powder, then wash it with fresh water a number of times until it becomes yellow; pour some Syrian safflower on it, and the way to extract the water from it is the same way we have mentioned about the ink for paper; with the difference that this one has no gum arabic or vitriol. 8. Way to prepare verdigris: Take some Iraqi verdigris, grind it into a fine powder, mix with it some ground saffron, and make them join.92

Material evidence also exists to corroborate Jawbarī’s claim that amulets were printed or painted with yellow, green, and red inks. While most extant blockprinted amulets are entirely printed with black ink, some were printed monochromatically in red (Cambridge Genizah Collection Or. 1080 J50). Of the polychromatic samples, one of the most elaborate is housed in the David Collection (Inv. No. 85/2003). It is an amulet scroll printed with black, green, and red inks. A yellow wash covers portions of an amulet depicting text and illustrations of locations relevant to the Prophet Muḥammad’s life.93 However, one most commonly finds amulets hand-painted in a reddish wash. Preparation of these inks required little more than the raw materials, a mortar, pestle, and water. Because mineral or vegetal inks do not cleave to metal stamps, we can deduce that Jawbarī was most familiar with stamps (ṭurūsh) carved from wood. In the thirteenth century, the ghurabā’ were printing with metal matrices, which would have required a different type of ink. No written evidence exists about other types of ink used by the ghurabā’, but one could add a metallic component like vitriol to the vegetal recipes to make it compatible with metal printblocks. Chemical analysis of the black and red inks used in the Gutenberg Bible has demonstrated that Gutenberg used oilbased inks containing high levels of copper and lead that could adhere evenly to metal movable type.94 In Ibn al-Jazarī’s short treatise on handwriting, he explained how to combine vegetal and metallic substances to make iron-gall ink and colored metallic inks.95 In future, analysis of ṭarsh-printed amulets may be able to show whether an amulet had been produced with wooden or metal printblocks.

Ṭarsh of Tin Ḥillī highlighted the facility of the ghurabā’ with different languages as well as a new method of production: “How many times has my hand written/printed

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(sarmaṭat yadī), by ṭarsh of tin, Syriac followed by the language of phylacteries (i.e., Hebrew)!”96 This single verse of al-Ḥillī’s opens up yet another view into amulet production. Here, he specified that the stamps were fashioned from tin. Since tinsmithing and tinsmiths barely register in premodern Islamicate sources, scholars have had little evidence of historical tin-engraving methods.97 Richard Bulliet rejected the possibility of amulet makers carving out letters in relief on tin, because it “would have been an impossibly laborious task.”98 Instead, he proposed that the Banū Sāsān either pounded a tin sheet into a clay mold to form a tin ṭarsh or they poured molten tin into a clay mold, then removed the hardened metal as the completed ṭarsh. Both methods are improbable. In the first, the clay risks fracturing under the pressure of the hammer. One could simply form a stamp by carving the clay. In the second instance, the need for a foundry would have made concealment of printing rather difficult. Recognizing that coin die engravers exercised the same skills that Bulliet found “impossibly laborious” makes Ḥillī’s claim much more plausible. A gharīb could have engraved scavenged pieces of metal, and tin (qaṣdīr) is certainly soft enough to be engraved. While no sources suggest that the ghurabā’ were printing with engraved stones or etched metal, the fifteenth-century Egyptian magician Zarkhūrī, who wrote about the secrets of the Banū Sāsān, instructed his readers on using acid to etch words into stone and metal: Description of a flowing ink with which you can write on stones. Take the stone and write whatever you want on it with wax and soak it in the watery solution. Take potassium nitrate, ammonia, and wine vinegar (shabb yamānī wa-nūshādir wa-khall khamr). If you want the writing to be engraved, coat the background surface with the wax, but if you want the background surface to be engraved, then coat the writing with the wax. Leave it in the abovementioned solution for three days. So understand this. Description of another ink that writes on tin bronze (al-qaṣdīr al-aṣfar). And this (tin bronze) becomes white like inlay (al-mukaffat), when it [the ink] is wiped away. The way of making it is to write on the tin with alkali and lime dissolved in water. So understand this.99

Etching is a printmaking method in which an acid solution is used to etch text and design into a metal plate. Historians of printing processes have placed the origins of etching in sixteenth-century Europe, where artists typically coated a copper or iron plate with wax, then etched designs into the wax. Leaving the wax-coated plate in an acid bath would etch the design into the metal. Etching words backward would have left grooves into which ink could have been filled. Paper could have been pressed onto the plates so that the paper met the ink in the grooves. This style of printing is more commonly known as intaglio printing, and its origins traditionally attributed to German printers of the 1430s.100 These etching technologies emerged simultaneously in fifteenth-century Europe and Egypt but put to different uses. European artisans recognized the utility for printing, but in Egypt no such application is in evidence.



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s(h)armāṭ (n.), s(h)arāmīṭ (pl.): inscribed amulet sarmaṭa (trans. and intrans. v.): to write, (and metonymically) to print qarmaṭa (v.): to write amulets in tiny and large scripts The philologist Theodor Nöldeke encountered the term sharmāṭ in some manuscripts of Jawbarī’s Kashf and proposed to Georg Jacob, who had read it in Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play, that sharmāṭ derived from the Greek term for chiromancy—“cheiromanteia.”101 The repeated identification of amulet production with fortune-telling astrologers lends considerable credence to Nöldeke’s proposal that the ghurabā’ had borrowed words from another occult tradition. Yet another amulet-writing term qarmaṭa seems to derive from the Greek grammata, or “letters of the alphabet.” Regardless of etymology, in twentieth-century Cairo, the term sarmāṭ still retained its earliest associations with writing amulets and magical practices. Paul Kahle recorded the many shades of meaning of sarmāṭ: ‫ )سرمط) سرمت‬sarmat (auch ṣarmat, sarmaṭ und ṣarmaṭ) “er schrieb,” asarmit “ich schreibe,” surmâta “Buch,” surmâti “Zauberer,” “Rammâl,” “Amulettenschreiber,” surmâti innâwi “ein fränkischer Schreiber, Priester.”102

But it was Richard Bulliet who made the crucial link between the carved blocks in Abū Dulaf ’s verse and printed amulets that he was able to study in Columbia University’s own papyrus collection. According to two tenth-century Iraqi poets, the Sīn term sarmāṭ generally signified “a piece of writing” but was also used more specifically for “amulet” or “blockprinted amulet.” Al-ʿUkbarī wrote that among the Banū Sāsān is “the one who peddles a sarmāṭ.” The final word is not Arabic but a Sīn term that the author glossed as “a text and an amulet.”103 Abū Dulaf elaborated on his discussion of amulet production with a verse about the act of writing them. [Verse 76] And the one who wrote with fine, closely-spaced writing (qarmaṭa) or who wrote (sarmaṭa) or penned lines (khaṭṭata) in a book. [Gloss to verse 76] The one who qarmaṭa is the person who writes amulets in scripts both minute and grand. Sarmaṭa means “he wrote” (kataba) and the sarmāṭ is the written document (kitāb).104

Both handwritten and blockprinted texts were forms of writing, and in this early phase of West Asian printing, Arabic and Sīn had not developed vocabularies to differentiate texts by their production modes. The Syrian poet Ibn al-Muḥaddith al-Kātib (d. 731/1331) describes how a scribe like himself could write or print amulets as part of a larger fortune-telling routine. The poem is in Arabic, interspersed with Sīn terms. Many a time did I write/print amulets (sarmaṭtu sarmāṭan)/ of the kind that sets free or binds [with spells] // I scammed (ʿazbartu) and cast spells / in the balance scale with a firebrand // And I conjured spirits in the magic circle (mandal) / by burning aloeswood and amber // And I have gathered the crowds of the jinn / to myself spontaneously.105

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In Arabic lands the blockprinted amulet represents a significant and enduring innovation in technology and craftsmanship that underwent changes over time. In the thirteenth century this technology was adapted for Meccan pilgrimage certificates that combined blockprinted passages with painted illustrations and handwritten text.106 Until direct evidence shows otherwise, at least some of the makers of these certificates can be assumed to have been ghurabā’. The ghurabā’ certainly traveled in pilgrimage caravans. The fourteenth-century Damascene notary Ibn Ṭawq made a record in his diary of their arrival from Aleppo: “Monday, 11 [Shawwāl 899]. After noon, the first pilgrims from Aleppo arrive, Turkmens and Ghajar.”107 Fellow pilgrims would have been obvious customers for the amulets and pilgrimage certificates, as well as people they encountered on stops between Aleppo and Mecca. sharīḥa (n.), sharā’iḥ (pl.): small amulet haykal (n.), hayākil (pl.): large amulet naffādh (n.): seller of hayākil Jawbarī also explained how the ghurabā’ classified their amulets: There are two types [of amulets]: small ones are called sharāʾiḥ, and big ones are called hayākil.108

Although these classifications are too vague to apply them with certainty, but we may assume that the sharīḥa was a rectangular or square leaf that could be folded, and a haykal was a long amulet scroll. In fact, a self-referential header of a fifteenth-century amulet scroll reads: “The noble haykal is beneficial.”109 A fourteenth-century verse confirms that the ghurabā’ participated enthusiastically in distributing hayākil: “And how often have I acted as a naffādh,” where naffādh is glossed as “seller of talismans and large amulets (bāyiʿ ʿuwadh wa-hayākil).”110 While the terms sharīḥa and sharā’iḥ did not gain currency outside of gharīb circles, the terms haykal and hayākil were absorbed into the postclassical Arabic lexicon. In Arabic today, haykal still signifies “temple,” but also “amulet.” One nineteenth-century lexicographer composed the following entry for haykal: “In the language of the Arabs, it means long horse, holy building, house of idols, and the Christian place of worship. As for the amulets that they call haykal and hayākil, they are not found among the speech of the Arabs, as al-Ṣāghānī [sic] [d. 650/1252] said in al-ʿUbāb.”111 Is there any deeper significance to the finding that the Sīn word for “large amulet” is the same as the Arabic for “temple”? Jeffrey Kotyk has argued that in Tang China, Buddhist astrology and astral magic constituted “a kind of ‘sub-religion’ that has often been embedded, whether formally recognized or not, within larger religions.”112 And just as religious communities would erect monuments and shrines, could the haykal have served as a specific form of monument for adherents to a gharīb astrological faith? jawānī (n. pl.): small amulets and talismans of lead and paper Al-Ḥillī, assuming the voice of a gharīb, asks in his fourteenth-century qaṣīda: “How many jawānī and how many amulets / do I sell to the would-be customer



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Figure 6.2  Blockprinted Arabic amulet and lead case, Egypt, eleventh century. Paper, ink, and lead. Amulet: 2.8 × 2.1 in. (7.2 × 5.5 cm). Case: 1.1 × 0.5 in. (2.7 × 1.3 cm). Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, AKM508.

in exchange for the seven different kinds of metal (i.e., for all kinds of precious metals and coins)!”113 The author glosses jawānī as “small amulets and talismans of lead and paper” (hayākil ṣighār wa-ʿuwadh raṣāṣ wa-wariq), probably referring to such items as this 2.7 × 1.3 cm eleventh-century lead amulet case that held a 7.2 × 5.5 cm paper amulet. Such encased amulets were meant to be worn close to the body, perhaps on a chain or sewn into a bag or article of clothing, protecting the wearer against disease or other misfortune.114 Both the case and the amulet are inscribed: Qur’ān 112:1-4 on the case and 3:18 and 1:137, plus supplications to God, on the amulet.

Knowledge Classification This reassessment of the “classical” moment of the onset of European modernity situates Gutenberg in a nascent printing culture that centered on popular Christian devotion. He did not exist outside or above it, and the combination of his expertise in metalwork, his social proximity to minters, and a rising appetite for private devotional tools may have been the crucial factors leading to his invention of the printing press. To build on the work of troubling canonizations, decolonizing the archive, as a first step, will change the ways in which we categorize knowledge about the global enterprise of early printing. An incunabulum is usually defined as an early printed book, particularly one printed before 1501, but in practice, blockbooks, broadsheets, pamphlets, and even very small blockprinted leaves are also cataloged with them.115 This Latin term means “in the cradle” and encapsulates the framing of the European phase of

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printing as the ultimate beginning of this technology. They mark the birth of print history, of early modernity, and of Western civilization. Between the 1440s and 1501, books were printed in Latin, European vernaculars, and Hebrew. Earlier printed books in Chinese or Mongolian or Uyghur do not appear in incunabula collections in North American and European libraries. What if librarians cataloged materials printed before 1500 in any language as rare prints, instead of classifying non-European pre-1500 prints as manuscripts or papyri? The phrase “early print” would no longer make much sense, as centuries of Afro-Asian prints could not reasonably be considered “early.” Such a move would more clearly represent the history of global print and retrain medievalists to think in terms of interconnected histories. It would also prevent such obvious miscategorization as one finds with the Sanskrit and Uyghur blockprints that are listed in the online International Dunhuang Project database as “manuscript; ink on paper” instead of, for instance, “xylograph printed from carved blocks; ink on paper.”116 Similarly, the Arabic blockprints, including one print bearing Arabic and Coptic script, at the Austrian National Library form part of the vast papyrus collection. Here, a papyrus is interpreted broadly as a manuscript on paper or papyrus, but it most certainly does not include printed matter. In Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, two large fragments of an Arabic blockprint (Yale P.CtYBR inv. 2016) are cataloged as manuscripts, and the metadata includes the oxymoronic detail that “[t]his manuscript is block-printed.” Yale only holds the one blockprint, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art owns at least twelve, which are not consistently identified as blockprints in the online catalog (Table 6.1). Seven of these are described as printed material, whereas five are not. The oldest blockprint in the collection (MMA 1978.546.38) dates to the tenth century, placing it among the earliest Arabic blockprints in the world, but it is nowhere described in the public-facing catalog as a printed work.   Accordingly, no fanfare surrounds this piece, nor others that share its distinctive features of decorative headers (and sometimes also footers) bracketing tens of Table 6.1  Cataloging Arabic Blockprints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Shelfmark

Place and Date of Production Is it Cataloged as a Print?

MMA 1971.237.1 MMA 1975.192.20 MMA 1975.192.21 MMA 1978.546.32 MMA 1978.546.33 MMA 1978.546.34 MMA 1978.546.35 MMA 1978.546.36 MMA 1978.546.37

Egypt, eleventh to twelfth century Egypt, eleventh to twelfth century Egypt, eleventh to twelfth century Egypt, eleventh century Egypt, eleventh century Egypt, eleventh century Egypt, eleventh century Egypt, eleventh century Egypt, eleventh century

MMA 1978.546.38 MMA 1978.546.39 MMA 2016.624

No No Yes, “printed” and “blockprinted” Yes, “blockprinted” Yes, “printed” No Yes, “blockprinted” Yes, “blockprinted” Yes; object title is “blockprinted talismanic circular leaf ” Egypt, tenth century No Egypt, eleventh to twelfth century No Egypt, thirteenth or fourteenth Yes, object title is “Ibex or Gazelle, Block century Print”



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Figure 6.3  Blockprinted Arabic amulet, Egypt, tenth century. Paper and ink, 10.9 × 1.8 in. (27.6 × 4.6 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1978.546.38.

lines of miniscule Kufic text. The duplicate blockprints in Munich (BSB Res A. or.88.2021) and Utah (Lilly A1563r), along with others in Princeton (Scheide Library 26.6) and Utah (Lilly A19r), probably represent the earliest layer of Arabic printing, appearing two centuries after printing emerged in China. A model of inclusive cataloging is the Bavarian State Library in Munich, which recently placed its two specimens of Arabic blockprints into its early print collection that comprises printed matter before 1500 from anywhere in the world. From the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, all of West Asian and northern African printing was firmly in the hands of linguistic and religious minorities— Buddhist Mongols; Shiʿi ghurabā’ who spoke Sīn; Jews printing in Hebrew, Greek, and Turkish; and Christians printing Syriac, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and Arabic. The majority Sunni Muslims resisted this technology. In the earliest phase of textual printing, between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries, Shiʿi gharīb astrologers engraved wooden and metal matrices to print talismans (in

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Sīn sarāmīṭ, sing. sirmāṭ) for Christians, Jews, and Muslims on paper and parchment. Then in the fifteenth-century production of these talismans suddenly ceased. The latest print that we can date (Gutenberg Museum GM 03.1 Schr.) bears an Italian watermark, placing the production of the paper between 1436 and 1444.117 The manufacture of the last West Asian blockprints probably overlapped with Johann Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1440s. Shortly thereafter, minority-language presses—the first printing presses in all of West Asia—sprang up in the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century. Just oneand-a-half years after their expulsion from Iberia, the Jewish brothers David and Samuel Ibn Naḥmias established the first Ottoman printing house, publishing the religious collection Arba’ah Turim in Istanbul in December 1493.118 After the expulsion in 1497 of Jews from Lisbon, the Jewish printer Judah Gedaliah left Lisbon to set up a Greek-language press in Ottoman Salonica; he started publishing books in 1516. To our knowledge, it was more than fifty years before another printing press was founded in Ottoman lands. In the interim, European presses developed Asian-language movable type, and the bulk of Asian-language book printing occurred in Europe.119 But in 1567, the Abgar Dpir Tokhatetsi press in Istanbul printed an Armenian grammar book, and in 1610 a Lebanese monastery printed a bilingual Syriac and Karshuni Arabic Psalter. (In the 1580s or 1590s, Domenico Hierosolimitano, a Jewish court physician to Sultan Murad III, discreetly noted that the Ottoman palace library held “books in all kinds of languages, of great beauty, all written by the pen.”120 According to this testimony, the Topkapı Palace library held no printed material at this point.) Finally, in Istanbul in 1727, in what marks for most historians the beginning of Middle Eastern printing, two Muslims were granted sultanic approval for the undertaking. Together, Mehmet Sait Efendi (d. 1761), the son of a Georgian who had served as the first Ottoman ambassador to France, and İbrahim Müteferrika (1674–1745), a Hungarian Christian convert to Sunni Islam who served in the Ottoman diplomatic service, opened a printing press and in 1729 published a Turkish translation of an Arabic dictionary. Both men had unusually easy access to the highest levels of imperial decision-making and contact with non-Ottoman Turkish Muslim culture. From 1720 to 1721, Mehmet had resided in France with his father Yirmisekiz, who recorded in his diplomatic dispatches that he had been given a tour of the royal French printing press. Duc Saint-Simon, a local French notable, claimed that Yirmisekiz “was a particular friend of the Grand Vezir, and, on his return, he was going to propose to him the establishment of an Ottoman printing press and a library in spite of the aversion of the Turks.”121 Of course, Yirmisekiz did not accomplish this himself, but his son, along with Müteferrika, did. Less is known of Müteferrika’s biography and the timing of his conversion, but his hybrid cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds were likely crucial to his interest in printing. If print had historically been associated with the lower prestige of minority status, then that may have been enough to deter most Muslims from embracing the practice. By contrast, Mehmet Sait Efendi and İbrahim Müteferrika’s own biographies may have made them more accepting of foreign and minority practices.



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If the social status of minorities influenced their receptivity to print, then which social values or priorities led to the maintenance of printing practices among these populations? The question of minority motivations for countercultural activity has shaped historiographical debates about the supposed absence of archives in preindustrial Islamic society. Unfortunately, and in sharp contrast to the extensive documentary archives that proliferated in parish churches and official chanceries in Latin Christendom, very little of any premodern Islamic state’s archive has survived.122 Tamer El-Leithy has argued that the few surviving caches of official state documents were intentionally preserved by minority communities, such as the Greek Orthodox monks at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, the Jewish congregation of Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, and Georgian monks in Jerusalem. What we scholars recognize as archival practices may have been more strongly embraced by Jews and Christians of this period, because as second-class dhimmī subjects, they could often assume less security around their rights to property and religious expression, making the preservation of rights-affirming documents a matter of communal preservation. Dhimmīs’ “social logic of archival strategies,” El-Leithy stresses, highlights their political and material precarity.123 Could similar fears have led to the emergence and maintenance of printing practices among minority populations? The ghurabā’ prized their financial and professional independence, whether as a defiant posture in the face of exclusion or as a matter of principle is difficult to ascertain. As discussed in the Introduction, a major appeal of begging was not needing to borrow and repay money and not having one’s earnings taxed. Blockprinting also afforded personal autonomy. As a portable art, requiring no fixed domicile or workshop and for which there was a thriving market, printers were free to choose sedentary or mobile lives. Maya Shatzmiller has extensively documented the reputable trades and professions in medieval West Asia and northern Africa but omitted marginal trades, such as those plied by the ghurabā’.124 The ghurabā’ filled economic niches, unrepresented in most tax records, by providing specialized “consumer goods, medical services and entertainment,” as animal trainers, public performers (astrologers, magicians, acrobats, sword swallowers), medical workers (ophthalmologists, drug dealers, pharmacists, female genital cutters), beggars, night watchmen, and makers and sellers of printed amulets. What Patricia Crone has described as a general feature of preindustrial societies certainly applies to West Asia and northern Africa. “Because the sums in any one place were so small, such people were often itinerant, moving from place to place in search of their meagre income and sometimes trying to improve on it by combining several specialties, as did for example the gypsies (who were tinkers, fortune tellers and purveyors of trinkets and other knick-knacks wherever they went.)”125 But this explanation does not account for the printing presses of Ottoman Jews and Christians, whose professional tools were less portable. İbrahim Müteferrika suggests that, like the archival practices, these minorities embraced printing as a means of protection, and a defense against change and alteration on account of falsehoods or untruths according to religion and morals, and a way of creating

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safety from sudden catastrophes and the changes arising in the poor memories of men caused by the passing of days and years, thus enabling the laws and ordinances of the state and society to be kept correctly, as if they were a compact inscribed in stone, copper, or iron.126

Even though Ottoman Jews and Christians lived under far more stable regimes than their European counterparts, Jewish refugees recently relocated in Ottoman lands remembered that in 1490 the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the burning of Hebrew Bibles and other books owned by Jews. The loss of this religious and literary heritage may have spurred moves to preserve and disseminate works as widely and quickly as possible, a project perfectly suited to the printing press.

CChapter 7 GHURABĀ’ ASTROLOGERS AND PRINT IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CENTRAL EUROPE

Revising the social history of print to center minority artisans and their work raises new technical questions. Given the timing of ghurabā’ blockprinting, from 900 to 1430, could they also have used movable type at some point to produce amulets? Buddhist Chinese, Koreans, Uyghur, and Mongolian printers in Central and East Asia had been using movable type before the thirteenth century. Die engravers in ninth-century Umayyad Andalusia and tenth- and eleventh-century Iran and Afghanistan employed the movable-type technology of letter and shape punches centuries before Gutenberg manufactured sets of Latin type in the 1450s. Gregorio de Gregori is rightfully credited with producing the first Arabic book—a Book of Hours—using movable type on his printing press in Fano, Italy, in 1514, but revising the history of print also inspires questions of whether and how print production methods changed over time. Although my preliminary research into this topic has been inconclusive, reading these amulets so closely has revealed details about the printers and their working process.1 Inky fingers left red smudges on the page (University of Utah A1562r); words mistakenly dropped from Qur’anic verses were inserted interlineally after the fact (Cambridge University, Michaelides (charta) E32);2 printers made uneven and slurred impressions (Cambridge University, Michaelides (charta) E33); and with some duplicates it is evident that repeated use has worn down the wood, blurring the letters of the later print.3Another amulet bears a fragment of a handwritten Arabic line that reads: “the one who carries this writing of mine on [him].”4 If written by the amulet seller, it may record the beginning of an interaction with a customer. How far did the market for printed amulets extend? What possible links exist between gharīb printing, which ended around 1430, and the emergence of print in Central Europe around the same time? Between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, Sīn-speaking ghurabā’ astrologers printed and sold religious amulets in various languages and scripts in Egypt and West Asia, possibly transferring this technology into Central Europe. As evidenced by the Andalusian Arabic amulets discussed in the previous chapter, the ghurabā’ had been blockprinting amulets in Iberia since at least the tenth century, making these the earliest blockprints on the European continent. As monumental a development as this was, it did not directly influence the explosion

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of prints made on paper in Central Europe in the 1410s, nor on Gutenberg in the 1440s and 1450s. When print historians have considered routes of transfer, the Mongols emerge as the likeliest candidate. By the time they had invaded Europe in the thirteenth century, woodblock printing and movable-type technology were known in Mongol Asia. Since paper had not yet reached Europe, knowledge of Mongol printing technology may not have led to its adoption. But the beginning of printmaking, or the blockprinting of images on paper, in Central Europe coincided with the first documented migrations of “Egyptians” and “Secani” from Hungary, proximately, and from Ottoman vassal states, in the recent past. Firm structural divisions in the field of European print history have isolated the printing of texts from the printing of images, making it difficult to reconcile European and AfroAsian print traditions into a coherent narrative of transmission. Kai-Wing Chow, a historian of Chinese printing and book culture, has pinpointed two guiding assumptions in scholarship on European xylography that serve to isolate the field from print studies broadly. First, woodblock printing of images is studied as a graphic art, not a technological stage, which separates it from its antecedents in Asia and Egypt, and, second, woodblock printing of texts is considered inferior to letter-press printing and is not the ancestor of the printing press. This “bifurcated approach to European print culture” gets reinforced by disciplinary vocabularies that construct the printing press as a technology apart.5 In European historiography images made from xylography are “woodcuts” and the craft is known as “printmaking,” whereas xylographic texts are “woodblock prints,” and this craft is called “printing.” For instance, if the excellent 2005 exhibit and catalog Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public had instead been titled Origins of European Printing: Fifteenth-Century Woodblock Prints and Their Public, its reception would have been wider and the implications of the art more easily apparent. Historians of European print have carefully ignored European xylography, specifically “woodcuts,” as the ancestor of the printing press or even as a valid printing method. In what follows I use “woodblock print,” “xylograph,” “woodcut,” and “print” interchangeably to refer to a product made from impressing an inked block of wood onto paper. Chow himself urged his readers to reexamine Reformation-era broadsheets and latefifteenth-century blockbooks, within the cultural context of nascent European letterpress printing and the long history of Afro-Asian printing. Peter Schmidt also calls on print historians to look broadly at early fifteenth-century craftsmanship for other possible connections. “Well-established technical methods long used by woodcarvers, goldsmiths, and die-cutters formed the basis of wood- and metalcutting as well as engraving. New was only their application to printing on paper images intended for wide circulation.”6 Once historians abandon these obscurant distinctions, the relationship between early fifteenth-century printed images and the mid-fifteenth-century invention of letterpress printing emerges in unexpected ways. Ulman Stromer was operating a fully operational paper mill in Nuremberg by 1390. Shortly thereafter, around 1410, woodblock printing was first used in southern Germany, to print large images of saints and scenes from the life of Christ

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on paper. In the 1420s some images were printed with short accompanying texts. The earliest European woodcuts only survived because their cloistered owners had pasted them into the inner covers of manuscript bindings and printed books. “That the majority of these volumes belonged to monastic libraries in southern Germany (Swabia and Bavaria), Austria, and the Czech Republic (Bohemia and Moravia) furnishes prima facie evidence that this region of German-speaking lands witnessed the birth of the European woodcut on paper.”7 In other words printing on paper developed in the 1410s in Latin Christendom, and this body of evidence suggests that Germanic cloistered religious communities were the central audience, if not the producers, of these xylographs.8 Because woodcut production began around 1410 among a specific population and in such a localized area, historians have enough foundational knowledge to posit direct influences on the emergence of this particular craft. Of the three earliest known woodcuts, two were found together pasted in a 1410 manuscript that had been housed in the Augustinian monastery of Sankt Zeno in Bad Reichenhall, Germany, from the 1410s until 1803, when it was transferred to the Bavarian State Library in Munich. In 1829 or 1879 these prints of Saint Dorothy holding the hand of the Christ child and Saint Sebastian’s martyred body were removed from the front and back doublures of a 1410 Latin manuscript and transferred in 1884 to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich.9 Analysis of the Sebastian print shows that its paper was produced after 1406. As such, scholars generally agree that both the Dorothy and Sebastian woodcuts were manufactured in southern Germany between 1410 and 1420.10 A third woodcut depicting the Adoration of the Magi (30.5 × 20.5 cm) was pasted onto the back doublure of Staatsbibliothek Berlin MS Theol. lat. fol. 614. This manuscript was written in Silesia, probably Breslau, and a marginal note and a donation statement suggest that the attached woodcut was produced in a workshop somewhere between Breslau and Leipzig, between 1410 and 1420.11 Similarities in subject matter and in production methods connect the earliest European woodcuts to western Asian and northern African sirāmīṭ and pilgrimage certificates. Both types of prints lacked carvers’ signatures, atelier marks, or dates; were impressed on a single side of a page; frequently used brown, red, yellow, and green watercolors to paint the ornamental elements and images; and exclusively treated religious themes. In seeking to understand whether Islamicate printing technology was known in Christian Europe, these fifteenth-century xylographs are especially promising, because the emergence of the earliest Central European prints also coincided with the arrival of “Egyptians” to this region. Historians have widely assumed that the newly arrived “Egyptians” were all Roma. As argued in the Introduction, this assumption of a single identity erases the possibility that wandering peoples native to Europe, like the Yenish, Travellers, Sinti, and others, were circulating alongside Romani clans. In fact, assuming a series of heterogeneous migrations, as well as cultural hybridity in fifteenthcentury German and Latin narratives that refer to “Egyptians” and “Cyganorum,” is in keeping with much of the historical record. The Banū Sāsān had, as early as the tenth century, presented themselves as a confederation of smaller tribes. Even

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Figure 7.1  Saint Dorothy, Bavaria, 1410-20. Blockprinted ink on paper, 11.3 × 8.2 in. (28.8 × 20.9 cm). Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Inv. 171506, Schreiber 1395.

as late as 1564, the Ottoman sultan issued a decree to all governors and judges in his territories, in which he warned that “currently, in your dominions some groups of wanderers and Gypsies (kurbet ve çingan taifesi) have emerged and have been engaging in various unlawful activities and behaving immorally.”12 To preserve the sense of strangeness that observers conveyed, I will not assume that each traveling company was Romani but will use the names found in the sources. In 1387 Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia), the chronicler Giovanni Conversini described a tribe of brown-skinned, hairy, scantily clad, unclean nomads who called themselves Jenepici and lived off fortune-telling, begging, stealing, and selling household tools fashioned from horse hair. He also reported that they

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Figure 7.2  Saint Sebastian, Bavaria, 1410-20. Blockprinted ink on paper, 11.3 × 8.1 in. (28.7 × 20.6 cm). Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Inv. 171505, Schreiber 1677.

called these tools “cicotrigonizatoria, a word likely Gypsy (zingaresca), certainly devilish, that neither I nor anyone else has managed to interpret.”13 They spent no more than a week in any place and set up camp outside the walls of Ragusa during the hottest months. Migrations of similar groups continued westward in successive years. Between 1407 and 1416, references to “Tartars” and “heathens,” usually interpreted as references to Romani people, appeared in archives in the northern German towns of Hildesheim and Meissen, though it may have designated any darker-skinned, dark-haired person.14 However, a “Tartar” generally referred to Cumans, Tatars, and Crimean Tatars, peoples of Turkic nations in the western part

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of the Eurasian steppes, who had settled in parts of Hungary and Romania by the twelfth century.15 The observers in Hildesheim and Meissen may have registered traveling Romani groups as nomadic Tatars.16 Without more context we cannot resolve this ambiguity. We find the clearest record of Roma entry into Central Europe in the imperial registers of Sigismund, the king of Hungary and emperor of Germany. On March 13, 1417, only two petitioners, both male Christian converts from Islam who hailed from the Islamic East, approached the king.17 On that day he was attending the Council of Constance, a convocation of archbishops, bishops, and deacons, to resolve the papal schism. The two laymen petitioners either approached King Sigismund at the Cathedral of Constance, where the council regularly convened, or at the nearby Augustine monastery close to the lake shore, where the king was staying as a guest.18 The first was Duke Michael of Egypt, who managed to secure a letter of safe passage, permitting him and his band unrestricted travel in the king’s realms. The full note reads: “[King Sigismund] giebt dem H[e]rz[og] Michael v[on] Agythum einen Geleits- u[nd] Schutzbrief.”19 The German scribe misspelled “Agypten” as “Agythum,” which could have been a simple error but may also have been a sign that he did not comprehend Duke Michael’s speech. It was only in the sixteenth century that Europeans write about “Egyptians” speaking an unrecognizable language among themselves, but this short notation could indicate earlier linguistic barriers.20 The second petitioner of the day was Count Bartholomew of Bethsaida, a convert recently arrived in Europe, for whom the king wrote a letter “recommending him in general” to the entire Christian community.21 In fact, Count Bartholomew was practiced at requesting such documents from powerful authorities, having recently approached two other Christians about his plight. King Wenseslaus of Bohemia and Archbishop Conrad of Prague both wrote letters for him on October 25, 1416. King Wenseslaus announced that because he had “quitted the Pagan Errors to embrace the Christian Faith . . ., we recommend him in a very particular manner to your Protection . . . because he is come naked out of his own Country, and has nothing to depend on but the Favour and Assistance of Christians.”22 Archbishop Conrad added that although Bartholomew had been a manual laborer in Bethsaida, he no longer had the ability to work, making Christian charity necessary for his survival. The archbishop promised an Indulgence of forty days to any reader of his letter who helped Count Bartholomew.23 What accounts for this exceptional charity that two kings and an archbishop bestowed on Bartholomew? As a high-ranking former Muslim, Count Bartholomew embodied Christendom’s highest hopes, that though Crusader action had failed to defeat the Muslim empires, then the appeal of Christianity could compel conversions of powerful Muslims, who would in turn convert their households and members of their communities. Certainly, Count Bartholomew’s audience also recognized the personal risks that he must have taken to assume a Christian identity. According to Islamic law, Muslim apostates were subject to death, so Count Bartholomew’s daring conversion was treated with appropriate reverence. To support him in his new land, the kings and archbishops commanded the entire Christian community to offer money, food, clothing, and shelter.

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Though King Sigismund’s letter to Duke Michael has not been preserved, it probably struck a similar note of welcome. More than a century after its composition, the chronicler Sebastian Münster claimed that a group in Eberbach whom “the common people called Tartars or gentiles, and Italians [called] Cinganos” (Tartaros aut Gentiles vulgus vocat, in Italia, cinganos appellant) had Duke Michael’s letter or a copy of it in their possession. Münster summarized the contents for his readers: [It] told how their ancestors in Lesser Egypt [in minori Aegypto] had formerly abandoned for some years the Christian religion and turned to the error of the pagans and that, after their repentance, a penance had been imposed upon them that, for as many years, some members of their families should wander about the world and expiate in exile the guilt of their sin.24

Like Count Bartholomew, Duke Michael presented himself as a Christian convert from Islam, since at this time “pagan” generally signified Muslim in Latin Christendom. Identifying as a foreign penitent certainly had an air of plausibility, for the city of Constance lies along the Way of Saint James, a network of pilgrimage routes that spans Western Europe. Of all of the parties that one would encounter on the road—“minstrels, messengers, masons, pedlars, tinkers, beggars, friars and runaway serfs”—the wandering penitent was among the least threatening and most revered of these possibilities. It was “one of the acceptable reasons for people to be mobile.”25 In southern Germany, the Way of Saint James connects Constance to Bad Reichenhall, near Salzburg, 300 kilometers away, where the earliest regional woodcuts—those of Saints Dorothy and Sebastian—were found. In fact, Erhard Etzlaub’s circa 1492 map of pilgrimage routes between Germany and Rome shows a clear route from Constance to Salzburg.26 This same pilgrimage route would easily have taken the penitents directly on to the city of Augsburg, where later that same year, a local anonymous chronicler recorded the arrival of “Egyptian folk” (Egiptenleut) on November 11, Saint Martin’s Day, “bearing letters, by which they might steal from anyone who gave them no alms.”27 We cannot know whether this was Duke Michael’s group, a splinter group, or an entirely new company. Sometime between September and December 1417, a similar group led by a duke and a count had reached the Baltic Sea coast. In his Latin Chronica novella (1435) Hermann Cronerus of Lübeck documented his impressions of the new arrivals. A certain strange, wandering horde of people, not seen hitherto, came out of eastern lands to Alemannia [Swabia], travelling through that entire region into the provinces by the sea. They were also in the coastal towns; starting from Lüneberg and penetrating Prussia they passed through Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund and Greifswald. They travelled in bands and camped at night in the fields outside the towns, for they were excessively given to thievery and feared that in the towns they would be taken prisoner. They numbered about 300 men and women, not including the children and infants, and were very ugly in appearance, black like Tartars; they called themselves Secanos. They

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also had chieftains among them, that is a Duke [ducem] and a Count [comitem], who administered justice over them and whose orders they obeyed. They were however great thieves, especially their women, and several of them in various places were seized and put to death. They also carried letters of recommendation from princes and especially from Sigismund, King of the Romans, according to which they were to be admitted and kindly treated by states, princes, fortified places, towns, bishops and prelates to whom they turned. Certain among them were on horseback, while others went on foot. The reason for their wandering and travelling in foreign lands was said to have been their abandoning of the faith and their apostasy after conversion to paganism. They were committed to continue these pilgrimages (peregrinacionem) in foreign lands for seven years as a penance laid upon them by their bishops (episcopis).28

Before setting out on pilgrimage, medieval Christians typically received blessings from their local bishops, and their pilgrimage, usually to a destination like Rome, Santiago de Compostela, or Jerusalem, could serve as a form of penance. In the last sentences of his account of the Secanos, Hermann Cronerus describes the travel of the Secanos as a pilgrimage ordered by bishops in penance. It is possible that Cronerus was describing the activities of the newcomers in ways that would be legible to his readers. It should not be overlooked that the Latin word for “pilgrim” is “peregrinus,” which also means “stranger” or “foreigner.” Christian pilgrimage was not only styled as wandering in foreign lands but also as position of estrangement from worldly concerns and an approach to spiritual enlightenment. Whether or not the Lesser Egyptians and Secanos understood this idea of pilgrimage and consciously adopted this stance as penitent pilgrims, making their cultural estrangement legible to local Christians is “an extraordinary process . . . of successful cultural translation by the Romani.”29 Circulating as penitent pilgrims gave the Secanos cover as they made their way north. Duke Michael of Egypt’s group could have reached the Baltic Sea coast by September. The pilgrimage trail has a branch running north from Augusburg through Nuremberg and Erfurt to Lüneberg. That “they called themselves Secanos” ties their background to the Ottoman Empire, where Kıptî/Kıbti/Kıbtiyan (Egyptian) and Çingane/Çingene/Cingene (Gypsy) were common Ottoman Turkish terms for the Roma and other groups.30 Whereas it is assumed that these new groups presented false identities as Egyptians, it is more likely that they were translating Ottoman terms into German or Latin. From 1417 onward, mentions of these “Egyptians” and “Secanos” proliferated in European town archives, diaries, and chronicles. In 1417 and 1418 alone, Egyptians appear in Hungary, Bohemia, Mecklenburg, Hannover, Holstein, Switzerland, Provence, Colmar and Strasbourg, and Saxony.31 The Saxon connection holds particular interest because Johann Gutenberg is thought to have been enrolled at the University of Erfurt, in Saxony along the Way of Saint James, at this time. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the winter 1419–20 term.32 A large group numbering around 1,000 had at least four leaders—Duke Michael, Duke Phillip, Duke (or Count) Andrew, and Count (or Earl) Thomas—who headed smaller splinter units in the coming

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years. All of these groups survived by begging, telling fortunes, and subsisting on alms. Within this large company of travelers, Donald Kenrick has identified three smaller groups circulating in Europe at the same time: one traveling through Czech lands, another of acrobats and fortune-tellers, and a third group recorded in Zurich and Arras that had unknown sources of money that they used to buy their own food.33 The medieval history of Roma and other wandering groups is vast and deserves deep treatment by trained historians of the European Middle Ages. Most of what we know of “Egyptians” and “Secanos” from this period comes from chronicles and town records. Monastic archives, reconstructed monastic libraries, parish registers, manuscript notes, diaries, notarial records, account books, pilgrimage narratives, and other late medieval sources may yield more data with which to enrich our current base of knowledge. But in what follows, I restrict my investigation to movements of “Egyptians” in the 1410s in southern Germany, which I believe has the greatest relevance to the history of printing. The Egyptians’ self-presentation as wandering penitents guaranteed their initial acceptance in the Holy Roman Empire. Their “creation of a self-legitimating history . . . allowed the Latin West to put its best self forward and demonstrate its capacity for Christian charity.”34 Once sovereigns and high-ranking clergy had legitimated their spiritual identity, no cleric could deny shelter or sustenance to their coreligionists who had already suffered so much in their homelands. Unlike Duke Michael’s royal visit with King Sigismund or the Egyptians’ widely recorded begging and fortune-telling, any visits they made to monasteries would not have drawn a chronicler’s attention. Just as the production and sale of printed amulets received scant attention in medieval Arabic sources, the production of fifteenth-century European woodcuts may also not have fascinated a wide public. So, understanding the limits of our sources and in lieu of hard confirmation of Romani contact with monastic communities, I will present a series of questions and conjectures to link the concurrent arrival of “Lesser Egyptians” in Germany, Austria, and Czechia with the emergence of xylographs on paper. The medieval history of Romani migration and the rise of print are not ordinarily brought into conversation, because printing has been inexorably linked to advanced literacy, and the Roma have been stereotyped as illiterate. Keeping in mind that the earliest woodcuts featured only images, the literacy of the woodcutters has no bearing on questions of influence. So, could there have been among these wandering penitents a woodblock printer, a Sīn-speaking craftsperson, or simply someone who inherited this ancestral knowledge from Asian or African forebears? Along the Way of Saint James, the “Lesser Egyptians” could have produced and sold woodcuts as part of their pious practice, exchanged them for goods or services, or even taught cloistered individuals to carve print blocks. Although convents, particularly female ones, restricted their access to outsiders, sometimes the attached churches were spaces where monks and laypeople could interact. With this setup in mind, several specialists have proposed the existence of itinerant printers. The art historian Henri Bouchot “pictured the travelling craftsman with his stock of prints with large margins ready for such inscriptions (added by hand or from a further block) as would be pertinent to the convents that purchased

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them.”35 The art historian Peter Parshall, too, has conjectured that members of the Antonite begging order in Memmingen could have used woodcuts of their patron saint Anthony to collect alms.36 Certainly, other mendicants or wandering penitents could have also produced woodcuts for these purposes. Any of these scenarios could explain how early woodcuts entered monastic libraries, but there are other confirmed routes of distribution. Monks and nuns lent and gifted books to other monastic libraries, sharing woodcuts pasted into their own books. In fact, one woodcut from the 1420s, the Rochester, New York, “Death of the Virgin,” is pasted inside the cover of a manuscript from a Dominican convent in the small town of Mödingen.37 An inscribed donation statement records this book as a gift from Nuremberg. Other woodcuts from this period bear personal messages on the back, forming a sort of medieval postcard.38 The sum of this circumstantial and material evidence localizes early print production in an environment of Christian devotion and establishes its likely circulation through networks of mobile mendicants, penitents, monks, nuns, pilgrims, and their books. As a result of the secularization of German states in 1803, the land and material holdings of Bavarian monasteries were transferred to the Hof- und Staatsbibliothek, which is known today as the Bavarian State Library. Among its holdings is a notebook that once belonged to a Benedictine monk named Johannes ex Grafing. From 1510 to 1515, he is thought to have studied in Vienna, afterward entering a monastery in the village of Ebersberg, near Munich. Around 1515, while still in Vienna, Johannes recorded a list of sixty-one Romani words and their Latin equivalents.39 The words related to body parts, numbers, gender, and astrology/astronomy, including the names for zodiac constellations, sun, moon, and stars. Johannes also inscribed samples of Czech-Polish vocabulary and Hungarian and Cuman Pater Nosters, Ave Marias, and Credos, testifying to the range of languages spoken in Bavaria and Austria at the start of the sixteenth century.40 Significantly, the Romani sample included no Christian prayers and was the only one to have zodiac terms. Johannes’s Romani informant(s) had not only astrological interests, but they also evidenced ties to Ottoman Balkan ghurabā’ (in Ottoman Turkish gurbet). Georg Knauer found considerable overlap between this list and Evliya Çelebi’s 1668 wordlist of non-Vlach Sedentary Romani from Ottoman Greece. Furthermore, “[s]ome words of the Romani dialect in the Munich list seem to be linked to the Gurbet, if not even the Bosnian Gurbet,” and that “the informer of the Munich list originated from the north Balkans, which were then under German influence.”41 He or she may have lived in an Ottoman vassal state or in the Ottoman Empire. Today, the vast majority of Gurbet Roma are Muslims, who divide their Balkan community by geography. In their Romani Gurbet dialects, they distinguish between western Gurbets (Gurbetujra), those of Serbia (Gurbetura), and those of Kosovo and Macedonia (Gurbéta or Gurbétora). This Gurbet name recurs in Muslim Romani communities throughout Anatolia, the Crimea, Crete, and Cyprus.42 Their Islamic faith, like their Gurbet name, is probably the last vestige of an Ottoman heritage. Could Gurbet-speaking Romani astrologers, themselves likely familiar with the printing heritage of the Mamluk and Ottoman ghurabā’, have been present

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137

in southern Germany or Vienna earlier than 1515? The possibility cannot be easily dismissed. Still, to answer that question with greater certitude will require a closer investigation of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts and woodcuts at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the archives of the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München. After the secularization of German territories in 1803, abbeys and bishoprics were dissolved, and their property, including the contents of libraries, were confiscated and transferred to local municipal and university collections. Some medieval abbeys never reincorporated. The Bad Reichenhall monastery that had housed the Dorothy and Sebastian woodcut for so many centuries remains, but large parts of it have been converted into a modern spa hotel. In any case, Balkan, Hungarian, and Austrian archives and collections would make promising investigative sites for additional materials relevant to this history. It will require competence in Latin, Greek, and vernacular European languages to understand how the Roma interacted with monastic communities. Print historians have sought direct influences on Gutenberg himself, but, in fact, the history of Latin and vernacular European print had begun some decades before he invented the printing press. So, how do any of these arguments affect our appreciation of Gutenberg and his invention? For one, they show that linking the histories of xylography and letterpress printing brings more clarity to the emergence of technologies that were thought to have arisen ex nihilo. There is sufficient circumstantial evidence to investigate the possibility that “Egyptians” of Ottoman heritage introduced xylography to Germanic peoples. These woodcuts had the greatest effect on late medieval domestic practices. According to Sarah Blick, “personal devotion grew more intense and tactile.”43 Christians, especially those who could not afford paintings of saints or the Passion of Christ, could now hang cheaply printed pictures on their walls, paste them into books, or under the lids of wooden chests.44 Woodcuts did not replace the Book of Hours, which was an abridged version of psalters and monastic breviaries that had become a popular prayer book by the late thirteenth century. These woodcuts probably reminded worshippers of traditional settings, as their thick black lines and faint wash of watercolors seemed to imitate stained glass.45 There appears to have been a general trend of making common versions of monastic and church accoutrements (psalters, breviaries, stained glass, devotional paintings, and manuscripts) that Christians could appreciate in private. Gutenberg may have seen a potential market in private ownership of Bibles or felt inspired to democratize holy texts for a broader audience. Either way, situating Gutenberg’s invention in the context of personal devotion and woodblock printing makes it apparent that the cradle phase of German printing spanned roughly 1410 to 1453 and included cloistered individuals and penitents from Lesser Egypt. In premodern Middle Eastern studies, the devaluation of Sīn has obscured its speakers’ 500-year tradition of printing to such an extent that Arabists encountering premodern printing vocabulary nearly always assigned error or ignorance to the medieval scribe. There was little conception of this technical vocabulary originating in a language other than that of the dominant speech community. Even leaving aside the question of obscure vocabularies, one can

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hardly ignore the physical survivals of this printing tradition. Researchers like Karl R. Schaefer and Mark Muehlhaeusler have led the field in documenting these specimens in collections around the world. However, Arabists have convinced themselves that the Arabic print heritage was insignificant and inferior because whoever did it was only printing on one side of the paper, and then not binding the leaves into books. Similarly, Europeanists have agreed that the early fifteenthcentury woodblock-printed images mostly preserved in monastic libraries were an insignificant technological stage because the images were not texts. Both printing stages, I have argued, depended on the technical know-how of the ghurabā’, who seemed to have maintained their printing monopoly for half a millennium. The concomitant migration of “Egyptians” into the Holy Roman Empire and the development of woodblock printing there may not have been accidents of history. At the same time that blockprinting was waning in Islamic lands and giving way to other minority groups printing with movable type, blockprint was emerging in Central Europe. The year 1417 was a watershed moment in European history. In this year Wallachia agreed to pay the Ottomans 3,000 ducats a year in tribute, easing long-standing political tensions, and self-proclaimed “Egyptians” and “Cyganorum” from the east fanned out across Western Europe. A company of “Egyptians” presented themselves as wandering penitents and secured letters of protection. A gharīb craftsperson, like a woodworker or an astrologer, could have sold prints to Bavarian and Bohemian monasteries, thereby spreading an established Afro-Asian technology into Latin Christendom.

EPILOGUE

Roma in the Medieval Islamic World ranges beyond the history of Roma to investigate histories of Afro-Eurasian Roma and Roma-adjacent groups who found common ground in their estrangement (ghurba) from majority culture and values as well as in the Sīn language. In the early Islamic period this polyglot, multiethnic, Shiʿileaning configuration named themselves the Banū Sāsān, claiming for themselves some of the prestige and valiance of the Sasanian dynasty. By the late 1200s they had renamed themselves ghurabā’ and promoted countercultural values around private property, labor, astrology, and print. Living in ghurabā’ neighborhoods, the ghurabā’ were able to reproduce craft expertise and maintain the Sīn language over many generations in their separate communities. The ghurabā’ nurtured a rich and varied literary culture, complemented by the portable arts of storytelling, music, and dance, the complex merging of which is manifested in the shadow play tradition. The flexibility of gharīb literary cultures allowed the mujūn poet Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, amulet printers, and makers of bulhāns to flourish in their respective arts. Strikingly, these arts traveled widely; amulets were produced from Andalusia to Iran, and bulhāns and their offshoots were made in Anatolia, Iraq, Iran, and India. The manuscripts and prints that scholars have thus far identified may only represent a small portion of extant premodern gharīb material culture. Jawbarī described a subgroup of the Banū Sāsān that produced a book called Kitāb al-ʿAzīz (The Book of the Precious One), which they used to lure young boys to them, but scholars have yet to identify any excerpts, let alone a full extant copy.1 Another new field is gharīb literary culture in medieval Europe. Merging Romani history with the history of European print opens new avenues of research. Fifteenth-century chroniclers portrayed “Little Egyptians” as a detached, invasive community of public nuisances, while modern studies tend to treat them separately, as irrelevant to the majority historical actors. Placing the “Egyptians” in human landscapes led me to hypothesize quieter encounters between these Christian converts who claimed to wander in penance and residents of German towns. Their travels could have taken them past monasteries along pilgrimage routes, where they could find a meal and a place to camp. The 1803 dissolution of German monastic properties scattered medieval and early modern account books, libraries, and study materials, which might have held records of “Little Egyptians” visiting cloisters. The likelihood of early monastic contact with the Roma increases when one learns that around 1515 a young German monk

140 Epilogue

recorded a sample of a Gurbet Romani dialect, which is the earliest record of written Romani in Europe. Furthermore, his informant had clear astrological interests. Ghurabā’ astrologers had been driving the printing of religious texts in Islamicate lands since the 900s, and some ghurabā’ subgroups may have continued printing as they moved through Central Europe.

Figure 8.1  “Fahrendes Volk (Metz Unmuss),” Upper Rhine Valley, 1420-50. Watercolor and blockprinted ink on paper. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, Inv. Nr. XV. Einbl. WB 3.34.

Epilogue

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The implications of this proposal for Romani history, Ghurabā’ studies, and the history of print are vast, and some of these have been probed in Chapter 7. Merely acknowledging the presence of the ghurabā’ alters the perspectives of historians of the premodern past, and gharīb-European encounters shifted European selfconceptions. A woodcut produced between 1420 and 1450 in the Upper Rhine Valley between Lake Constance and the North Sea depicts a bearded, tonsured man leading a donkey.2 A wooden paddle hangs from his belt. Riding sidesaddle on the donkey, a woman balances a basket of chickens on her head and an infant in a cradle on her knees. The ends of a large cloth are tied over her right shoulder, and behind her the cloth bulges with a roasting cage and bellows. The large knot at her shoulder was a widely recognized sartorial feature of “Little Egyptian” women that artists reproduced and chroniclers noted throughout the fifteenth century.3 She uses both hands to spin wool or flax on a spindle and distaff. The speech bubble reads in part: “Ich heiss metz vnmusz,” or “My name is Busybody.”4 This woodcut, thought to be “one of the earliest-known cuts of a profane subject” was, in fact, inspired by Christian iconography of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt to escape King Herod’s plans to kill the infant Jesus.5 The Holy Family entered Egypt as an indigent and righteous trio, but this allegorical portait of a family of “Little Egyptians” enacted the reverse journey, leaving Egypt as impoverished wanderers, though meeting, not fleeing, rejection as they went.  The encounter with “Egyptians” forced European Christians to reimagine a biblical past that accommodated their existence, ultimately constructing them as the ultimate Strangers. Racial hierarchies found biblical justification, as Noah’s sons were thought to be the progenitors of every race on earth. But the “Egyptians” escaped this taxonomy and came to represent any heathen. Fifteenth-century artists began incorporating features of “Egyptian” women’s dress into paintings of biblical scenes, chiefly to signal a woman of questionable moral character. At the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, Mary Magdalene wears the flat turban of the “Egyptians” in the Master of Flémalle’s “Entombment Triptych” painted c. 1420, as does Salome in Jacques Daret’s 1434 or 1435 painting “The Nativity.”6 Fifteenthcentury Netherlandish painters of biblical scenes, especially those of the Exodus from Egypt, also dressed Israelites in the style of “Egyptians.”7 Medieval Christian observers made sense of the newly arrived foreign Christians by mapping them onto familiar stories about Jews as religious outsiders and women as sinners. Historians today find ourselves in circumstances similar to those of medieval Christian observers, realizing that the global Middle Ages we have been studying did not account for Roma and Roma-adjacent groups. Reimagining the Banū Sāsān and the ghurabā’ as historical actors with agency, and not merely as buffoonish literary representations, presents an opportunity to renew our sensibility to the past and to question the historiographical choices and political motives that have led to the long erasure of the ghurabā’ from our historical narratives. In this book the groundwork has been laid for a field of history called Ghurabā’ studies, of which Romani studies is a subset, that examines communities and people who embrace the social position of estrangement. Historians often assume that people in the past behaved in the same way that they themselves would, pathologizing or rejecting

142 Epilogue

the unrecognizable. The most urgent intellectual work now involves suspending those assumptions in an attempt to understand people and communities who do not share the values and lifestyles of the ideal white Christian citizen of Europe or North America. It is an opportunity to expand our understanding of indigeneity, as well. As mentioned earlier, there are white Christians, like the Yenish and Travellers, who are native to Europe, speak minority mixed languages, and are traditionally nomadic. However, their strangeness has precipitated considerable anxiety about their ethnic origins. Europe is popularly conceived as a place of settled people, whereas nomadism is a feature of Africans and Asians. Recent genetic studies undermine these narrow constructions of authentic European identity, showing, for instance, that the Irish Travellers are natives who diverged from settled Irish populations forty generations, or roughly 1200 years, ago.8 The ghurabā’ by whatever name—Roma, Dom, Lom, Nawar, Ḥalab, Ghorbat, Çingane, Yenish, Traveller—shaped medieval cultural heritage on three continents. They nurtured their most creative impulses in estrangement, emerging to extract food, property, favors, and money from the people around them. In these interactions the ghurabā’ offered horoscopes, spectacle, music, sermons, and stories; they sold amulets, medical services, and wooden and metal tools. Built into this worldview was an uncompromising rejection of the cultural priorities of the majority groups, such as social conformity or the sanctity of private property. The ghurabā’ covered considerable cultural and physical ground, and deeper engagement with their medieval and early modern histories in Africa, Europe, and Asia will only enrich our understandings of the premodern past.

APPENDIX 1 GLOSSARY OF PREMODERN SĪN

َ ‫( إ ْس‬isṭabl) mosque ‫طبْل‬ physician ‫آس‬ ٍ (ās) ‫( أ َ ْمر‬amr) reflexive pronoun, as in “the very . . ., the thing itself ” ‫واريَّة‬ rush mat ‫بَ َو ٍار‬ ِ َ‫( ب‬bawāriyya) ‫( بوار‬bawār) mats? ‫( باز‬bāz) a woman who ties up her hands with the fingers clenched tightly together, claiming that the fingers have been cut off ‫ورة‬ night or day َ ُ ‫( بَ ْخت‬bakhtūra) ‫( تَبخِ ير‬tabkhīr) censing (with smoke) ‫( بَاخِ س‬bākhis) one ‫( بَ ْربازار‬barbāzār) pieces of bread and morsels of food and condiments which have been collected together for the relief of Sufis, so called because the whole pile of scraps is of various colors ‫( بَ َّر َخ‬barrakha) to expose, tear away a cover ‫( برزَ ان‬b-rzān) an iron instrument used for pulling teeth ‫( بَرزَ ك‬barzak) lancet ‫( بَرغَاشَات‬barghāshāt) ears ‫َش‬ ‫ك‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ب‬ (barkasha) to go into detail ْ َ َ ‫( بَ ْر ُكوش‬barkūsh) beggar feigning deafness ّ‫( بَركَك‬barkakk) person who extracts molars and gives treatment for them ‫( ُمبَ ْركِك‬mubarkik) quack dentist ‫( بَ َّزاق‬bazzāq) the person who uses magical spells to cure madmen and those with physical defects, and who as part of these rituals spits on them ‫( بَزَ ْهمِ ي‬bazahmī) fish ‫زواني‬ Persian or Kurd َ َ‫( ب‬bazwānī), pl. bazāwin) ‫( بَ ْشبَاشة‬bashbāsha) beard

144

Appendix 1

‫( بُ ْشتَد َِاري‬bushtadārī, pl. bushtadāriyyūn) ‫ي ُخ ْردَة‬ ُّ ِ‫( بُ ْشتَكَان‬bushtakāniyy[u] khurdat[in]) َ‫( بَ ْش َرك‬bashraka)

servant boy peddler of small goods and trinkets to dress up in the garb of monks, feigning asceticism to see, look at َّ‫( بَص‬baṣṣa) to let, cause to see, display ‫ص‬ َّ َ‫( ب‬baṣṣaṣa) َ ‫ص‬ ‫صاص‬ َّ َ‫( ب‬baṣṣāṣ) oculist ْ ‫( بَنُو الب‬banū l-buṭri) ‫ُط ِر‬ lit., “sons of women with long clitorises,” but here means the mass of non-Sāsānis ‫( ت َ ْنكِيت‬tabkīt) cover, garment ‫( بَلَ ُح األجْ ر‬balaḥu l-ajri) rosary beads from Jibāl َ‫( بَلَّز‬ballaza) to sell, fraudulently substitute to use an almost invisible silk thread َ‫ بَ ْفلَك‬، َ‫( بَ ْلفَك‬balfaka or baflaka) to draw off rings ‫( بُل َهان‬bulhān) book with illustrations and decorations to claim to be an affiliate of َ‫( بَ ْن َون‬banwana) the bānūwāniyya, who are bands of shuṭṭār ‫( بَانُوانِيَّة‬bānūwāniyya) bands of shuṭṭār ‫( بَ ْهت‬baht) face ‫( بَ ْهتة‬bahta) picture, shape, form ‫( بُهت َان‬buhtān)   ‫( بَ َّه َل‬bahhala) to do well ‫ بُ ْهلُول‬، ‫( بَ ْهلُول‬bahlūl or buhlūl, pl. bahālīl) beggar chief   ‫( بور‬b-w-r) gate ‫( بَ ْيدَر‬baydar) threshing floor ‫( بَيْض‬bayḍ)   ‫( بِيقَان‬bīqān) boys with down on their cheeks or virgins ‫( ت َ ْبيِيس‬tabyīs)   ‫( تَتْبِير‬tatbīr) blowing of the wind; scaring away, warding off ‫( تَبْك‬tabk, pl. tubūk) copper coin ‫( ت ُ ْربِد‬turbid)   ‫( ترثا‬t-r-thā) until ‫( ت َلَّ َغ‬tallagha) to speak ‫( ت َِّلغ‬tillāgh) speech ‫ تِ ْنبَل‬، ‫( ت َ ْنبَل‬tanbal or tinbal) the simpleton who is the victim of tricks played on him and who is taken in by the fortunetellers’ returning his money to him. So he too lays out his money, fully expecting the fortune-teller to give it back to him; but the latter takes it from him, thus making him look ridiculous ‫( يتنبل‬yatanabbalu)  

Appendix 1

145

‫( تَنُّور‬tannūr) oven ‫( ثَا ُمولَة‬thāmūla)   ‫( ث َ ِيّب‬thayyib) either partner in a validly consummated marriage ‫( جُحْ ر‬juḥr) anus ‫ار ِعيَ َالت‬ the one who hires children and ُ ‫( َج َّر‬jarrāru ʿiyālāt) women and uses them for begging purposes ‫( َج َّر َخ‬jarrakha) to dance ‫( َج ْرخ‬jarkh) a dance ‫( َج ْزر‬jazr) faculty of sight ‫( َج َّزارة‬jazzāra) eye to conceal َ‫( َجفَّت‬jaffata) ‫( َج ْفر‬jafr) celestial globe َ ‫ع َمي َْرة‬ to rub oneself ُ َ‫( َجلَّد‬jallada ʿumayrata) ‫( َجا ُمور‬jāmūr) some contrivance like a beaker of goblet engraved with magical signs, in which smoke was produced, into which the soothsayer then peered and produced his prognostications ‫( َج ْن َجانِي‬janjānī) a m.rātī and a wielder of scissors ‫( َج َوانِي‬jawānī) small blockprinted amulets and amulets made of lead and paper to wash in a cistern ‫ض‬ َ َ ‫( حا‬ḥāḍa) ‫( ُم َحب ِْرش‬muḥabrish) showing anger, reviling or showing hostility ‫( َحا ُجور‬ḥājūr) the person who pierces a hole in an egg, which one secretes in one’s bosom so that it oozes out as a yellow liquid ّ‫( ُم ْست َ َحد‬mustaḥadd) the butt (or perhaps, assistant) of the conjuror and tightrope walker َ‫( َح َّرز‬ḥarraza) to write out amulets and charms ‫( َح ْرق‬ḥarq) crying out, shouting ‫( َح َّراق‬ḥarrāq)   ُ ‫( َح‬ḥāzūza)   ‫ازوزَ ة‬ ‫( َمحْ ُزوز‬maḥzūz) meat ‫ير‬ ُ ‫( َحزَ ِاز‬ḥazāzīr) eyes to await or to watch  َّ‫( ت َ َحص‬taḥaṣṣa) to know (ḥafaftu = I knew) ‫ف‬ َّ ‫( َح‬ḥaffa) ‫( َح َّكاك‬ḥakkāk) the person who has with him special stones brought from Darband, by means of which iron can be distinguished from the precious metals of dirhams and dīnārs; one of these stones is called a touchstone or a rubbing stone ‫( َح ْمدَاني‬ḥamdānī) pimp

146 َ‫( َحنَّن‬ḥannana)

Appendix 1

the person who dyes his hands with henna. At the same time, he shaves off his moustache and thus leaves his upper lip like a polished washing bowl and like a woman’s plucked pudendum. He then claims to be one of the Sufis, the learned and ascetic ones, and he begs his daily living by means of that. ‫( ُم َحنِّن‬muḥannin) one who captivates people by his stories and verses َ ‫( خ ََّرأ‬kharra’a) to defecate on oneself ‫( خ َْربَشة‬kharbasha) village ‫( خ َْرط‬kharṭ) one of the dogs of Mecca who are without faith ‫ خ ََّراطة‬، ‫( خ ََّراط‬kharrāṭ/kharrāṭa)   ‫َش‬ viper ّ ‫( خ‬khashsh) َّ ‫( َخ‬khashshāsh) ‫شاش‬ snake charmer َّ ‫( َخ‬khashshāshah) ‫شاشَة‬ viper ‫( خَشبُ ِوي‬khashbuwī) drugged stew non-Sāsāni ‫ي‬ ّ ِ‫( ُخ ْشن‬khushnī, pl. akhshān) the person who defecates and does ‫ي‬ ّ ‫( َخلَ ْن ِج‬khalanjī, pl. khalanjiyūn) not wash his anus ‫( مِ ْخ َلة‬mikhlāh) nosebag. Along with ṭayr and bayḍ, it is a tool used by illusionists You laugh ‫( ت ُ َخ ْن ِد ُج‬tukhandiju) to beg with a bear ‫َّب‬ َ ‫( دَب‬dabbaba) ‫( دَبَّاب‬dabbāb) bear trainer ‫( دَبَّة البِ ْزر‬dabbat al-bizr) vessel of snot (?) ‫( دَبَ ْش ِري‬dabashrī) ox1 ‫( مِ د َْرج‬midraj) leg َ‫( د ََّرز‬darraza) to sew up seams, sew together to sell perfumes by the roadside َ‫( د َْر َمك‬darmaka) ‫( درمون‬d.r.mūn or d.r.mūt) vessel or container ‫ إ ْست َ ْذ َرى‬، ‫َدرى‬ َ ‫( إ ْست‬istadrī/istadhrī)   َ‫( د َْر َوز‬darwaza) going round from door to door ‫( دَسْت‬dast) ten craftsmen َ‫َاريُّون‬ ِ ‫( دَ ْستَك‬dastkāriyyūn) َّ َ‫( د‬dashshasha) ‫ش‬ to insert a porridge-like substance َ ‫ش‬ into the anus and have it leak out while he sleeps on the roadside to oppose, show hostility toward ‫َاص‬ َ ‫( د‬dāṣa) ‫صاء‬ َ ‫( أ َ ْد‬adṣā’) enemies ‫( دَ ْغر‬daghr)   ‫( دَ ْغ َرة‬daghra, pl. dagharāt) raid, foray for plunder to kiss ‫( دَ ْقش ََم‬daqshama) َ‫( دَ َّكك‬dakkaka)   ‫( دَ َّكاك‬dakkāk) one who juggles with vessels?  ‫( ُم ْدلِج‬mudlij) absconding in the night

Appendix 1 ‫( د َْل َوانِي‬dalwānī)

147

swinging the head from side to side while declaiming and shouting ِ‫( دَ ّم َاألخ‬damm al-akhi)   ‫( دَ َّم َخ‬dammakha) to put to sleep ‫( د َْمخ‬damkh) sleep, dream to stand in the markets weeping, in ‫( دَ َّم َع‬dammaʿa fī qirr) times of freezing cold, so that people might give one money ‫( دَا ُموع‬dāmūʿ) onion juice ‫( دمق‬d-m-q) ointment, salve to say, assert َ‫( دَنَّك‬dannaka) ‫( دانك‬dānik, pl. dawānīk) tale, saying, allusion to deceive people and create a false ‫( دَ ْهث َ َم‬dahthama) impression that one is fasting ‫( ذَابُول‬See ‫ )زابول‬  to go up to a shopkeeper who is ‫ع‬ َ ‫( ذَ َّر‬dharraʿa) mixing up harīsa and beg a bowl of it from him. As soon as the shopkeeper gives it to him, he licks it all up ‫( اِ ْست َ ْذ َرى‬istadhrā)   ‫( ال َم ْذ ُكور‬al-madhkūr)   ‫( المِ ْذقان‬midhqān) mihrab of a mosque to go along with a bare butt َ‫( أ َ ْذلَق‬adhlaqa bi’l-dubr) ‫( ُم ْذ ِلقَة‬mudhliqa, pl. madhāliq) bare-rumped or perhaps naked ‫( َربَّ َخ‬rabbakha) to extol, laud, treat handsomely ‫( ت َْربِيخ‬tarbīkh)   madrasas ‫( َربَائِ ُخ‬rabā’ikh) to compose, make up ‫َّص‬ َ ‫( َرب‬rabbaṣa) ‫( َربَّى‬rabbā) to believe that a beggar boy should be trained to go around with a master ‫( َر ْخت َانِي‬rakhtānī) the man who carries round in a pack or rolled-up bundle a selection of drugs ‫( ِر ْزق‬rizq or razq) trick of the astrologer ‫ش‬ to beg, seeking money in return for َّ ‫( َر‬rashsha) sprinkling rose water over people َّ ‫( َر‬rashshasha) ‫ش‬ to take a urine flask with gravel in it َ ‫ش‬ and when his urine comes, he sprinkles the contents over the people. Such a person is a murashshish  raṣafa ‫ف‬ َ ‫( َر‬SD v. 55) َ ‫ص‬ ‫( َرصْف‬raṣf) slap, blow ‫صى‬ to order, adjure َّ ‫( َر‬raṣṣā) ُ‫( ِرض َْوان‬riḍwānu)   ‫َّس‬ to wander round the merchants’ َ ‫( َرع‬raʿʿasa) shops, taking a walnut from here and a date and fig from there

148 ‫ب‬ َ ‫( َر َّك‬rakkaba)

Appendix 1

to smear one’s body with sesame oil so that one’s skin becomes black. He then makes people believe that he has been flogged or that the jinn have beaten him up during the night. to crawl into a stokehold and roll َ‫( َر َّمد‬rammada) about in the ashes  ‫ ت َْرنَان‬ (tarnān) singing ‫ زابُول‬or ‫( ذَابُول‬zābūl or dhābūl) whore ‫( زَ ا ُحوف‬zāḥūf) the beggar who drags himself along, claiming paralyzed legs ْ (m-zdāh) ‫مزدَاة‬ tongue  to stuff with food, fill to satiety َ‫( زَ َّرد‬zarrada) ‫( زَ ْرع الخِ يَار‬zarʿ al-khiyār)   ‫( زَ َّرى‬zarrā) to fear ‫( ُز ْغبُل‬zughbul) everything harvested except for the actual grain of wheat, barley, rice, and so on, so foreign matter like weeds, dirt, and stones to be certain, convinced ‫( زَ ْغ َم َر‬zaghmara) ‫( ُمزَ فَّت‬muzaffat) destitute, penniless ‫( مِ ْزقَان‬mizqān) See midhqān ‫( زَ قَّى‬zaqqā) to recite, read out loud, to talk to someone to beg door to door ‫( زَ َّك َر‬zakkara) َ‫وريُّون‬ ِ ‫( زَ ُك‬zakūriyyūna)   ‫( أَبُو زَ ْك ِري‬abū zakrī)   ‫( زَ ال‬zāl) donkey ‫( زَ َالنِي‬zālānī) trainer of donkeys ‫( زَ ْمقار‬zamqār)   ‫( زَ َم ْكدَان‬zamakdān)   ‫( زَ ْن َك َل‬zankala) to intercept a group of pilgrims and use stratagems to plunder them ‫( زَ ْن َك َل‬zankal) a parasite who attaches himself to caravans ‫( ِزيه‬zīh) hashish  ‫الزيهاوي‬/ ‫ الزهاوي‬  (al-zahāwī or al-zīhāwī) hashish user ‫( َمزيِة‬mazīh) hashish ‫سبَّاع‬ wild animals َ (sabbāʿ) ‫( سدل‬s-d-l) upon, by َ ‫س ْر َم‬ ‫ط‬ to write َ (sarmaṭa) ‫س ْر َماط‬ َ (sarmāṭ, pl. sarāmīṭ) amulet ‫( سرماطية‬sarmāṭiyya) collective of amulet writers َ ‫( سِرما‬sirmāṭa) book ‫طة‬ ‫س ْر َمل‬ ragged shirt َ (sarmal) َّ ‫س‬ ‫ط َل‬ to feign blindness َ (saṭṭala) ‫ ِإسطِ يل \ ِإصطِ يل‬ (isṭīl or iṣṭī) man feigning blindness ‫سعَّى‬ to send off َ (saʿʿā) ُ ْ ‫يح‬ ‫الر‬ (safʿatu r-rīḥi)   ‫ة‬ ‫ع‬ ‫ف‬ ‫س‬ َ ِ َ ِ

Appendix 1 ‫( ِسقَاع \ ِشقَاع‬siqāʿ or shiqāʿ, pl. siqāʿāt or shiqāʿāt)

149

rug of one or many colors on which prayers are performed to rage against the heavens against ‫ف‬ َ (saqqafa) َ َّ‫سق‬ fate  ‫( ِس ْكر‬sikr) weir ‫س َل‬ to speak lengthily in selling images َ ‫س ْل‬ َ (salsala) ‫س َّلر‬ Arabized form of Persian sālār, َ (sallār) meaning “commander” ‫سالُوس‬ fair words, blandishment (In َ (sālūs) al-Khafaji, Shifā’ al-ghalīl, p. 125, the plural is given as ‫ سالوسة‬and it is defined as “clothing made of hair, for ascetics to wear while begging.” The word also appears in Ibn Daniyal’s poetic diwan, p. 114, and is glossed in the footnotes as meaning “‫عيّار‬,” or vagabond.) to talk with someone ‫س َّم َر‬ َ (samara) ‫س ْمقُون‬ beardless boy َ (samqūn, pl. samāqīn) ‫س َّمان‬ person who gives fattening drugs to َ (sammān) women ‫سنَّان‬ person who gives drugs to alleviate a َ (sannān) toothache ‫( ذو شان‬dhū shān) God the Sublime and Mighty ‫( ِشب ِْريَّات‬shibriyyāt) short, snappy stories related span upon span ‫( شحَّم‬shaḥḥama) to supply with food; conciliate, win someone’s favor ‫( َم ْش ُحون‬mashḥūn) place of sitting in the sun َ (shaddada)   َ‫شدَّد‬ ‫صم‬ the one who ties up his wrist and َ (shaddādu miʿṣam) َ ‫شدَّادُ مِ ْع‬ alleges that his hand has been cut off to gamble ‫( ش َْرش ََر‬sharshara) ‫( ش َْرش ََرة‬sharsharah) gambling ‫صوص‬ extracted snake fangs َ (shaṣūṣ) ُ ‫ش‬ ‫صة‬ َ (shaṣūṣah)   ُ ‫ش‬ َ ‫صو‬ َّ ‫( ش‬shaṭṭaba) to slash oneself with a razor and then ‫ب‬ َ ‫َط‬ claim that Bedouins or Kurds or robbers did this َ ‫( مِ ْش‬mishṭaḥ) ‫طح‬ the person who wanders around unceasingly and unrelentingly ‫( َمشَاطِ ُح‬mashāṭiḥu)   ‫ش ْع ِبذ‬ juggler, conjuror, legerdemain َ ‫( ُم‬mushaʿbidh) practitioner ‫( ِشغَاثَة‬shighāthah, pl. shighāthāt) mosque ‫( ُمشافِّر‬mushāffir) wounding ‫( مِ ْشفَر‬mishfar) sword ‫( ت َ ْشفِير‬tashfīr) act of wounding ‫ش ْقبَان‬ honey-colored garment َ (shaqbān)

150

Appendix 1

‫( مِ ْشقَاع‬mishqāʿ)   to produce secret writing through ‫ف‬ َ (shaqqafa ) َ َّ‫شق‬ immersion in a solution or who holds it over a fire ‫شقِّف‬ one who writes with an aqueous َ ‫( ُم‬mushaqqif) solution of sal ammoniac (mā’ al-nushādir) on paper ‫( شقيفة‬shaqīfah) a piece of paper treated in this way ‫ش َّكاك‬ the person who sells the rat poison َ (shakkāk) called arsenic (al-shakk) ‫( شَا ُكوك‬shākūk) reciter of poetry in villages and public places like markets ‫( أ َ ْش َك َل‬ashkala) to link up with, connect with something ‫( أ َ ْشكَال‬ashkāl)   ‫( ِإ ْشكَان‬ishkān) act of entering, pushing forward seller of ointments, medicinal pastes ‫ي‬ َ (shalabī) ّ ِ‫شلَب‬ ‫( شَلب‬shal-b) ointment to destroy ‫ف‬ َ َّ‫( شَل‬shallafa) ُ (shumūl) ‫ش ُمول‬ bread ‫ش َّمالَة‬ five َ (shammālah) ‫( َم ْش ُمول‬mashmūl)   ‫( َمشَامِ ي ُل‬mashāmīl)   two ‫( ش َّن‬shann) ‫ش ْندِل‬ neglected, ill-cared for َ ‫ ُم‬، ‫ش ْندَل‬ َ ‫( ُم‬mushandal/mushandil) ‫شنَاط‬ َ (shanāṭ) man ‫( مِ ْش َواذ‬mishwādh) telling stories in a mad, deranged fashion ‫ شَوزَ ر‬، ‫( ش َْوذَر‬shawdhar/shawzar)   ‫س‬ ascetic who goes around begging and َ َ‫( ش َْول‬shawlasa, pl. shālūsah) wearing coarse garments (In al-Khafaji, Shifā’ al-ghalīl, p. 125, the plural is given as ‫ سالوسة‬and it is defined as “clothing made of hair, for ascetics to wear while begging.” The word ‫ سالوس‬also appears in Ibn Daniyal’s poetic diwan, p. 114, and is glossed in the footnotes as meaning “‫عيّار‬,” or vagabond.) ‫ ُمش َْولِق‬  (mushawliq) feigning illness ‫( شِيح‬shīḥ) generic term for various types of wormwood ‫سق‬ pieces of iron or other charms َ (shayshaq/shīshaq/shīsaq) َ ‫ ِش ْي‬، ‫ ِش ْيشَق‬، ‫ش ْيشَق‬ dangling from their bodies ‫صدَّى‬ to hold back, instill fear, deter; to َ (ṣaddā) make one’s speech pleasant ‫اروخ‬ the eloquent person who cries out in ُ ‫ص‬ َ (ṣārūkh) the assembly ‫( مِ ص َْرد‬miṣrad) sieve

Appendix 1 ‫ص ْقر‬ َ (AD v. 126)

151

ṣaqr = Arabic for falcon. This term refers to a trick whereby someone binds up one eye and claims to be one-eyed. ‫ص ْلبَان‬ ṣalbān = “fours, the singular of which َ (SD v. 16) is the cross of four arms, ṣalība” [Ar . . .] ‫ص َّلج‬ َ (ṣallāj) masturbator ‫ص ْلج‬ َ (ṣalj) masturbation ‫صمغ‬ gum arabic َ (ṣamgh, pl. ṣumūgh) ‫ص ُموغ‬ ْ ‫( َم‬maṣmūgh)   ‫ص َمى‬ َ (ṣamā)   ‫ص َّمى‬ to give wine to drink َ (ṣammā) ‫ص َمى‬ ْ َ ‫( أ‬aṣmā)   ‫ص ْمى‬ َ (ṣamī) wine ‫ص ْميَة‬ َ (ṣamyah) wine ‫صنَّار‬ instrument used for rolling back the ِ (ṣinnār) eyelids when some eye operation is undertaken (ṣahlī) horse ‫ي‬ ‫ل‬ ‫ه‬ ‫ص‬ ِ ْ َ ّ ‫ص َهى‬ to like  َ (ṣahā) liking for ‫ص ْه ِوى ِل‬ َ (ṣahwī li) to frequent the market, praising Ali ‫ب‬ َ (ḍarraba) َ ‫ض َّر‬ or Abu Bakr ‫( طار‬ṭār) tambourine ‫( ت َْطبِيب‬taṭbīb) the act of satisfying and conciliating someone َ (ṭaḥana)   َ‫ط َحن‬ َ (ṭārūḥ) ‫اروح‬ beggar’s garb ُ ‫ط‬ ّ (ṭaraḥnā) ‫اطرحنا‬ We clothed ourselves ‫( طرح‬ṭ-r-ḥ) coarse garment َ (ṭarsh) ‫ط ْرش‬ engraved amulet stamp or carved printing  ‫( طراش‬ṭ-rāsh) maker of ṭarsh? ُ (ṭurūsh) ‫طروش‬ engraved amulet stamps or carved printing blocks َ (ṭarshān) deafness ‫ط ْرشَان‬ ْ ِ‫( م‬miṭrāsh) ‫ط َراش‬ one who carries around his severed hand as a pretext for begging َ (ṭafshala) ‫ش َل‬ to let one’s tongue hang down in َ ‫ط ْف‬ one’s mouth and pretend to talk like a Bedouin َ (ṭafshalī) ‫طفشلِي‬ peasant, cultivator َ (ṭalīm) blind ‫طلِيم‬ ‫( طِ ْمر‬ṭimr) worn-out cloak made from a material other than wool َ (ṭanā) ‫طنَا‬ to die ْ َ ‫( أ‬aṭnā) ‫طنَى‬ to kill َ (ṭān) dead ‫طان‬

152 َ ‫( ُم‬muṭāwil) ‫طا ِول‬ ُ (ṭūlaq) ‫طولَق‬

Appendix 1

long images a rolled-up piece of material having on it pictures and shapes َ (ṭayr)   ‫طيْر‬ َ (ṭayyana) to smear with clay َ‫طيَّن‬ ‫عبَى‬ to strip, plunder َ (ʿabā) ‫عتِيل‬ indigent, in poor circumstances َ (ʿatīl) those who disport themselves with َ‫( عِثْيَ ِريُّون‬ʿithyariyyūna) weapons and who ride round on horses, handling them skillfully, like ghāzīs from the frontier, and at the same time begging ‫عدَّ َل‬ to copulate َ (ʿaddala) ‫( تعديل‬taʿdīl) copulation َ‫( ُم ْست َ ْع ِرضُون‬mustaʿriḍūna)   ‫ع ْزبَ َرة‬ fraud, scam َ (ʿazbarah) to defraud, scam ‫ع ْزبَ َر‬ َ (ʿazbara) to paralyze ‫عس ََّم‬ َ (ʿassama) ‫سوم‬ paralyzed by a stroke ُ ‫( َم ْع‬maʿsūm) a group of people who go round ‫( ُم ْست َ ْع ٍش‬mustaʿsh) (begging) to the doors of houses between the times of the two evening prayers ‫ع ْفر‬ parasitic person who attaches himself ُ (ʿufr) to a caravan َ‫( ُمعَاف ُِرون‬muʿāfirūna)   ‫ع ْكر‬ = (In Kahle, mukn ‘ukr means jail/ ُ (ʿukr) police station.) ‫( ت َ ْعكِير‬taʿkīr) bringing an accusation of wrongdoing; condemning me to destruction and complaining about me ‫( ُمعَ َّكف‬muʿakkaf) fasting ‫ع َّلفَة‬ َ (ʿallāfah)   َ (ghabrā’)   ‫غب َْراء‬ ُ (ghubr)   ‫غبْر‬ ‫( غ َْرزَ ة‬gharzah) a secret marker planted beforehand by the trickster, as an indicator to or sign of buried treasure ُ (ghursh) ‫غ ْرش‬ beggar leader ُ (SD vv. 12, 23) ‫غ ْرشَة‬ ghurshah = “trick, device, strategem” beggar leaders ‫ِيش‬ ُ ‫( غ ََراك‬gharākīsh) َ (ghashmalah) ‫غ ْش َملَة‬ night ‫س‬ to set off on a begging expedition just َ َّ‫( غَل‬ghallasa) as the dawn is beginning to gleam ‫( ت َ ْغمِ يض‬taghmīḍ) blindfold? ‫ضة‬ seeing clearly with (allegedly) َ ‫( ت َ ْغمِ ي‬taghmīḍa) blindfolded eyes

Appendix 1 ‫( فَت َى‬fattā)

153

to be a beggar-master who trains youths in the beggar ways ّ‫( فَذ‬fadhdh) desert ‫( فَ ُروض‬farūḍ) circles and audience (gathered round the Sāsānīs) َّ َ‫( ف‬fashshasha) ‫ش‬ See qashshasha َ ‫ش‬ to wriggle free of chains by the َ‫( فَ َّكك‬fakkaka) roadside ‫( فَنَاد ُِر‬fanādir) fart (The manuscripts also show ‫فيادر‬ and ‫القنادر‬.) ‫( ُمف ّ َِول‬mufawwil) seller of fa’lāt, favorable horoscopes; one who throws things from which omens can be derived into water or fire ‫( فَيْس‬fays) mendacity road ‫ى‬ ّ ‫( قتن‬qatannī or qatannā) for people to eat dry fodder for َ‫( قَتَّت‬qattata) beasts, that is, hay, clover, and so on, between the hands, like a camel to address ‫( قَا َج َم‬qājama) ‫( قَجْ م‬qajm, pl. qujmān) saying ‫َّس‬ to put on a display of holiness or َ ‫( قَد‬qaddasa) sanctimoniousness ‫اروب‬ shaykh, leader of the beggars ُ َ‫( ق‬qārūb) ‫( ُمقَ ِ ّرب‬muqarrib) making people eager to dabble in astrology and having their fortunes told َ‫( قَ َّرد‬qarrada)   ‫( قَ َراد‬qarrād) monkey trainer ‫ضة‬ َ ‫( قَ ُرو‬qarūḍah) rat َ ‫( قَ ْر َم‬qarmaṭa) ‫ط‬ to write out amulets by hand with both thin and thick strokes  ‫قرانِي‬ he knows my intentions َ َ‫( ي‬yaqrānī) ‫( قَ ْزقَ َل‬qazqala or qarqala) to shout and gather together a circle of listeners َّ َ‫( ق‬qashshasha) ‫ش‬ to fart (in the mosque)2 َ ‫ش‬ ‫( قَ ْشقَاش‬qashqāsh) long-bearded shaykh َّ َ‫( ق‬qashshaʿa) to walk along with one’s eyes glued to ‫ش َع‬ the ground, looking for coins ‫( قَ ْشم‬qashm) beloved boy ‫( قَصْر‬qaṣr) kiln or furnace into which one of the group of beggars crawls and rolls about in the ashes ‫صعَة‬ water bowl ْ َ‫( ق‬qaṣʿah) ‫ضبَان‬ wands or sticks for beating out the ْ ُ‫( ق‬quḍbān) rhythm of a tune ْ ُ‫ ق‬، ‫ِطبَان‬ ْ ُ‫( ق‬SD v. 13) ‫ِطيَان؟‬ quṭbān , qiṭbān , quṭyān , qiṭyān = “shaykh of the company (of beggars, etc.), the sons of Sasan”

154 ‫( قَ ْفيَا‬qafyā)

Appendix 1

bread provided as charity to the poor and feeble ‫( مِ ْق َلع‬miqlāʿ)   ‫وريَّة‬ the form of a talisman not made ِ ُ ‫( قَلَ ْفت‬qalaftūriyya) from a matrix َ ‫( قَ ْم‬qamṭar or qimṭar) ‫طر‬ box or case for books and records ‫( قَ ِ ّمين‬qammīn) stokehold of a bath ‫( قُ ْنب َُرة‬qunburah, pl. qanābir) crust of bread ‫( قَ ْنبِيل‬qanbīl or qinbīl) reddish-colored drug ‫( قَ ْنت َة‬qantah or qintah) city, town ‫( قَ ْنت َاني‬qantānī or qintānī) townsman ‫ قُنِ ْيدَة‬  (qunaydah) fortress ‫( ُمقَ ْندَل‬muqandal) riding to be silent, still َ‫( قَنَق‬qanaqa) to claim to be a convert from the َ‫( قَ ْن َون‬qanwana) People of the Book ‫( ُمقَ ْن ِون‬muqanwin) Muslim convert from Judaism or Christianity ‫( قَانُون‬qānūn) robe, shirt ‫( قَنَّاء‬qannā’) Christian ‫س أَبي حُجْ ٍر‬ ُ ‫( قَ ْو‬qawsu abī ḥujr)   ‫( قُوفَانِي‬qūfānī) = C1 and C2 have fawqānī  storyteller ‫ي‬ ّ ‫( قَا ِل‬qālī) ‫( قِير‬qīr) fraction of something to beg importunately ‫ف‬ َ ّ‫( قَ ِي‬qayyafa) ‫( قَ ْينُون‬qaynūn) place where the beggars divide up their earnings ‫( َكبَاب‬kabāb) fire ‫( َكبَّا َجة‬kabbājah) bandits ‫َّس‬ to prowl about and when one spots a َ ‫( َكب‬kabbasa) man who has just cashed a financial draft (suftaja), to pounce on him and extort part of it from him ‫( كَب ْشتر‬kab-sht-r) camel َ‫ِيون‬ ُّ ‫( كَابُل‬kābuliyūna)   to defecate َ‫( َكبَّن‬kabbana) ‫( َك َح َل‬kaḥala) to rub the eyes with something to induce a flow of tears ‫( ُكدَّة‬kuddah, pl. kidād) woman, wife ‫( َكدَى‬kadā) to elapse ‫( َكدَّى‬kaddā) to beg ّ‫( يَ ُكد‬yakuddu) He begs ‫( ُك ْديَة‬kudyah) act of begging ‫( مكدّى‬mukaddī) beggar ‫( َكذَّابَات‬kadhdhābāt) bandages tied around the forehead baths ُ‫( ك ََو ِاريب‬kawārīb) ‫اجي ُم‬ the jinn ِ ‫( ك ََر‬karājīm) َ‫( ك ََّرز‬karraza) to stand ‫َارز‬ standing ِ ‫( ك‬kāriz)

Appendix 1

155

‫س‬ to fast َ ‫( ك ََّر‬karrasa) ‫( ُك ْرس‬kurs) hunger to give to drink ‫ع‬ َ ‫( ك ََّر‬karraʿa) ‫( كَركَى‬karkā) to lead the worship ‫( ك َْزك‬kazk, pl. kazākī or kazāk) governor, amir ‫( َكسِح‬kasiḥ)   ‫( َكسِيح‬kasīḥ)   ‫( ت َ ْكسِيح‬taksīḥ)   ‫( َكسْر‬kasr) dirham ‫( َكسَّى‬kassā) to conceal ‫( ت َ َكسَّى‬takassā) to hide oneself ‫سا ِوي‬ Jew َ ‫( ِك‬kisāwī) َّ ‫( َك‬kashshasha) ‫ش‬ to feed َ ‫ش‬ ‫َش‬ eating ّ ‫( ك‬kashsh) َّ ‫( َك‬kashshah)   ‫شة‬ َّ ‫( َك‬kashshāb) ‫شاب‬ astrologers ‫( مكتشب‬muktashab) astrologer (?) ‫( كَاغ‬kāgh) man who pretends to be crazy ‫( كَاغَة‬kāghah) woman who pretends to be crazy ‫( ُك ْفتِي‬kuftī, pl. kafātī) Turk or Mongol ‫( ت َ ْكلِيل‬taklīl) some practice connected with alchemy, literally “making a crown,” perhaps the claimed manufacture of precious metals or jewels ‫( َم ْكلُوذَة‬maklūdhah) mutilated or severed hand ‫( َك َماخَة‬kammākhah or kamākhah) scorpion   َ‫ ك َْمذ‬، َ‫( ك َْمد‬kamda or kamdha) copulation ‫( َك َّماذ‬kammādh) frequentative adjectival form of copulation ‫( َكنَّاش‬kannāsh) brigand, footpad َ‫( ك ََّوز‬kawwaza) to stand up in an assembly (until one is given money) ‫( كَاز‬kāz) the slave who pushes his way into the circle of onlookers, in order that they might collect money for him, while he is in fact one of them (sc. of the beggars) ‫( ُكوش‬kūsh, pl. akwāsh) black slave ‫( كَيذ‬kaydh, pl. kaydhāt) penis ُ‫سان‬ َ ‫( َك ْي‬kaysān)   ‫سانِيَّة‬ َ ‫( َك ْي‬kaysāniyya)   to take, exact, seize ‫َاف‬ َ ‫( استَك‬istakāfa) ‫( يكفي‬yakfī) He gives. ‫( َلبِس‬lābis) person who appears in various masks and disguises; man who dresses up as a woman ‫سات‬ vulvas َ ‫( لَبُو‬labūsāt) ‫صام‬ up to, up to where َ ‫( لَبِي‬labīṣām) ‫( ُم ْل َجم‬muljam) cat

156 َ‫( لَ َحن‬laḥana) َ‫( لَذَّذ‬ladhdhadha)

Appendix 1

to give money to sweeten (food, etc.); to fill someone with sweetmeats, and so on َ‫( لَ ْوذَذ‬lawdhadha) sugar, sweetmeat ْ َ‫( ل‬laṭkh, pl. luṭkhān) cloak ‫طخ‬ to assemble, gather ‫ف‬ َّ َ‫( ل‬laffa) ‫( ل ْغر‬l-ghr) dregs of the population ‫( َم ْلقَم‬malqam, pl. malāqim) mouth to copulate ‫ِي‬ َ ‫( لَق‬laqiya) ‫( لَ ْقى‬laqy) copulation ‫( َم ْل ًو‬dhū l-malw) the one who swings a burning censer among people ‫الوان‬ dirhams َ (alwān) ‫( َمت َّ َح‬mattaḥa) to travel ‫( َمتْر‬matr) copulation َ ‫( َم ْخ‬makhṭara) to swallow one’s tongue and give the ‫ط َر‬ impression that the Greeks have cut it out َ ‫( َم ْخ‬makhṭarānī) ‫ط َرانِي‬ one who swallows one’s tongue ‫( َم ْم ُرور‬mamrūr) one who wears ragged clothes and shaves off his beard, thereby creating the impression that their minds are deranged through melancholia and excess of bile ‫( َم ْرد‬mard, pl. murūd) dirham ‫( َم َّراس‬marrās) snake charmer who has with him baskets of serpents ‫( ُم َم ِ ّرش‬mumarrish) numbing balms someone who prepares broth in a َ‫( َم َّرق‬marraqa) cauldron in the beggars’ house, then sells it to the sick and enfeebled members of their band ‫( َم ْرقَان‬marqān, pl. marāqīn) dinar ‫( ُم ْس ِهل‬mushhil) purgative, or specifically scammony ‫( مِ ْشت َان‬mishtān, pl. mashātīn) beggars’ trickery and stratagems ‫صتَبَان‬ ْ ‫( َم‬maṣtabān or maṣlayān) hair َ ‫ص‬ dwellers in communal homes for the َ‫ِيون‬ ْ ‫( َم‬maṣtabāniyūn) ُّ ‫طبَان‬ indigent َ ‫ص‬ ‫طبة‬ home of the indigent ْ ‫( َم‬maṣṭabah, maṣāṭīb) ّ ‫( َم‬maṭṭ) money, belongings ‫ط‬ ‫( َم ْقر‬maqr) back of a horse ‫( َم ْنج‬manj) a contrivance of the astrologers, which is placed in water, and it divides up the water into a special pattern of divinatory significance to beg َ‫( َم ْندَق‬mandaqa) beggars, mendicants َ‫ِيون‬ ُّ ‫( َم ْندَقَان‬mandaqāniyūn) ‫( َم ْندَل‬mandal) magic circle ‫اس‬ to know, get to know َ ‫( َم‬māsa)

Appendix 1 (yamūsu) ‫يموس‬ ُ ‫( َم ْوس‬maws) ‫س َر‬ َ ‫( َم ْي‬maysara) ‫س َرانِي‬ َ ‫( َم ْي‬maysarānī)

157

He knows knowing, getting to know to beg someone who begs, pretending to have fought the infidel on the frontier ‫( ُم َم ّ ِوش‬mumawwish) spoiling, ruining to become an adherent of ‫( َمي ََّم‬mayyama) Muḥammad’s religion ‫( المِ يم‬al-mīm) the Prophet Muhammad ‫( ت َْم ِييم‬tamyīm) the claim of being able to find buried treasure to shriek, shout out ‫( أ َ ْنبَ َر‬anbara) ‫( ن َْخر‬nakhr or naḥr) heavenward  ‫( نَسْب‬nasb, pl. ansāb) house ‫( نَ ْشر‬AD v. 77) nashr ُ ‫( نَا‬nāṭūr) ‫طور‬ accomplice in the beggars’ tricks َّ ‫( ن‬naṭṭās or naṭṭāsh) ‫َطاس‬ practitioners of quack medicine َ َ‫( ن‬naṭasha) ‫ش‬ to go away َ ‫ط‬ ‫ارة‬ those who shout out, snort َ َّ‫( نَع‬naʿʿārah) َ‫( أ َ ْنفَذ‬anfadha) to put into circulation, sell ‫( نَ ْفذ‬nafdh) act of selling ‫( نَفَّاذ‬naffādh) seller of hayākil and amulets ‫( ُم ْنفِذ‬munfidh)   َ‫( نَقَّز‬naqqaza) to disquiet, anger ‫( ت َ ْنكِيت‬tankīt) cover, garment. See tabkīt, as most of the MSS have this ‫( نَ ْكدَانِي‬nakdānī) parasite, intruder َ‫( ُمنَا َكذ‬munākadha) sharing out between themselves the clothing and weapons which they have collected on pretext of going off to the Holy War. ‫س‬ to pretend to follow the nāmūs or law َ ‫( نَ َّم‬nammasa) to make someone eager to give ‫ض‬ َ ‫( نَ َّه‬nahhaḍa) (money) ‫( نيف‬nīf) hunger ‫( َهبَتْ َرى‬habatrā) cold wind ‫( َهبْج‬habj) beating, striking ‫( َهبُّوج‬habbūj) lice ‫( هَبر‬habr) the act of sharing out; everything which the beggars collect to exact a share ‫( هَابَ َر‬hābara) ‫( ُمها ِبر‬muhābir, pl. muhābirūn) accomplices, henchmen ‫( هَاذُور‬hādhūr) the circle of fortune-tellers and their shills operating in a street assemblage about which people congregate ‫( ت َ َهذُّل‬tahadhdhul) a flaccid, perhaps paralytic, physical condition and feeble-mindedness anus ‫( ه ُّر‬hurr)

158 ‫ب‬ َ ‫( ه ََّز‬hazzaba)

Appendix 1

to reproach until they are covered in shame ‫( ه َِزيب‬hazīb) nasty, unpleasant َ ‫( َه‬haṭṭala) ‫ط َل‬ to see ‫( هُطل‬huṭl) eye ‫( َهفِي‬hafī) in, inside ‫( ه َُّلب‬hullāb) clothing ‫( هَالِك‬hālik) a healing drug َ‫( َه ْنبَذ‬hanbadha) to recite poetry to collect together, gather round ‫( َه ْنك ََم‬hankama) ‫( هنكامة‬hankāma, pl. hanākīm) audience, onlookers ‫( هَات‬hāt) tongues; reviling, insults ‫( هَاك‬hāk) hostility, contentiousness ‫( ه َْول‬hawl) day ‫( َوبْخ‬wabkh, pl. wubkhān or wibkhān) son, child ‫( َوبْر‬wabr) dog ‫( مِ يزَ ان‬mīzān) In geomancy, it is the fifteenth square out of the sixteen ‫( يَب ُْروح‬yabrūḥ) mandrake plant

APPENDIX 2 TAROT CARDS, TREASURE-HUNTING MANUALS, AND BOOKS OF SHADOW PLAYS

There can be no real appreciation of premodern Arabic manuscript and print cultures without considering the singular contributions of the ghurabā’. From printing amulets and pilgrimage certificates with wooden and metal matrices to illustrating astrological books with unusual scenes, the ghurabā’ astrologers developed these craft techniques and book genre in service to their craft, as props during fortune-telling sessions. The innovativeness of the astrologers begs the question of what else they and other gharīb craftworkers may have created. When in 1379 an Italian chronicler recorded the arrival of card games to Viterbo, he added that “it comes from the land of the Saracens and is called among them naib.”1 In Spain today, playing cards are still called naipes. Naib and naipes probably derived from the Arabic word nā’ib (deputy), which, along with the king (malik) and second deputy (nā’ib thānī), were the face cards of courtly rank in Mamluk Egypt. The four Mamluk suits were cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks, which Italians and Spanish incorporated into their playing cards. By contrast, Central Europeans adopted hearts, acorns, hawkbells, and leaves as their suits, and the French and English settled on the suits of hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs. These early European card sets were painted, with woodblock-printed cards emerging in the 1420s.2 Richard Bulliet wondered whether Romani groups had brought tarot cards (fortune-telling cards) to Italy from Mamluk Egypt in the fifteenth century.3 Although only a fragment of a twelfth-century set and a full set of fifteenth-century Mamluk hand-painted cards have survived, we know that West Asian and North African amulets were stamped with text and images of jinn, arches, schematic maps of Mecca and Medina, hands, mosque lamps, and architectural elements, so the ghurabā’ astrologers had the technical expertise to print illustrated cards.4 The etymology of the term tarot (in Italian, tarocco, pl. tarocchi) is unconfirmed, but Bulliet connected the debate to the ghurabā’ when he proposed the Sīn term ṭarsh as the root word. Bulliet’s thesis is more compelling if instead of ṭarsh, one were to consider other clues about the ghurabā’ and in modern Sīn/Sīm. The Arabic term ṭuruqiyya, or street people, was another name for the Banū Sāsān since the thirteenth century. In the table of contents of an undated anonymous Arabic manuscript entitled The Niceties of Clothing: The Secrets of

160

Appendix 2

Tricks, one finds the following chapter heading: “On the tricks of the Banū Sāsān, who are the ṭuruqiyya.”5 Unfortunately, the manuscript is incomplete and lacks this chapter, but the reference makes the equivalence explicit. A more implicit identification comes in Yāqūt’s (d. 1229) mention that the ṭuruqiyya call the wakhshīrak herb by the name of shīḥ. The gharīb narrator of al-Ḥillī poem illuminates the meaning. Among the litany of subterfuges that the speaker claims to have practiced is “substitut[ing] ordinary wormwood (shīḥ) for the more highlyprized Khurasanian variety (wakhshīrak).”6 Last, al-Nuwayrī (d. 1333) mentioned that the ṭuruqiyya trained cats and mice, much like the Abū Qiṭāṭ character in Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb or the narrator in al-Ḥillī’s poem who “trained a cat, a rat and a viper to live together amicably, each one in close proximity to the others.”7 Among the Egyptian Ḥalab, von Kremer recorded the word tur’aii (sorcerer) and Littmann identified tur’aīj (the German letter “j” sounds like the English consonant “y”) as the Egyptian “Gypsy” word for “magician.” Kahle, during his interviews with shadow play artists, noted this particular term in their Sīm: “‫طرق‬ ṭûra’i „Zauberer, Rammâl, Faqîh‟; es ist einer, der mit einer ṭarîqa zu tun hat.”8 Kahle’s transcription of the term into Arabic, along with his transliteration into Latin characters, shows that the final letter qāf has been transformed into a glottal stop, which is a known Arabic dialectal variant. One can reference the appendix to this article to see how the Sīn word qajama, meaning “to say,” is today pronounced ajama among the Ḥalab and retains the same meaning.9 Presumably, the Sīn term ṭuraq meant “sorcery” or “magic.” Even in Arabic, the ghurabā’ were called ṭuruqiyya (street people), and the twelfth chapter of al-Jawbarī’s book is entitled “Fī kashf asrār al-munajjimīn arbāb al-ṭarīq,” which means “on revealing the secrets of astrologers, the people of the street.” Dozy surmised that the terms arbāb al-ṭarīq and ṭuruqī “désignent en général les charlatans des places publiques, qu’ils soient opérateurs, astrologues, géomanciens ou autre chose.”10 The combination of the Strangers’ strong reputation for occult expertise, their pioneering usage of blockprinting with amulets, and the linguistic connection between ṭuraq and magic make the hypothesis of Strangers’ introduction of tarot to Europe a plausible one. Of course, additional research into astrological practices in medieval Europe could unearth evidence to solidify this argument. Several medieval observers counted treasure hunters (muṭālibiyya) among the ghurabā’. Jawbarī nicknamed them aṣḥāb al-mīm, referring to the first letter in muṭālibiyya, and devoted the entire eleventh chapter of his work to their stratagems and tricks. Treasure-hunting manuals like BnF arabe 2764, 2765, and 2767 and Gotha MS orient A1301 could also shed light on gharīb culture and literacy.11 Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) was appalled to learn that the muṭālibiyya used what was probably Sīn to obscure their intentions from their clients. “During these (operations), the (swindlers) use among themselves a (special) linguistic terminology [wa-baynahum fī dhālika ṣṭilāḥ fī kalāmihim] with the help of which they inveigle (their victims), and keep them in ignorance of what they say concerning the digging, incense, slaughtering of animals, and the other such things that they do.”12 If they also authored any of the extant treasure-hunting

Appendix 2

161

manuals or annotated the margins of manuals by others, we may be able to see how Sīn functioned in other literatures. As of now, two Sīn terms that Ḥillī recorded form the extent of our knowledge. “And in the stratagem of claiming to be able to find buried treasure (tamyīm), I have previously made a secret mark pointing to its location (gharzah).”13 Gharzah and tamyīm are both glossed in the manuscripts as Sīn terms. Scholars of medieval Eurasia have started asking why so many medieval Eurasian “classic texts” only exist in a single manuscript copy, such as Beowulf, Ḥadīth Riyāḍ wa-Bayāḍ, El Cid, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Ibn Ḥazm’s Neck-ring of the Dove.14 Their unique status suggests that they did not circulate widely in their time, either due to the mass destruction of copies or their unpopularity. How does a tendency to elevate unique texts to the status of a classic warp our perceptions of the Middle Ages? In the more obscure corners of premodern Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish literature, in manuscripts and prints of astrology, and treasure hunting, to name a few, we gain a richer sense of the ideas and peoples that shaped the past.

NOTES

Introduction 1 This manuscript, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha ms. orient. A114, represents the earliest known notebook in Arabic by a craftsperson. An Arabic edition and English study of this work are forthcoming: Boris Liebrenz and Kristina Richardson, ed., Ayyām Kamāl al-Dīn al-ḥā’ik: Ḥalab fī awākhir al-qarn al-‘āshir / The Notebook of Weaver Kamāl al-Dīn (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2021). 2 Liebrenz and Richardson 2021, 85 [Arabic]. 3 Wim Willems, “Ethnicity as a Death-Trap: The History of Gypsy Studies,” in Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach, ed. Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems, and Annemarie Cottaar (Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan, 1998), 34. 4 The German Ministry of the Interior, Building, and the Community (Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat) recognizes four national minorities: the Danes, the Frisians, the German Sinti and Roma, and the Sorbs. The state does not collect population statistics on any ethnic group, so even if the Yenish were granted official minority status, their precise numbers would not be known. See also, Viktoria Balon, “Verstehst du Sesshafter mich Jenischen? Von einem Volk der ‘Fahrenden’,” Das Feature, Deutschlandfunk, 2 July 2019. I thank Boris Liebrenz (Leipzig) for this reference. 5 Klaus Siewert, Münsters Masematte (Münster: Geheimsprachen Verlag, 2015), 5. Siewert claims that Yenish vocabulary derives from Rotwelsch (29 percent), Hebrew via Yiddish (28 percent), modern German (9 percent), old Westfalian dialect (9 percent), Sinte Romani (17 percent), unknown (9 percent), Romance languages (0.8 percent), and Slavic languages (0.4 percent). The Rotwelsch category needs to be better specified. Rotwelsch itself is defined as “the argot employed by crooks, thieves, and vagabonds in the German-speaking portions of central Europe” and contains 22 percent Hebrew vocabulary. See Gary Rendsburg and Robert Jütte, “Hebrew Loanwords in Rotwelsch,” in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Literature, ed. Geoffrey Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 111, 431–4. 6 Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 47. 7 Paul Sillitoe, Indigenous Studies and Engaged Anthropology: The Collaborative Movement (New York: Routledge, 2016), 35–6. 8 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. and trans. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 144. 9 Ibid. 10 Other theories of strangerhood investigate social phenomena arising from modern contexts. In Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (2014), James Vernon has argued that exploding population numbers and mobility in Victorian Britain created

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a society of strangers. A presupposition of his work is that Victorian subjects felt an attachment to the crown and state. In the premodern contexts that I examine, alienation from the ruling classes was mostly expected. One need only recognize and submit to their sovereignty. The strangerhood I investigate is a cultivated social and cultural alienation, with an implicit political one. See the essays in Customary Strangers: New Perspectives on Peripatetic Peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, ed. Joseph C. Berland and Aparna Rao (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). Faika Çelik, “‘Community in Motion’: Gypsies in Ottoman Imperial State Policy, Public Morality and [sic] at the Sharia Court of Üsküdar (1530s–1585s),” McGill University, PhD thesis, 2013, 191, fn. 34. Bernhard Streck, Die Ḥalab: Zigeuner am Nil (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1996), 120. Diana Altner, “Do All the Muslims of Tibet Belong to the Hui Nationality?” in Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, ed. Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (New York: Routledge, 2016), 348. Zoran Lapov, Alain Reyniers, and Madeleine Davy, “Les Roms Gurbets,” Études Tsiganes 35, no. 3 (2008): 154–77; Aparna Rao, “Strangers and Liminal Beings: Some Thoughts on Peripatetics, Insiders, and Outsiders in Southwest Asia,” in Berland and Rao (2004), 293, fn. 8; Jean Cantineau, “Études sur quelques parlers de nomades arabes d’Orient,” Annales de l’Institut d’Études Orientales 2 (1936): 39; Michael de Goeje, Mémoire sur les migrations des tsiganes à travers l’Asie (Leiden: Brill, 1903), 67–8. On the Syrian speech pattern of substituting the Arabic letter ghayn with qāf, see Cantineau 1936, 39. He notes specifically that the classical Arabic word gharīb is pronounced qarīb. See also de Goeje 1903, 67–8; Aparna Rao 2004, 293, fn. 8; Matt T. Salo, “Gypsy Ethnicity: Implications of Native Categories and Interaction for Ethnic Classification,” Ethnicity 6, no. 1 (1979): 85. Jan Yoors, The Gypsies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 134. Joan W. Scott, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 285. Ibid. Boris Liebrenz has shown that a thirteenth-century book composed by a Stranger and purporting to reveal Strangers’ secrets commanded unusually high prices in nineteenth-century Syria. An appetite for knowledge about the Strangers did not, however, translate into increased integration or reduced exoticization of their lifestyle. See his “‘Mit Gold nicht aufzuwiegen’: Der Wert von Büchern im osmanischen Syrien (11.-13./17.-19. Jahrhundert,” ZDMG 164, no. 3 (2014): 673–5. “La concurrence de l’anglais, même dans la vie courante, représentait une réelle menace pour le français et . . . les importations anglo-américaines dans notre lexique devenaient trop massives.” . Accessed March 22, 2019. For efforts to promote one English dialect in the early American republic, see Peter Martin, The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Lyle Campbell, “Language Isolates and Their History, or, What’s Weird, Anyway?” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 36 (2016): 23. Sarah G. Thomason, Language Contact: An Introduction (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001), 157–9.

164 Notes 24 Alexander Beider, “Reapplying the Language Tree Model to the History of Yiddish,” Journal of Jewish Languages 1 (2013): 77–121. 25 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 7. 26 Alfred von Kremer, “The Gipsies in Egypt,” Anthropology Review 2, no. 7 (1864): 262. 27 Ibid., 265. The terms Sīm and Sīn refer to the same language. In early 1970s Cairo, Everett Rowson observed, “More educated speakers say siim and are puzzled by siin, while the reverse is the case for the less educated.” See his “Cant and Argot in Cairo Colloquial Arabic,” Newsletter of the American Research Centre in Egypt (1983): 15–16. 28 von Kremer 1864, 266. 29 Alexandra Parrs, Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt: On the Peripheries of Society (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2017), 177. 30 Karin van Nieuwkerk, “Secret Communication and Marginality: The Case of Egyptian Entertainers,” Sharqiyyât 10 (1998): 29. 31 See, generally, Handbook of Jewish Languages, ed. Aaron D. Rubin and Lily Kahn (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 32 On this and other premodern sources on Arabic pidgins and creoles, see Sarah G. Thomason and Alaa Elgibali, “Before the Lingua Franca: Pidginized Arabic in the Eleventh Century A. D.,” Lingua 68 (1986): 317–49. 33 See Clifford Bosworth, The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld: The Banū Sāsān in Arabic Society and Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1976), I, 150–79. 34 Samuel England, “Drama and Multiculturalism in Crisis: Ibn Dāniyāl’s Shadow Play,” in The Study of al-Andalus: The Scholarship and Legacy of James T. Monroe, ed. Michelle M. Hamilton and David A. Wacks (Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2018), 166. 35 Bosworth 1976, II, 314. 36 Bosworth 1976, II, 208, 274. 37 Maḥmūd ‘Alī Ghūl, “Was the Ancient South Arabian Mdqnt the Islamic Miḥrāb?,” BSOAS 25, no. 2 (June 1962): 331–5. ‘Alī Ghūl clearly regretted that such an interesting linguistic convergence involved the disreputable Banū Sāsān. “The subject matter of the poem is of a degenerate social level, and the obscene language used to describe the disgusting tricks and rascalities of these rogues comes naturally in the context. It is unfortunately in such a context that we come across the word midhqān” (p. 331). 38 Jadwiga Pstrusińska, Secret Languages of Afghanistan and Their Speakers (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013); Vardan Voskanian, “The Iranian Loan-Words in Lomavren, the Secret Language of the Armenian Gypsies,” Iran & the Caucasus 6, no. 1/2 (2002): 169–80; Gurgen Melikian, “On the Problem of Secret Languages and Slangs in Iran,” Iran & the Caucasus 6, no. 1/2 (2002): 181–8; Ludwig Paul, “Die Geheimsprache von Kahak (Tafreš),” Orientalia Suecana 48 (1999): 105–14. 39 “Diese Liste zeigt, wie tief die Sprache des Argot in die Alltagssprache der Familien hineinreicht. Warum werden alltägliche Worte des Haushalts vor der Umgebungsbevölkerung verschleiert, denn die Wirkung der Geheimhaltung wird ja nur für die Umgebung erzielt?” Olaf Günther, Im Zwischenraum – Zigeuner in Zentralasien: Ein Vergleich postsowjetischer und afghanischer mugat-Gruppen (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2016), 252. 40 Trouillot 1995, 7.

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41 David S. Powers, Muḥammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), iii. 42 Kristina Richardson, “Blue and Green Eyes in the Islamicate Middle Ages,” Annales Islamologiques 48 (2014): 13–29. 43 From 1391 to 1476, most rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia, the territories that with Transylvania now make up modern Romania, agreed to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire. In 1476, Wallachia and Moldavia formalized their status as vassal states to the Ottomans but were independent enough to construct their own legal and governance structures. Slavery seems to have been institutionalized in the 1470s, when Roma are only mentioned as slaves. It is unclear how slavery began in Wallachia and Moldavia, but it endured until 1856 when slavery was abolished in the territories. The literature on this phenomenon is rather thin, and an in-depth study is a desideratum. For more, see Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, “Gypsy Slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia,” in Nationalisms Today, ed. Tomasz Kamusella and Krzysztof Jaskulowski (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 89–124; Viorel Achim, The Roma in Romanian History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 27–85; Peter F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), 113–26. 44 Lewy 2000, 102. 45 Lewy 2000, 202–4. 46 Slawomir Kapralski, “Identity Building and the Holocaust: Roma Political Nationalism,” Nationalism Papers 25, no. 2 (1997): 269–84. 47 Many non-Roma Europeans felt that the Roma were lying about their Egyptian origins, which helped sever Romanis from their African past. The fifteenthcentury German pilgrim Arnold von Harff said that they “claim to be from Little Egypt. But this is false.” Cited in Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 47. 48 Ian Hancock, “On the Interpretation of a Word: Porrajmos as Holocaust,” 2006. The Romani Archives and Documentation Center. http://radoc​.net. 49 Yaron Matras, “A Conflict of Paradigms,” Romani Studies 14, no. 2 (Dec. 2004): 195. [pp. 193–209]. 50 Andrew Woolford and Stefan Wolejszo, “Collecting on Moral Debts: Reparations for the Holocaust and Pořajmos,” Law & Society Review 40, no. 4 (2006): 875. 51 Yaron Matras, The Romani Gypsies (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), 156. 52 The ERRC began publishing the Roma Rights Journal in 1998, and these volumes document the organization’s various legal campaigns. 53 Anand Gopal, “The Island of Democracy,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2018, p. 38. 54 The linguistic anthropologist Bruno Herin described the special features of the Domari dialect spoken in Aleppo and Saraqib in his article “The Northern Dialects of Domari,” ZDMG 164, no. 2 (2014): 407–50. For an overview of the Domari language, which is closely related to Romani, see Robert A. S. MacAlister, The Language of the Nawar or Zutt, the Nomad Smiths of Palestine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1914); and Yaron Matras, A Grammar of Domari (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012). 55 Gernot Windfuhr, “European Gypsy in Iran: A First Report,” Anthropological Linguistics 12, no. 8 (1970): 271–92. The perspective of Donald L. Stilo, Windfuhr’s research assistant, is included in Bart McDowell, Gypsies: Wanderers of the World (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1970), 164.

166 Notes 56 Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 28. 57 For such laws in Mamluk Egypt (1250–1517 CE), the nineteenth-century United States, and Nazi Germany, see Kristina Richardson, Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World: Blighted Bodies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 39; Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Wolfgang Ayaß, “Bettler und soziale Außenseiter im Nationalsozialismus,” in Ausgesteuert – ausgegrenzt . . . angeblich asozial, ed. Anne Allex and Dietrich Kalkan (Neu-Ulm: AG-SPAK-Bücher, 2009), 21–36. 58 Bosworth 1976 II, 192. (AD vv. 18–19). 59 Three Shadow Plays by Muḥammad Ibn Dāniyāl, ed. Paul Kahle and Derek Hopwood (Cambridge: Trustees of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1992), 62. 60 Thomas Bauer, “Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār: Ein dichtender Handwerker aus Ägyptens Mamlukenzeit,” ZDMG 152 (2002): 88.

Chapter 1 1 Richardson 2012, 48. 2 Jonathan P. Berkey, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 29. 3 Cyrus Ali Zargar, “The Satiric Method of Ibn Dāniyāl: Morality and Anti-Morality in ‘Ṭayf al-Khayāl’,” Journal of Arabic Literature (2006): 88, fn. 58. 4 Al-Thaʿālibī, Yatīmat al-dahr fī maḥāsin ahl al-ʿaṣr (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), III, 416; Bosworth 1976, I, 191. 5 Bosworth 1976, I, 83 and II, 200. 6 Al-Thaʿālibī 1983, I, 137. 7 Aḥmad al-Ḥusayn, Adab al-kudya fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī: dirāsa fī adab al-shaḥḥādhīn wa’l-mutasawwilīn (Damascus: Wizārat al-thaqāfa, 2011), 179; Bosworth 1976, I, 68. 8 Al-Sharīshī, Sharḥ Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, ed. Muḥammad Abū l-Faḍl Ibrāhīm (Cairo: Al-Mu’assasa al-ʿarabiyya al-ḥadītha li’l-ṭabʿ wa’l-nashr wa’l-tawzī, 1976), V, 328 [laysa la-hum aṣl yunsabūna ilayhi illā al-arḍ]. 9 Ira M. Lapidus, “Tribes and State Formation in Islamic History,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29. 10 Bosworth 1976, I, 22. 11 Arnold Franklin, This Noble House: Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 9. 12 Manuela Höglmeier, Al-Ǧawbarī und sein Kašf al-asrār: ein Sittenbild des Gauners im arabisch-islamischen Mittelalter: Einführung, Edition und Kommentar (Berlin: Schwarz, 2006), 121. 13 Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, Dīwān Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (Najaf: Al-Maṭbaʿa al-ʿilmiyya, 1956), 424. 14 Paul Kahle, “The Arabic Shadow Play in Egypt,” JRASGBI 1 (1940): 32. 15 Bosworth 1976, II, 208. AD vv. 127, 129. 16 al-Ḥillī 1956, 423 (ṭawāʾif al-ghurabāʾ; hādhihī al-ṭāʾifa; baʿḍ al-ashyākhihim); Höglmeier 2006, 348 (bayn al- ṭawāʾif); Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Zarkhūrī, Zahr al-basātīn fī ʿilm al-mashātīn: kitāb turāthī nādir al-tiqānah wa’l-ṣināʿāt (Cairo: Maktabat al-Imām al-Bukhārī li’l-nashr wa’l-tawzīʿ, 2012), 183 (ṭarāʾiq banī sāsān); Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Maqqarī, Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb

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27

28 29 30 31 32

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(Leiden: Brill, 1855), I, 21 (ṭarīqat sāsān). This last phrase appears in Abū ʿUmar al-Zajjāl’s (d. 1440–1) maqāma about the Banū Sāsān. On the shaykh al-ṭawāʾif, see William Brinner, “The Significance of the Ḥarāfīsh and Their ‘Sultan’,” JESHO 6, no. 2 (1963): 204. Gabriel Baer, Egyptian Guilds in Modern Times (Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society, 1964), 37. Al-Raḍī Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn, Kitāb al-dhakhā’ir wa’l-tuḥaf bīr al-ṣanā’i’ wa’l-ḥiraf, Gotha MS orient A. 903, fols. 35r–40r. Berkey 2001, 28–9. Michael de Goeje was the first modern scholar to notice that the astrologers of the Banū Sāsān called themselves ghurabāʾ. See de Goeje, “Gaubarî’s ‘entdeckte Geheimnisse’,” ZDMG 20 (1866): 508 and de Goeje 1903, 67–8. Höglmeier 2006, 214. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 62. (intum muʿāshīr al-ghurabā wa-sā’ir banī sāsān udabā’). A sixteenth-century manuscript of this qaṣīda (Vatican Library MS 583.5) bears this title, but it is most commonly known linked to Abū Dulaf ’s poem on the same topic. They are generally referred together as qaṣāʾid sāsāniyya. See, for example, Bosworth 1976, I, xi; Al-Jāḥiẓ, The Book of Misers: A Translation of al-Bukhalā’, trans. R. B. Serjeant (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1997), 36, fn. 164; Jamal al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī, The Book of Charlatans, trans. Humphrey Davies (New York: New York University Press, 2020), xiii. The Arabic root gh-r-b was present in much Sāsānī literature. In his qasīda al-ʿUkbarī referred to the beggar lords as presiding over banī l-ghurba, or the tribe of exile. Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1023), “the mainstay of the Banū Sāsān,” wrote at length about the concept of being gharīb and consorted with itinerant Sufis whom he called al-ghurabā’. Bosworth 1976, I, 58; and Joel L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 25. Höglmeier 2006, 444. al-Zarkhūrī 2012, 185. In the nineteenth century the Egyptian Nawar “intermarr[ied] with the Fellahin, or Arabs of the soil, from whom, in physical appearance and dress, they can be hardly distinguished.” Capt. Newbold, “The Gypsies of Egypt,” JRASGBI 16 (1856): 294. Similarly, in the UK the term “Gypsy” is applied equally to the Roma and to Irish Travellers, the latter of whom speak English and sometimes also a Irish Gaelicderived mixed language, such as Shelta. These communities have long histories of interactions and their members lead similar lifestyles, but their languages are distinct. Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 203–4. Michael C. A. Macdonald et al. “Arabs and Empires before the Sixth Century,” in Arabs and Empires before Islam, ed. Greg Fisher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 14. D. T. Potts, Nomadism in Iran from Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 160. Çelik 2013, 191, fn. 34. The article mentioned in this excerpt is Hüseyin Yıldız, “Türkçede Çingeneler İçin Kullanılan Kelimeler ve Bunların Etimolojileri,” Dil Araștırmaları Dergisi 1, no. 1 (2007): 61–82. Giulio Soravia, I dialetti degli zingari italiani (Pisa: Pacini, 1977), 65–6, 83, 94. Soravia only remarked the connection between fílo and fīl, and I have posited the other etymological connections.

168 Notes 33 Aparna Rao, Les Ġorbat d’Afghanistan: Aspects économiques d’un groupe itinérant ‘Jat’ (Paris: Institut d’Iranologie de Téhéran, 1982); Aparna Rao, “Ghorbat,” in Encyclopedia of World Cultures, ed. David Levinson et al. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996), IX, 105–7; Asta Olesen, “Adaptive Strategies among Itinerant Craftsmen in Eastern Afghanistan: Musallis, Shaykh Mohammadis and Ghorbats,” in Hommes et Terres d’Islam. Mélanges offerts à Xavier de Planhol, ed. Daniel Balland (Tehran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 2000), I, 435–45; idem, Afghan Craftsmen: The Cultures of Three Itinerant Communities (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 206–83; Katja Mielke, “Tracing Change: On the Positionality of Traditionally Mobile Groups in Kabul’s Camps,” Internationales Asien Forum. International Quarterly for Asian Studies 47, no. 3 (2016): 245–71.  34 Streck 1996, 45. 35 Mitra Asfari, “Kinship among the Ġorbat of Babol,” Anthropology of the Middle East 12, no. 2 (2017): 47; for more on the Iranian Ghorbat(i), see idem., “Etrangers endotiques de Téhéran: une ethnographie des dynamiques identitaires des Ġorbats,” PhD thesis, Université René Descartes Paris V, 2015; and Fredrik Barth, Nomads of South Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 91–3. 36 Josafa Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini, Travels to Tana and Persia, ed. Lord Stanley of Alderley (London: Haklyut Society, 1873), 50–1. 37 Roy S. Fischel, “Ghariban in the Deccan: Migration, Elite Mobility, and the Making and Unmaking of an Early Modern State,” in Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700, ed. Keelan Overton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 129. 38 De Goeje 1903, 83–5. 39 Charles Leland, The Gypsies (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1882), 331–3; de Goeje 1903, 5. 40 Manir Ali, et al., “Null Mutations in LTBP2 Cause Primary Congenital Glaucoma,” American Journal of Human Genetics 84 (2009): 664–71. 41 Abū ʿUthmān al-Jāḥiẓ, Al-Bayān wa’l-tabyīn, 4 vols., ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn (Cairo: Maktabat al-khānjī, 1968), I, 32. 42 de Goeje 1903, 72. 43 Geert Jan van Gelder, “Literary Criticism as Literature,” in The Weaving of Words: Approaches to Classical Arabic Prose, ed. Lale Behzadi and Vahid Behmardi (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2009), 69 [raṭānat al-zuṭṭ]. 44 Mohsen Zakeri, Sasanid Soldiers in Early Muslim Society: The Origins of ʿAyyārān and Futuwwa (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1995), 121–2. 45 M. J. de Goeje, “A Contribution to the History of the Gypsies,” in The Accounts of the Gypsies of India, ed. David MacRitchie (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1886), 16; Guy Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 244. 46 Andreas Kaplony, “Comparing Al-Kāshgarī’s Map to His Text: On the Visual Language, Purpose, and Transmission of Arabic-Islamic Maps,” in The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road, ed. Philippe Forêt and Andreas Kaplony (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 18–9 (figures 7.1 and 7.2), 147. 47 C. E. Bosworth, “Al-Zuṭṭ,” EI2, X, 574. 48 Khalil ‘Athamina, “Non-Arab Regiments and Private Militias during the Umayyād Period,” Arabica 45, no. 3 (1998): 355–9; Zakeri 1995, 158–9; Sean Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic: Ibn Saba’ and the Origins of Shī‘ism (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 121, 123.

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49 Aḥmad b. Shuʿayb al-Nasā’ī, Kitāb al-sunan al-kubrā, ed. ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Turkī (Beirut: al-mu’assasat al-risāla, 2001), VII, 105, no. 4065. 50 Christian Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 188. 51 Bosworth, “Sayābidja,” in EI2, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1997), IX, 97–8; Charles Pellat, “Mukaddī,” in EI2, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1993), VII, 494–5. 52 Abū ʿUthmān al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-ḥayawān, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn, 8 vols. (Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1949–50), V, 398–9. 53 Paul G. Forand, “The Status of the Land and Inhabitants of the Sawad during the First Two Centuries of Islām,” JESHO 14, no. 1 (1971): 33–6. 54 Al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī. Storm and Stress along the Northern Frontiers of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate, trans. C. E. Bosworth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), XXXIII, 11–13. 55 A. Asa Eger, “The Swamps of Home: Marsh Formation and Settlement in the Early Medieval Near East,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 70, no. 1 (April 2011): 59–62. 56 Ibid., XXXIII, 8–9. 57 Ibid., XXXIII, 11; Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1999), 14. 58 Saḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Book 60, Hadith 109. 59 Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Fatḥ al-bārī: sharḥ Ṣaḥiḥ al-Bukhārī, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Bāz, 13 vols. (Cairo: Al-Maṭbaʿa al-salafiyya, 1960–70), VI, 485. 60 Ewald Wagner, Abū Nuwās: eine Studie zur arabischen Literatur der frühen ʿAbbāsidenzeit (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965), 39, 48. 61 Wladimir Ivanow, “Ibn al-Quddah (The Alleged Founder of Ismailism),” Ismaili Society Series A-9 (1957): 114, fn. 21. 62 Heinz Halm, “Baqliyya,” in EI 3 ; Wilferd Madelung, “Ḳarmaṭī,” in EI2, IV, 661. 63 Muḥammad b. Mukarram Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān alʿarab, 1830, q.v. z-ṭ-ṭ. Consulted online at ejtaal​.ne​t. 64 Zoltan Szombathy, Mujūn: Libertinism in Mediaeval Muslim Society and Literature (Warminster: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2013), 29, 77. 65 Hossein Modarressi, Tradition and Survival: A Bibliographical Survey of Early Shīʿite Literature (Oxford: OneWorld, 2003), 138–9, 209. 66 Wladimir Ivanow, Ibn Al-Qaddah (The Alleged Founder of Ismailism) (Bombay: Ismaili Society, 1957), 100–1. 67 Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 35–7. 68 Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq, Al-Taʿlīq: yawmiyyāt Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Ṭawq, 834– 915/1430–1509 (Damascus: Institut français d’études arabes de Damas, 2000), I, 403. 69 Luke Yarbrough, “Introduction,” in al-Nābulusī, ʿUthmān b. Ibrāhīm, The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt, ed. and trans. by Luke Yarbrough (New York: New York University Press, 2016), xviii–xxxii. 70 On the term mukaddī, see Pellat 1993 and Bosworth 1976, I, 34. Some examples of Ghajar Romani include pani “water,” machi “fish,” bakra “sheep,” mansh “father,” ag “fire,” and ghora “horse.” For Ghajar vocabulary lists, see Newbold 1856, 285–312; John Sampson, “The Ghagar of Egypt: A Chapter in the History of Gypsy Migration,”

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JGLS (1928): 78–90; and Émile Galtier, “Les Tsiganes d’Egypte et de Syrie,” Mémoires publiés par les membres de la Mission archéologique française au Caire (1912): 1–9. For Sīn, consult this book’s glossary. Al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-bukhalā’ (Cairo: Dār al-maʿārif, 1981), 46, 49–50. Bosworth 1976, II, 208. The Zanj and Zuṭṭ who joined the Banū Sāsān could very well have been fugitive slaves. Höglmeier 2006, 141. S. B. Miles, “On the Route between Sohar and el-Bereymi in Oman, with a Note on the Zatt, or Gipsies in Arabia,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 46 (1877): 57. Recall that MacAlister titled his 1914 book The Language of the Nawar or Zutt, the Nomad Smiths of Palestine.

Chapter 2 1 Yaron Matras, Hazel Gardner, Charlotte Jones, and Veronica Schulman, “Angloromani: A Different Kind of Language?” Anthropological Linguistics (2007): 142–84. 2 Martin Schwartz, “Loterā’i,” Iranica Online 2012 (accessed on September 23, 2015), and idem., “Loterāi: Jewish Jargon, Muslim Argot,” in Jews of Iran: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World, ed. Houman M. Sarshar (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 33–57. 3 Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, Akhlāq al-wazīrayn (Damascus: al-Majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿarabī, 1965), 185. [kāna yataʿallamu minhu kalāma l-mukaddīna wa-munāghāta l-shaḥḥādhīna]. 4 Al-Tawḥīdī 1965, 215. Translated in Bosworth 1976, I, 73. 5 Al-Thaʿālibī 1983, III, 137. Translated in Bosworth 1976, I, 68. 6 ʿAqīl b. Muḥammad al-Aḥnaf al-ʿUkbarī, Dīwān al-Aḥnaf al-ʿUkbarī, ed. Sulṭān b. Saʿd (Riyadh: s. n., 1999), 39. A portion is cited in al-Ḥusayn (2011, 101). 7 Al-Thaʿālibī 1983, III, 356–7. Translated in Bosworth 1976, I, 76. 8 From Greek to lughat Banī Sāsān, the phonemes appear to have been reordered. 9 In a twenty-first-century Shiʿi Bahraini dialect, sakkar means “to block (irrigation channel).” See Clive Holes, Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia (Leiden: Brill, 2001), I, 242. 10 Martin Schwartz, “On Some Iranian Secret Vocabularies, as Evidenced by a Fourteenth-Century Persian Manuscript,” in Trends in Iranian and Persian Linguistics, ed. Alireza Korangy and Corey Miller (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2018), 69–80. 11 Schwartz 2014, 50, 54. 12 Devin Stewart, “Professional Literary Mendicancy in the Letters and Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī,” in Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationships from Abbasid to Safavid Times, ed. Beatrice Gruendler and Louise Marlow (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004), 39–47. 13 Al-Hamadhānī, The Maqámát of Badíʿ al-Zamán al-Hamadhání, trans. W. J. Prendergast (London: Madras Luzac & Co., 1915), 81–2. 14 Matthew Keegan, “Commentators, Collators, and Copyists: Interpreting Manuscript Variation in the Exordium of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt,” in Arabic Humanities, Islamic

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20 21 22 23

24

25 26

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Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett K. Rowson, ed. Joseph E. Lowry and Shawkat M. Toorawa (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 295–316. Al-Ḥarīrī, Kitāb Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī (Beirut: Maṭbaʿat al-maʿārif, 1873), 35. Al-Sharīshī 1970, I, 207. Al-Ḥarīrī 1873, 52. Ibid., 24. [sirāj al-ghurabāʾ wa-tāj al-udabāʾ]. Al-Sharīshī 1976, V, 328. Abū Dulaf also noted that “in the dusty roadway, there are of our company the lords of the dusty ones,” explaining that they are Sāsāni beggars who sit in the road so that the wind blows dust onto them. People give them money out of pity (v. 48). Father Anastas, a Carmelite missionary in Syria in the early twentieth century, described as many Nawar tribes as he knew. At the end, he claimed that he had “set aside all mention of the other names of the Nawar among the Arabs, such as are found in common current speech; as for example, Ṣaʿālīk (beggars), Beni Ġabrā (sons of the dust) . . . and the rest of such synonymous words.” See Father Anastas, “The Nawar or Gypsies of the East, Part I,” trans. Alexander Russell, JGLS 7, no. 4 (1913–14): 319. Maurice Pomerantz, “A Maqāma Collection by a Mamlūk Historian: al-Maqāmāt al-Ğalāliyya by al-Ḥasan b. Abī Muḥammad al-Ṣafadī (fl. First Quarter of the 8th/14th c.),” Arabica 61 (2014): 662–3. Ibn Abī Ḥajalah, “Manṭiq al-ṭayr,” Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, (Ahlwardt 8554) Wetzstein 1803.2, fol. 104r. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama: A History of a Genre (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 396. Höglmeier 2006, 141. The “beards for women” may signify pubic wigs or merkins. In accordance with ritual purity laws, observant Muslims would have removed their pubic hair, but there is evidence that female sex workers typically did not. See James T. Monroe and Mark Pettigrew, “The Decline of Courtly Patronage and the Appearance of New Genres in Arabic Literature: The Case of the Zajal, the Maqāma, and the Shadow Play,” Journal of Arabic Literature 34, no. 1/2 (2003): 148. For a thirteenth-century reference to a woman’s pubic hair as a beard, see A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia: Ibn Mujawir’s Tarikh al-Mustabsir, trans. G. Rex Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 83. Höglmeier 2006, 214, 441–2, 498. The text offers no explanation for the origins of the name Sīn, but Höglmeier believes that it is the first letter of the Arabic word sīmiyāʾ, or “natural magic.” That Sīn in classical Persian meant “natural magic, alchemy” only lends support to her claim. Indeed, various aqlām al-sīmiyāʾ, or cryptographic scripts based on a twenty-eight-letter alphabet, were used in magical formulas. See [Treatise on ancient, alchemical, and magical alphabets], Princeton Garrett MS 52B, fols. 41r–45v. This passage partially explains a line in Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow play, wherein the astrologer advises his customer to “beware of people whose name begins with the letter qāf, and beware ṣāḥib al-sīn wa’l-kāf.” See Three Shadow Plays 1992, 70. The aṣḥāb al-sīn must have been astrologers. Al-Zarkhūrī confirms that within the ranks of the Banū Sāsān the aṣḥāb al-kāf were alchemists (al-kīmāwiyūn) and the aṣḥāb al-mīm were treasure hunters (al-muṭālibiyūn). See al-Zarkhūrī 2012, 185. Höglmeier 2006, 348, 498. On the thirty-three Arabic manuscripts and the single Karshuni one, see Höglmeier 2006, 51–3. I also consulted BnF Paris MS 4640 Al-Mukhtār fī kashf al-asrār, but it did not include the section about Sīn. René Khawam’s French translation of the Sīn

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

text seems completely fabricated. As he did not indicate which manuscript(s) he used, I am unable to verify his source for these translations. See ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Djawbarī, Le Voile arraché: l’autre visage de l’Islam, trans. Khawam (Paris: Phébus, 1979–80), II, 206. The two manuscripts mostly overlap; however, the scribe of the Istanbul manuscript interpolated the word h​.b​.t​.​r​.sh between kasiḥāb and bi-baht. In Sīn habatrā means “cold wind” but does not make much sense here. References to the verses of Abū Dulaf and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī: samqūn (AD v. 86), kasiḥ (SD v. 71), baht (SD v. 34, 48), and bahhala (SD vv. 34, 48). Three Shadow Plays 1992, 74. [jamālu wajhi yasbī bi-ḥusnihi kulla jinsi]. Verse references: nisb (SD vv. 8, 38, 43, 73), maṭṭ (SD vv. 7, 13, 67), mushandal (SD v. 68), dammakha (SD v. 58), and ṭalīm (SD v. 57). Verse references: ṣahā (SD vv. 12, 71), saʿʿā (SD v. 22), barkūsh (AD v. 75), and kaddā (AD v. 62). Li Guo, The Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl’s Mamluk Cairo (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 6. Reuven Amitai, Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhānid War, 1260–1281 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 108–9; Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality: Studies in Anthropological History (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 244–7. Guo, “Reading Adab in Historical Light: Factuality and Ambiguity in Ibn Dāniyāl’s ‘Occasional Verses’ on Mamluk Society and Politics,” in History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods, ed. Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh A. Quinn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 388. Irmeli Perho, “Climbing the Ladder: Social Mobility in the Mamluk Period,” Mamlūk Studies Review (2011): 19–20. Translated in N. Peter Joosse and Peter E. Pormann, “Decline and Decadence in Iraq and Syria after the Age of Avicenna? ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (1162–1231) between Myth and History,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84, no. 1 (2010): 18. Translated in Peter E. Pormann, “The Physician and the Other: Images of the Charlatan in Medieval Islam,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79, no. 2 (2005): 218–9. Ibn Dāniyāl, Urjūza fī l-ṭibb, MS Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ayasofya 3645/2, fols. 85–114. I was unable to view this manuscript. Étienne-Marc Quatremère, Histoire des Sultans mamlouks de l’Égypte (Paris: Oriental Translation Fund, 1837–45), I, i, 195–7. Brinner 1963. Ibn Dāniyāl, Al-Mukhtār shiʿr Ibn Dāniyāl, ed. Muḥammad Nāyif al-Dulaymī (Mosul: n. p., 1978), 239, vv. 31–2. Bosworth 1976, II, 197, v. 56. Mustafa Badawi, “Introductory Essay,” in Three Shadow Plays 1992, 25. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 25 [Arabic]. This following transcription uses Jacob, Ein ägyptischer Jahrmarkt im 13. Jahrhundert (Munich: Verlag der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1910), 7–8; and Three Shadow Plays 1992, 57. Recently, two additional manuscripts of Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow plays have come to light. Cairo, Adab Ṭalʿat, no. 2774, 1327 CE and Cairo, Adab, no. 186, 1370 CE. See Ahmed Shafik, “Ibn Dāniyāl (646/1248–710/1310): Poeta y Renovador del Teatro de Sombras,” Miscélanea de estudios árabes y hebraicos Sección Árabe-Islam (2012): 103.

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46 Ibid., 57 (Arabic). Verse references: kubbana (AD v. 133), kadā (SD v. 69), sirmāṭ (AD v. 76), fakkaka (AD v. 40), muḥannin (SD v. 25), haṭala (SD v. 9, 18), al-kudd (AD v. 141; SD v. 57), samāqīn (SD v. 11), fays (SD, v. 3), and mardī (SD v. 3). I was able to define one other word through recourse to modern Ḥalabi word lists. Yikīf in Ḥalabi means “he gives.” See Werner Vycichl, “The Slang of the Halab is-Sudan,” Kush 7 (1959): 228. The fourth verse recurs in Ibn Dāniyāl 1978, 239, v. 27. 47 Jacob 1910, 7–8. 48 Ibn Dâniyâl, Les Comédiens de la rue, trans. René Khawam (Paris: L’Esprit des Péninsules, 1997), 23–4. 49 Francesca Corrao, Il riso, il comico e la festa al Cairo nel XIII secolo (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino, 1996), 116–17. 50 Theatre from Medieval Cairo: The Ibn Dāniyāl Trilogy, trans. and ed. Safi Mahfouz and Marvin Carlson (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2013), 94. 51 Three Shadow Plays 1992, 58. For the reading of copper coins as tubūk, rather than the editor’s yubūk, see SD vv. 3, 68. 52 Theatre from Medieval Cairo 2013, xxix; Guo 2012, 24. 53 Erich Prokosch, “Zigeuner und Schattentheater: Ein vorläufiger Überblick,” Grazer Linguistische Studien 58 (2002): 103–29. 54 Jacob 1910, 8. 55 Kahle 1940, 24. 56 al-Ḥillī 1956, 423. This language is not to be confused with al-lisān al-gharbī, which signified Amazigh languages in medieval and early modern Arabic sources. 57 al-Ḥillī 1956, 423; Bosworth 1976, I, 104 ff. 58 Bosworth 1976, II, 304–5. 59 Private communication from Martin Schwartz (November 8, 2015). 60 Szombathy 2013, 253. 61 On kalām al-shuṭṭār, see Abū Saʿd Manṣūr b. al-Ḥusayn al-Ābī, Min Nathr al-durr, ed. Maẓhar al-Ḥajjī, 4 vols. (Damascus: Manshūrāt wizārat al-thaqāfa fī al-jumhūriyya al-ʿarabiyya al-sūriyya, 1998), II, 213–8. On aḥnadha, see Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Thaʿlab, Majālis Thaʿlab, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif bi-Miṣr, 1969), 143. 62 Al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār al-mudhākara, ed. ʿAbbūd al-Shālijī, 8 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1971), I, 2–7. 63 Al-Thaʿālibī 1983, III, 35 [wa-in kānat mufṣiḥaʿan al-sakhāfa, mashūba bi-lughāt al-khuldiyyīn wa-l-mukaddīn wa-ahl al-shaṭāra]. See also Bosworth 1976, I, 64. 64 Al-Jāḥiẓ 1997, 41, fn. 194. 65 Translated in Sinan Antoon, The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and Sukhf (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 40–1. 66 Antoon 2014, 78, 177–8, vv. 21 and 23. 67 Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Khafājī, Rayḥānat al-alibbā’ wa-zahrat al-ḥayāt al-dunyā, ed. ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw, 2 vols. (Cairo: ʿIsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1967), II, 140; idem. Shifā’ al-ghalīl fīmā fī kalām al-ʿarab min al-dakhīl (Cairo: n. p., 1282 [1865]), 144. 68 Macalister 1914; Giovanni Canova, “Note sulle tradizioni zingare in Egitto attraverso la testimonianza di un cap Nawar,” Lacio Drom 17, no. 6 (1981): 4–25; Matras 2012; Herin 2014. Here, I should correct a falsehood that has crept into the historiography, namely that in 1322 CE the Irish Franciscan monk Symon Simeonis recorded the presence of three Egyptian and Nubian tribes in Crete: the Ragar (Ghajar), Elebj (Ḥalabī), and Muri (Nūrī). Simeonis only described nomads in Crete, without

174 Notes

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71 72 73 74 75 76

77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

mentioning tribal names. See Symon Simeonis, Itinerarium Symonis Semeonis ab Hybernia ab Terram Sanctam, ed. Mario Esposito (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1960), 44–5. Cf. C. J. Popp Serboianu, Les Tsiganes (Paris: Payot, 1930), 24; Jean-Paul Clébert, The Gypsies, trans. Charles Duff (London: Vista, 1963), 84; and Streck 1996, 318. von Kremer 1864, 265. In modern Egyptian Arabic a “sīm” is a code or secret language. Captain Newbold’s Ḥalabi word list was published in 1856, but he did not mention that speakers referred to it as Sīm or Sīn. For later research on the Ḥalabi dialect, see Galtier 1912; Enno Littmann, Zigeuner-Arabisch: Wortschatz und Grammatik der arabischen Bestandteile in den morgenländischen Zigeunersprachen (Bonn-Leipzig: Kurt Schroeder Verlag, 1920), 1–40; Hans A. Winkler, Ägyptische Volkskunde (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1936), 259–62, 345–81, 388–93; Werner Vycichl, “Zur Geschichte der Halab,” Archiv für Aegyptische Archaeologie 1, no. 6 (June 1938): 138; Vycichl 1959, 222–8; Streck 1996, 290–303; Bernhard Streck, “Über Sprache und Gewerbe der Niltalzigeuner,” Gießener Hefte für Tsiganologie 1, no. 1 (1984): 26–57. de Goeje 1903, 71. Everett Rowson, “Cant and Argot in Cairo Colloquial Arabic,” Newsletter of the American Research Centre in Egypt 122 (1983): 15-16. Idem., “Al-Sīm,” in EI2, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1997), IX, 611. Littmann 1920, 6–20. Paul Kahle, “Eine Zunftsprache der ägyptischen Schattenspieler,” Islamica 2 (1926): 313–22. Der Leuchtturm von Alexandria. Ein arabisches Schattenspiel aus dem mittelalterlichen Ägypten, ed. Paul Kahle and Georg Jacob (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1930), 34*–35*. Elmeḥázz means “one who strangles,” and rabaṣ is the person who stands lookout. Rowson 1983, 13–24. The phenomenon of Middle Eastern goldsmiths’ dialects merits further exploration. The goldsmiths of Damascus also speak a special dialect, for which see Michel Barbot, “Notes lexicographiques sur les orfèvres et bijoutiers de Damas (texte révisé),” Arabica 21, no. 1 (1974): 72–83; and Claudia Wolfer, “Arabic Secret Languages,” Folia Orientalia 47, no. 2 (2011): 8–49. Dwight Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 73, fn. 28; MacAlister 1914, 150; Littmann 1920, 15, no. 67; Kahle 1926, 317. ʿAlī ʿĪsā, Al-Lughāt al-sirriyya (Alexandria: self-published, 1988), 105; Bosworth 1976, II, 277. ʿĪsā 1988, 105. ʿĪsā 1988, 105–12. van Nieuwkerk 1998, 33. Idem., “A Trade Like Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 202. Idem. 2008, 99; Idem. 1998, 36; Newbold 1856, 297. Albiruni Center for Oriental Manuscripts, Tashkent State Institute of Oriental Studies, MS 2213/XXV fols. 74r–76v. See A. A. Semenov, Sobranie vostochnykh rukopiseĭ Akademii nauk Uzbekskoĭ SSR (Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR), 11 vols. (Tashkent: Izd-vo Akademii

Notes

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88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

175

nauk UzSSR, 1952), I, 196–7; W. Ivanow, “An Old Gypsy-Darwish Jargon,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal N.S. 18 (1922): 373–83; Schwartz 2018. I am grateful to Martin Schwartz (Berkeley) for sharing this information with me. Anna L. Troitskaya, “Abdoltili. Argo tsekha artistov I muzikantov Srednei Azii,” Sovetskoe Vostokovedeniei 5 (1948): 251–74; Shirin Akiner, “Enduring Strangers: Mughat, Lyuli, and Other Peripatetics in the Social Fabric of Central Asia,” in Customary Strangers: New Perspectives on Peripatetic Peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, ed. Aparnu Rao and Joseph C. Berland (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 300. The Abdal of Xinjiang province in China are nomadic Shiʿites, who speak a mixed language of Turkish grammar with a Persian vocabulary. On this Abdal group, see Otto Ladstätter and Andreas Tietze, Die Abdal (Äynu) in Xinjiang (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994). Bosworth 1976 II, 210, 281; Troitskaya 1948, 256, 262, 267. Bosworth 1976 II, 296, 299, 316, 338, vv. 21, 57. von Kremer 1864, 266. Richardson, “Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature,” Der Islam 94, no. 1 (2017): 151–6. Günther 2016, 250. Ladstätter and Tietze 1994, 83; J.-L. Dutreuil de Rhins and F. Grenard, Mission scientifique dans la haute Asie: 1890–1895. Deuxième partie (Paris: E. Leroux, 1898), 313. Bosworth 1976, I, 174. Parvaneh Pourshariati, “Local Historiography in Early Medieval Iran and the Tārīkh-i Bayhaq,” Iranian Studies 33, no. 1/2 (2000): 151–2. Even as late as the 1910s, [i]n the west of Persia, in the districts bordering on the Turkish Empire, the name of the Gypsies varies between Zōzan, Sōzan, Zayzān, Sayzān, Sōsān, Saysān, and Sasān, which are erroneous renderings of Sāsāniyah or Beni Sāsān. This is the name of the Gypsies among the present day Arabs according to what is published in their books and histories; moreover, it is their real name, which includes all the tribes of the Gypsies in their classes, families, and divisions. (Father Anastas 1913–14, 316)

96 Peter Behnstedt and Manfred Woidich, Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2011–2014), I, 71, and II, 498. 97 Colin, Georges S. Notes on Eating, Drinking, and Smoking. Dossier 88, p. 38. Papiers d’orientalistes 75: Georges S. Colin. BnF, Paris, August 28, 2017. 98 Jean Lapanne-Joinville, “Contribution à la connaîssance des argots arabes du Maroc,” Hespéris 42 (1955): 209–11, 213–4. All of these words were recorded in Ulad Bū ‘Azīz, a rural community twenty kilometers southwest of Casablanca, but the terms for “man” and “money” were also found in Casablanca proper. 99 Ibn ʿArabshāh (d. 1450) used the word qajama to mean “to speak,” but it seems otherwise obscure in premodern sources. See Ahṃad b. Muḥammad Ibn ʿArabshāh, Kitāb fākihat al-khulafā’ wa-mufākahat al-ẓurafā’, ed. Georg W. F. Freytag (Bonn: s.n., 1832), 70–1, 104 [Arabic]. 100 L. and H. Hélot, Dictionnaire de poche français-arabe, arabe-français, à l’usage des militaires, des voyageurs, et des négociants en Afrique, 6th ed. (Algiers: Juillet Saint Lager, n.d.), 451. 101 Abderrahim Youssi, “Secret Languages,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, ed. Kees Versteegh, Mushira Eid, Alaa Elgibali, Manfred Woidich, and Andrezej Zaborski, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), IV, 157.

176 Notes 102 Galtier 1912, 5. The language of the Guedzâni tribal federation, to which the Bani Addes belongs, is not Arabic but otherwise unidentified in the literature. See Paul Bataillard, “Recherches à faire sur les Bohémiens en Algérie,” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 2è série, 8 (1873): 694, 706. 103 Lapanne-Joinville 1955, 203–15.

Chapter 3 1 Donald Kenrick, Gypsies: From the Ganges to the Thames (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), 22. 2 The “Nomads’ Manuscripts Landscape: Investigating Literary Evidence for Transculturation in Medieval Iran and Central Asia (13th–15th Centuries)” project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund. 3 Maaike van Berkel, “The People of the Pen: Self-Perceptions of Status and Role in the Administration of Empires and Polities,” in Prince, Pen, and Sword: Eurasian Perspectives, ed. Maaike van Berkel and Jeroen Duindam (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 450. 4 Samer M. Ali, Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation of the Past (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 17. 5 Christian Mauder, “In the Sultan’s Salon: Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī,” PhD thesis, University of Göttingen, 2017. 6 Shawkat M. Toorawa, Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfūr and Arabic Writerly Culture: A NinthCentury Bookman in Baghdad (New York: Routledge, 2005), 108–22. 7 Al-Nawājī, Ḥalbat al-kumayt, Berlin, Ms. Spr. 1216, fol. 12r. Cited in Ali 2010, 17. 8 Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 42. 9 Höglmeier 2006, 214, 348, 498 [wa-lahum majālis lam takun li’l-mulūk wa-awqāt ʿajība]. 10 While living in the Nile Delta in the 1980s, the anthropologist Dwight Reynolds attended exclusive gatherings of Sīn-speaking Ḥalabi poets who occasionally asserted their cultural superiority over low-status rural groups. He writes: “But privately, the poets’ community socializes in its own restricted circles. . . . The evenings I spent in the homes of the poets were often filled with displays of verbal art; folktales, proverbs, riddles, and improvisatory poetry were the most common genres. After a particularly well-told tale, one poet’s son leaned over to me and said, ‘You’d never hear anything like that in a fellāḥ’s home; all he has to talk about is his water buffalo and his clover harvest!’” (Reynolds 1995, 64, 66)

11 Höglmeier 2006, 121. 12 Bosworth 1976, II, 296–7, vv. 24–5. 13 Three Shadow Plays 1992, 55. For a German translation of Gharīb’s speech, see Kahle, “Muḥammad ibn Dānijāl und sein zweites arabisches Schattenspiel,” in Miscellanea Academica Berolinensia II, 2 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1950), 161–7. 14 For a German translation of ʿAjīb’s monologue, see Georg Jacob, “ʿAgîb ed-Dîn al-Wâ’iz bei Ibn Dânijâl,” Der Islam 4 (1913): 67–71. On popular preachers, see Berkey 2001. 15 Shafik, “El Saber médico en las obras literarias: el caso de la trilogía de Ibn Dāniyāl,” Revista del Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos 39 (2012): 27–8; Leigh Chipman, The World of Pharmacy and Pharmacists in Mamlūk Cairo (Brill: Leiden, 2010), 166.

Notes

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16 Chipman 2010, 166–9. 17 Shafik “El Saber médico” 2012, 31–2. 18 Kahle, “A Gypsy Woman of Egypt in the Thirteenth Century AD,” JGLS 29 (1959): 11–5; Berkey, “Circumcision Circumscribed: Female Excision and Cultural Accommodation in the Medieval Near East,” IJMES 28, no. 1 (1996): 27; Maya Shatzmiller, Labor in the Medieval Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 355–6. Ibn Dāniyāl used banāt to mean female sex workers in “The Phantom,” the first shadow play of his trilogy. On the banāt, see Guo, “Cross-Gender ‘Acting’ and GenderBending Rhetoric at a Princely Party: Performing Shadow Plays in Mamluk Cairo,” in In the Presence of Power: Court and Performance in the Pre-Modern Middle East, ed. Maurice A. Pomerantz and Evelyn Birge Vitz (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 164–75. 19 Bosworth 1976, II, 299 (SD vv. 47–9). 20 Shafik “El Saber médico” 2012, 34–42; Bosworth 1976, II, 201 and 299 (AD v. 74; SD vv. 39–40). 21 Shafik, “El Saber médico” 2012, 24–7 (AD vv. 92–7; SD v. 50). 22 Bosworth 1976, II, 205 (AD v. 103). A Mughal Indian painting created around 1630 depicts a dervish walking a leashed lion (Metropolitan Museum of Art 55.121.10.11), and an early seventeenth-century Safavid ink drawing of a lion tamer is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago 1987.360.5. 23 An eighth-century silk textile depicting an elephant tamer was recovered near Rayy. See Hayford Peirce and Royall Tyler, “Elephant-Tamer Silk, VIIIth Century,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 2 (1941): 19–26, esp. plate 1. On elephants and their Indian handlers in Ottoman Cairo and Istanbul, see Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114–22. 24 Bosworth 1976, II, 299 (SD v. 52). The ṭuruqiyya (lit., street people) trained cats and mice. See Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, 33 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1933), IX, 284. 25 Zaghbar means “fluff.” See Adam Talib, “Review of Li Guo, the Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl’s Mamluk Cairo,” Mamlūk Studies Review 18 (2015): 361. 26 Bosworth 1976, II, 205 and 299 (AD v. 104; SD v. 51). 27 Jacob, “Der Nâtû und sein Lied bei Ibn Dâniyâl,” Der Islam 7 (1910): 178–82. 28 Maymūn means “large ape” in Arabic. On monkey trainers, see Bosworth 1976, II, 205 and 299 (AD v. 104; SD v. 51); Höglmeier 2006, 146–52. 29 Bosworth 1976, II, 208 (AD v. 128); Th. Marita Wijntjes, “Daily Life, Catastrophes and Strange Events in al-Maqrīzī’s Kitāb al-Sulūk li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk,” in Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras, VIII, ed. U. Vermeulen, K. D’Hulster, and J. Van Steenbergen (Leuven: Peeters, 2016), 555–6; Olaf Günther, “How Acrobats Remember Their Lives,” in The Past as Resource in the Turkic Speaking World, ed. Ildikó Bellér-Hann (Würzburg: Orient-Institut Istanbul, 2008), 123–37. 30 The song forms part of Ibn Dāniyāl’s poetic oeuvre. See Muḥammad Ibn Dāniyāl, Al-Mukhtār shiʿr Ibn Dāniyāl, ed. Muḥammad Nāyif al-Dulaymī (Mosul: n. p., 1978), 125–31; Ira M. Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 83–4; Guo 2012, 27–9; E. O. Winstedt, “The Mashaʿiliyya of Egypt,” JGLS (1910): 76–8, cites Mamluk sources that depict them as cleaning wells, bathhouses, pits, and latrines and removing animal carcasses from the city. For images of a mashaʿil in the late-eighth-/fourteenth-century manuscript

178 Notes

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

Kitāb al-Bulhān (Oxford Bodleian Or. 133, fol. 26r) and in later Turkish translations, see Eva Baer, “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish Manuscripts,” BSOAS 31, no. 3 (1968): 526–33 and plate xii. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), II, 348. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 89. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 1. Translation by Everett K. Rowson, “Two Homoerotic Narratives from Mamlūk Literature: al-Ṣafadī’s Lawʿat al-shākī and Ibn Dāniyāl’s al-Mutayyam,” in Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. J. W. Wright, Jr. and Everett K. Rowson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 173. Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 277. Guo, Arabic Shadow Theatre, 1300–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 7. Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arab Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 179. Ibid. On the contents of MS Taymūr shiʿr 970, see Guo, “The Monk’s Daughter and Her Suitor: An Egyptian Shadow Play of Interfaith Romance and Insanity,” JAOS 137, no. 4 (2017): 788. Kahle 1926, 318. Kahle, Zur Geschichte des arabischen Schattentheaters in Egypten (Leipzig: Verlag von Rudolf Haupt, 1909), 9, fn. 5. Shafik, “Dīwān kadas y la revivificación del teatro de sombras en Egipto,” Al-Andalus Magreb: Estudios árabes e islámicos 22 (2015): 317–22. Liebrenz and Richardson 2021, 51 [Arabic]. Kahle 1909, 9–10; Cf. Shafik 2015, 317. Marcus Milwright, “On the Date of Paul Kahle’s Egyptian Shadow Puppets,” Muqarnas 28 (2011): 43–68. Pier Mattia Tommasino, “Approfondimenti sull’arabo della «Zingana» di Gigio Artemio Giancarli,” Lingue e Stile 41 (2006): 203–30; Erwin Pokorny, “The Gypsies and Their Impact on 15th-Century West European Iconography,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migraiton and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress of the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2009), 579–601. Oleg Graba, Islamic Visual Culture, 1100–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 180. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 79. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Qalqashandī, Kitāb ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīriyya, 1913), III, 359. André Raymond, “The Residential Districts of Cairo’s Elite in the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” in The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society, ed. Thomas Philipp and Ulrich Haarmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 209. D. S. Margoliouth, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus: Three Chief Cities of the Egyptian Sultans (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907), 79. Guo 2012, 167; Pomerantz 2014, 646. Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 136. Boaz Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9.

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54 Carl F. Petry, The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2012), 127. Ibn Dāniyāl’s third shadow play Al-Muṭayyim wa’l-Ḍā’iʿ al-Yutayyim (The Man Distracted by Passion and the Little Vagabond Orphan) contains vivid descriptions of cockfighting and ramfighting. Höglmeier 2006, 229, has al-mubashikīn. 55 Al-Qalqashandī 1913, III, 362. 56 Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī, Al-Mawāʿiẓ wa’l-iʿtibār bi-dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa’l-āthār, ed. Muḥammad Zaynahum and Madīḥa al-Sharqāwī, 3 vols. (Cairo: Maktabat Madbūlī, 1998), II, 477. On aṣḥāb al-ḥalaq, see Bosworth 1976, I, 109. 57 Aḥmad b. ʿAli al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-Sulūk li-maʿrifat duwal al-mulūk, ed. Saʿīd ʿĀshūr, 4 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1973), IV, 436. For another version of this story, see Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbā’ al-ghumr bi-anbā’ al-ʿumr, ed. Ḥasan Ḥabashī, 3 vols. (Cairo: n. p., 1969–72), III, 155 [nūdīya bi’l-qāhira anna kulla gharībin yarjiʿu ilā waṭanihi]. Members of the Qalandar order of Sufis shaved their heads and beards, branded their bodies with hot iron, and wore animal furs or cloaks that were left open to expose their genitals. Cf. Adam Sabra, Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250–1517 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 30. 58 Cairo Geniza documents occasionally mention ghurabā’ on alms lists but with too little context to make firm determinations about how the term is used. See, for example, Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 76–7, and Doton Arad, “Welfare and Charity in a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Community in Egypt: A Study of Genizah Documents,” Al-Masāq 29, no. 3 (2018): 270. 59 Three Shadow Plays 1992, 56 [wa-radda kulla gharībin ilā waṭanihi]. 60 Abū l-Maḥāsin Yūsuf Ibn Taghrībirdī, Abû ‘l-Mahâsin ibn Taghrî Birdî’s annals entitled an-Nujûm az-Zâhira fî mulûk Miṣr wal-Qâhira. Vol. 6, (824–841 A.H.), ed. and trans. William Popper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1915–23), 763. 61 Bosworth 1976, II, 193, 200. AD vv. 35, 67. 62 Petry 2012, 45. 63 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār (gest. 749/1348–49): Edition und Kommentar, ed. Thomas Bauer, Anke Osigus, and Hakan Özkan (Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag, 2018), 308 [nadhkur nahār fī bāb al-lūq / wa-anā min al-suṭla makhnūq]. 64 Khalil b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, Aʿyān al-ʿaṣr wa-aʿwān al-naṣr, ed. ʿAlī Abū Zayd, 6 vols. (Damascus: Dār al-fikr, 1998), I, 146. My translation of the term miʿmār owes much to Doris Behrens-Abouseif ’s conclusion that “[t]he miʿmār, whose salary was equal to that of the plumber, was a specialist for repair and restoration works and should not be mistaken for an architect, for whom this term is never applied in Mamluk terminology.” See her “Muhandis, Shad, Muʿallim—Note on the Building Craft in the Mamluk Period,” Der Islam 72, no. 2 (1995): 296. 65 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 148. 66 Al-Maqrīzī 1998, II, 639. 67 Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, Alḥān al-sawājiʿ bayn al-bādi’ wa’l-murājiʿ, ed. Ibrāhīm Ṣāliḥ, 2 vols. (Damascus: Dār al-bashā’ir, 2004), I, 52. 68 Schimmel, Islamic Names (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 28. 69 Rice, “Studies in Islamic Metal Work—II,” BSOAS 15, no. 1 (1953): 67. 70 Bauer 2002, 65–6; J. Walker, “Nūrī,” in EI2, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1995), VIII, 138–9.

180 Notes 71 Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Ibn Abī Hajalah, Maghnāṭīs al-durr al-nafīs, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS Landberg 69, fol. 12r, ll. 3–4. 72 Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Fāsī, Taʿrīf dhawī al-ʿulā bi-man lam yadhkurhu al-Dhahabī min al-nubalā’, ed. Maḥmūd al-Arnā’ūṭ and Akram al-Būshī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1998), 61. 73 Al-Maqrīzī 1973, II, 131. Translated in Amalia Levanoni, A Turning Point in Mamluk History: The Third Reign of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad Ibn Qalāwūn (1310–1341) (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 162. 74 The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa A.D. 1325–54, trans. and ed. H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1958–71), I, 41. 75 Al-Ṣafadī, Kitāb al-wāfī bi’l-wafayāt, ed. Aḥmad al-Arnāwūṭ, 29 vols. (Beirut: Dār iḥyā’ al-turāth al-ʿrabīi, 2000), VI, 111. Translated in Adam Talib, How Do You Say “Epigram” in Arabic? Literary History at the Limits of Comparison (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 231. 76 Translated in Özkan, “The Drug Zajals in Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār’s Dīwān,” Mamlūk Studies Review 17 (2013): 215. 77 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Al-Durar al-Kāmina (Cairo: Dār al-kutub al-ḥāditha, 1998), I, 49. Translated in Perho 2011, 19–20. 78 Bauer 2002, 69. More recently, Bauer has sought to distance al-Miʿmār from Bāb al-Lūq. “Al-Ṣafadī mentions Bāb al-Lūq once, without expressly stating what connection al-Miʿmār had to this neighborhood. It is perhaps a play on words.” See Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 21. 79 Bauer 2002, 88. 80 Bauer, “In Search of ‘Post-Classical Literature’: A Review Article,” Mamlūk Studies Review 11, no. 2 (2007): 162. 81 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 148–51. 82 Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlallāh al-ʿUmarī, Taʿrīf bi-al-muṣṭalaḥ al-sharīf (Al-Karak: Jāmiʿat Mu’tah, 1992), 163. 83 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 155, no. 246. 84 Levanoni 1995, 38. 85 Brinner 1963, 197. 86 Sabra 2006, 15; Guo 2006, 389–90. 87 Brinner 1963, 199; Lapidus 1984, 64-6. 88 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 215, no. 387. 89 Brinner 1963, 201. 90 Three Shadow Plays 1992, 57. 91 Mukhtār shiʿr Ibn Dāniyāl 1978, 239–40. 92 Brinner 1963, 200. 93 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 331. Dā is the masculine demonstrative pronoun in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. 94 AD vv. 52, 132, 167; SD vv. 24, 35, 36, 58. 95 Yale MS Landberg 69, Maghnāṭīs al-durr an-nafīs, fol. 12r, ll. 13–5. Translated in Talib 2018, 233. 96 Lara Harb, “Persian in Arabic Poetry: Identity Politics and Abbasid Macaronics,” JAOS 139, no. 1 (2019): 20. 97 Ibid., 19. 98 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 309. A transcription and English translation is found in Özkan 2013, 219, 242. 99 van Nieuwkerk 2008, 110.

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100 Özkan, “Ein Fischlein mit Lästermaul Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmārs liebster Feind, Aḥmad b. Ismā’īl as-Sumayka,” Asiatische Studien / Études asiatiques 71, no. 1 (2017): 42; and Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 325, ln. 12. 101 Özkan, “Why Stress Does Matter: New Material on Metrics in Zajal Poetry,” Mamlūk Studies Review 19 (2016): 106, 113. 102 Dīwān Ibn al-Miʿmār, Chester Beatty Library MS 5483, fol. 43r. Cf. Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 306, which has kibdī (my liver). 103 Der Dīwān des Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār 2018, 183. 104 Hinrich Biesterfeldt, “Mizr fī Miṣr: Ein Preisgedicht auf das Bier aus dem Kairo des 14. Jahrhunderts,” in Differenz und Dynamik im Islam: Festschrift für Heinz Halm zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Verena Klemm (Würzburg: Ergon, 2012), 388, 391; Özkan 2013. 105 Michael Pifer, “The Age of the Gharīb: Strangers in the Medieval Mediterranean,” in An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Michael Pifer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 31. 106 Ibid., 32. 107 Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Azbakiyya and Its Environs from Azbak to Ismā’īl, 1476– 1879 (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1985), xv.

Chapter 4 1 Lapidus 1984, 177–8. 2 Bosworth 1976, II, 209. AD, v. 144 [wa-man ya’wī l-maṣāṭīb / maʿa l-ʿiffati fī satri]. The end of this verse may allude to the ahl al-sitr/al-satr, who lived in seclusion and voluntarily chose a life of poverty. It could also refer to a mastūr (lit., concealed), who had fallen suddenly into poverty and felt so humiliated by his downward mobility that he concealed (satara) his plight by not publicly begging or making appeals for aid. On these categories of people, see Mark Cohen 2005, 41–4, 48–51; and Yaacov Lev, “The Civilian Ruling Elite of the Ṭūlūnid-Ikhshīdid Period,” in Transregional and Regional Elites—Connecting the Early Islamic Empire, ed. Hannah-Lena Hagemann and Stefan Heidemann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 411–12. 3 Maḥmūd b. ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī, Muqaddimat al-adab, ed. Johann Gottfried Wetzstein (Leipzig: Barth, 1843), 21. 4 Bosworth 1976, II, 204. AD, v. 91. I have slightly altered Bosworth’s translation. 5 Claude Cahen, “Futuwwa,” in EI2, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1991), II, 961. 6 Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons (London: Penguin, 2014), 42. I revised the translation slightly based on an edition of this unique manuscript (MS Aya Sofia MS no. 3397). See Das Buch der wunderbaren Erzählungen und seltsamen Geschichten, ed. Hans Wehr (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1956), 45. 7 Bosworth 1976, II, 206, v. 115. 8 Bosworth 1976, II, 203, 206–7; AD vv. 87, 115–20. Some changes have been made to Bosworth’s translation. 9 Bosworth 1976, II, 201; AD v. 72. Al-Khafājī claimed that the phrase jarrār al-mukaddī was Sāsāni but did not define it. It likely carried the same sense as the earlier phrase. See Al-Khafājī 1865, 165.

182 Notes 10 Qārūb is glossed in SD vv. 4, 26, as “shaykh of the ghurabā’.” The word derives from the Syriac term qārūgbed, which meant “chief of the artisans,” for which see Ahmad Tafazzoli, “List of Trades and Crafts in the Sassanian Period,” Archaeologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 7 (1974): 191–6. Bahlūl is glossed in AD v. 141 as “beggar leader.” 11 Al-Tawḥīdī 1965, 185, 215. 12 Al-Tawḥīdī 1965, 215. On page 185, the term is spelled with a sīn and on page 215, with a ṣāḍ. Both spellings seem to have been current. 13 Bosworth 1976, II, 295, 297; SD vv. 4, 26. 14 Ibn Taghrībirdī 1915–23, 763. 15 Baer 1964, 35. 16 Johann G. Wetzstein, “Der Markt in Damaskus,” ZDMG 11 (1857): 482, fn. 9. 17 Al-Ḥarīrī, The Assemblies of Al Ḥarïri, trans. F. Steingass (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1898), II, 26. 18 Ibid. [maṣṭabat al-muqayyifīn wa’l-madrūzīn (?) wa-walījat al-mushaqshiqīn wa’l-mujalūzīn]. 19 Ibid., 26, 29. 20 Olivia Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 21 Sabra 2006, 106. 22 Nimrod Luz, The Mamluk City in the Middle East: History, Culture, and the Urban Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 81. 23 Newbold 1856, 292. 24 von Kremer 1864, 264. 25 Michelle Ziegler, “The Black Death and the Future of Plague,” The Medieval Globe, edited by Monica H. Green, 1, no. 1 (2014): 259–83. 26 Al-ʿAsqalānī 1969–72, I, 350. 27 David Ayalon, “Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army--I,” BSOAS 15, no. 2 (1953): 204–6. 28 David Neustadt, “The Plague and Its Effects upon the Mamlûk Army,” JRASGBI 1 (1946): 69–70. 29 Fabian Crespo and Matt B. Lawrenz, “Heterogeneous Immunological Landscapes and Medieval Plague: An Invitation to a New Dialogue between Historians and Immunologists,” The Medieval Globe, edited by Monica H. Green, 1, no. 1 (2014): 229–58. 30 Michael Walter Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 185–7. 31 Ayalon 1953, 204–6. 32 Hafid Laayouni, et al., “Convergent Evolution in European and Rroma Populations Reveals Pressure Exerted by Plague on Toll-Like Receptors,” PNAS 111, no. 7 (2014): 2668–73. 33 Ibid., 35. 34 Richard Bulliet, The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 91. 35 The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter in the Muslim Mediterranean, ed. Susan Gilson Miller and Mauro Bertagnin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). 36 Jacob Lassner, The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 202.

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37 Robert Dankoff, Nuran Tezcan, and Michael D. Sheridan, Ottoman Explorations of the Nile: Evliya Çelebi’s ‘Matchless Pearl These Reports of the Nile’ Map and His Accounts of the Nile and the Horn of Africa in the Book of Travels (London: Gingko Library, 2018), 153. 38 Translated in Victor A. Friedman and Robert Dankoff, “The Earliest Known Text in Balkan (Rumelian) Romani: A Passage from Evliya Çelebi’s Seyāḥat-nāme,” JGLS series 5, 1, no. 1 (1991): 2–3. 39 Georg Nicholaus Knauer, “The Earliest Vocabulary of Romani Words (c. 1515) in the Collectanea of Johannes ex Grafing, a Student of Johannes Reuchlin and Conrad Celtis,” Romani Studies 20, no. 1 (2010): 1–15. 40 Richard J. Pym, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425–1783 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 93. 41 Friedman and Dankoff 1991, 4. 42 Guo, Early Mamluk Syrian Historiography: al-Yūnīnī’s Dhayl Mir’āt al-zamān, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), I, 116. 43 Nikita Elisséeff, La Description de Damas d’Ibn ʿAsākir (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1959), 138, n. 2, and the accompanying map. 44 Toru Miura, Dynamism in the Urban Society of Damascus: The Ṣāliḥiyya Quarter from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 41. 45 A judge born in 678/1182 taught at both the Ṣārimiyya and ʿAdhrāwiyya Madrasas in Ḥārat al-Ghurabā’. See Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Dhahabī, Taʾrīkh al-islām wa-wafayāt al-mashāhīr wa’l-aʿlām, ed. ʿUmar al-Salām Tadmurī, 51 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1998), XLVI, 363. 46 In Ramaḍān 690/1291, Najm al-Dīn al-Dimashqī taught in the Sharīfiyya Madrasa on Darb al-Shaʿārīn in Ḥārat al-Ghurabāʾ. See Ismā’il b. ʿUmar Ibn Kathīr, Al-Bidāya wa’l-nihāya, ed. ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Turkī, 20 vols. (Giza: Hajr, 1998), XVII, 639; ʿAbd al-Qādir b. Muḥammad al-Nuʿaymī, Al-Dāris fī taʾrīkh al-madāris, 2 vols. (Damascus: Maṭbaʿat al-turqī, 1948–51), I, 238. 47 Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Dhahabī, Dhayl taʾrīkh al-islām, ed. Māzin Sālim Bā Wazīr (Riyadh: Dār al-mughnī li’l-nashr wa’l-tawzīʿ, 1998), 470. 48 Nasser Rabbat, “Ideal-Type and Urban History: The Development of the Suq in Damascus,” in The Bazaar in the Islamic City: Design, Culture, and History, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2012), 58–9; Rasmus Bech Olsen, “Just Taxes? Tracing 14th-Century Damascene Politics through Objects, Space and Historiography,” PhD Thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2017, esp. Chapter Three (Taḥt al-Qalʿa: A Medieval Islamic Ceremonial Space). 49 Abū l-Baqā’ ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad al-Badrī, Nuzhat al-anām fī maḥāsin al-shām (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-sāfiyya, 1922), 62. 50 Ibid., 63. Most of this translation is adapted from Bosworth 1976, I, 108. On Taḥta al-Qalʿa, see Dorothée Sack, Damaskus: Entwicklung und Struktur einer orientalischislamischen Stadt (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1989), 29, and the references listed there. 51 Boaz Shoshan, Damascus Life, 1480–1500: A Report of a Local Notary (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 19. 52 Ibn Ṭawq 2000, I, 363. Boris Liebrenz helpfully shared this reference with me. 53 Ibid., I, 316. The name Naʿīṣ (or Nuʿayṣ) does not appear in Arabic onomastica, so some ghurabā’ may have been distinguished by their non-Arabic names. A

184 Notes

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67 68

16th-century author gave the following as names of the sons of Sāsān: “Sālim Salmān, Barīq Sharīf, Razbaʿ Ḥarfūsh, Ḥardān Faʿzah, Nāhūḍ [. . .], Qūbah Thaʿlab Marʿash Salhūb, Ḥamqān Shuhbah Wahbah, Nafra (?) Ḥamah Shākir, Sitt Farūʿ kamā Sarī/Saraya, Shaʿlān ʿAbbās ʿAyyār, Maḥmūd Dahrān Rābiṭ, Suhayl Ḥ*bbār ʿAllām, Shaʿbān Kāman ʿArbūd, Nāhaḍ [. . .] Qubayḍah Ghārī, Nāmaḍ Rayyān Salīm, Rabaḥ ʿAzzām Qūbah, Ḥayyān Bayyān Hamdān Jaffān Ḥarbān.” See Forschungsbibliothek Gotha MS orient. A903, fol. 39v. Ibid., I, 325. Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat al-khillān fī ḥawādith al-zamān: ta’rīkh Miṣr wa’l-Shām (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998), 103. Torsten Wollina (Berlin) kindly shared this reference with me. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Ibn Ṣaṣrā, A Chronicle of Damascus, 1389–97, trans. and ed. William M. Brinner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), I, 209. Dana Sajdi, “The Dead and the City: The Limits of Hospitality in the Early Modern Levant,” in Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, ed. Richard Kearney and James Taylor (London: Continuum Books, 2011), 125. Leor Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 148. Sajdi 2011, 123–31. Muḥammad Khalīl b. ʿAlī al-Murādī, Silk al-durar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-thānī ʿashar, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1988), II, 2; Ibn Kannān, al-Ḥawadith al-yawmiyya, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, MS Ahlwardt 9480, 74b; Sajdi 2011, 128. Aḥmad al-ʿInāyātī al-Nābulusī, Dīwān al-ʿInāyātī al-Nābulusī, ed. Mashhūr al-Ḥabbāzī (Ramallah: Dār al-amīn, 2010), 46. He was interred in maqābir al-ghurabā’ in Marj al-Daḥdāḥ cemetery, north of Damascus’s Bāb al-Farādīs cemetery. Najm al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ghazzī, Luṭf al-samar wa-qaṭf al-thamar, ed. Maḥmūd Shaykh, 2 vols. (Damascus: Manshūrāt wizārat al-thaqāfah wa’l-irshād al-qawmī, 1981–82), II, 672–3. Muḥammad Amīn b. Faḍl Allāh al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿashar, 4 vols. (Cairo: Al-Maṭbaʿa al-wahbiyyah, 1284 [1868]), I, 112; Najm al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ghazzī 1981–82, I, 263. Al-Hindī and al-Sindī were friends, who both succumbed to the plague and were buried side by side in turbat al-ghurabāʾ in al-Farādis cemetery. Al-Muḥibbī 1868, IV, 162. He was buried in “the Bāb al-Farādis Cemetery, which was known as turbat al-ghurabāʾ.” Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Bāqī Abū l-Mawāhib al-Ḥanbalī, Mashyakha Abī l-Mawāhib al-Ḥanbalī, ed. Muḥammad Muṭīʿ al-Ḥāfiẓ (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr al-Muʿāṣir, 1990), 34. He was buried in turbat al-ghurabāʾ in the Bāb al-Farādis Cemetery. Reynolds 1995, 49–50. Gertrud von Massenbach, “Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunuzi-Dialektes,” Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen 3 (1933): 172. Not until the 1850s does one find references to the Ghajar, this time in Egypt. Captain Newbold described them as physically similar to Egyptian Ḥalab and Syrian Kurbats. They were seasonally nomadic, spending summers in the countryside and winters in the Hosh el Ghagar quarter of Cairo. He also claimed that a subtribe of the Ghajar was named Románi. From the vocabulary that Newbold collected, it appears that the Egyptian Ghajar spoke a Romani dialect. See Newbold 1856, 292–4.

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69 Ibn Ṭawq 2000, III, 1297. I thank Torsten Wollina for this reference. Pilgrims would gather in Damascus in Shawwāl, the tenth month of the Islamic calendar, then make the thirty- to forty-five-day journey to Mecca, arriving there in time for the start of Dhū l-Ḥijja, which is the twelfth month and the season of pilgrimage. 70 Jean Sauvaget, Alep (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuther, 1941), 228–30; Raymond, “Alep à l’époque ottomane (XVIe-XIXe siècles),” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 62 (1991): 97. On ghurabāʾ and qurbāt being equivalent terms, see Littmann 1920, 36–7. 71 Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, “The Turkomans and Bilād aš-Šām in the Mamluk Period,” in Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East, ed. Tarif Khalidi (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1984), 169. 72 Heghnar Watenpaugh, “The City’s Edge: Rethinking Sources and Methods for the Study of Urban Peripheries,” Annales Islamologiques 46 (2012): 135. 73 Kamāl al-Ghazzī, Nahr al-dhahab fī taʾrīkh Ḥalab, 3 vols. (Aleppo: Al-Maṭbaʿa al-marwāniyya, 1923), II, 429–31. 74 Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, Durr al-ḥabab fī taʾrīkh aʿyān Ḥalab, ed. Maḥmūd Fākhūrī and Yaḥyā ʿAbbārah, 2 vols. (Damascus: Manshūrāt wizārat al-thaqāfa, 1972), I, 555 [bi’l-qurbi min qubūr al-ghurabāʾ bi-ḥalab]. 75 Heghnar Watenpaugh, “Deviant Dervishes: Space, Gender, and the Construction of Antinomian Piety in Ottoman Aleppo,” IJMES 37, no. 4 (2005): 535–6. 76 Leonhard Rauwolf, A Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages, in two parts: part I: containing Dr. Leonhart Rauwolf ’s Journey into the Eastern Countries, viz. Syria, Palestine, or the Holy Land, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Chaldea, &c. (London: n. p., 1738), 91. 77 Richard Pococke, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries 2.1 Observations on Palestine of the Holy Land, Syria, Mesopotamia, Cyprus, and Candia (London: Bowyer, 1745), 207–8. Cited in Anonymous, “Gypsies in EighteenthCentury Aleppo,” JGLS 9 (1930): 95–6. 78 Alexander Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo (London: n. p., 1756), 104, fn. P. Corn (maize) is native to the Americas and brought to Europe by Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century. Leonhard Rauwolf observed fields of Indian millet (maize) around Aleppo in 1570. 79 Ibid., 191. 80 Roger Le Tourneau, Fez in the Age of the Marinides (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 86; Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein, 3 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896), II, 434. Furthermore, a Marinid-era inscription on the madrasa’s façade reads “in the inn on the Street of the Ghurabā’, which is at the slaughtering place” [fī funduq darb al-ghurabā’ al-kā’in bi-jurna]. See Alfred Bel, “Les inscriptions arabes de Fès,” Journal Asiatique 11 (1917–19): 159, 163. 81 Nancy Benco, Ahmed Ettahiri, and Michelle Loyet, “Worked Bone Tools: Linking Metal Artisans and Animal Processors in Medieval Islamic Morocco,” Antiquity 76 (2002): 447–57. 82 Lilia Zouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 68–75. 83 Nabil Sobhi Hanna, Ghagar of Sett Guiranha: A Study of a Gypsy Community in Egypt (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1982), 18. The Sawafa were the Ghajar who worked with wool as shearers, spinners, and traders. The village of

186 Notes

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94

95 96

97 98 99

100 101 102 103

Settohom is a pseudonym for a village south of Cairo, whose details Hanna anonymized to protect the identities of his Ghajar informants. Reynolds 1995, 57. The author explains on pp. 49–52 that the villagers in al-Bākātush referred publicly to the Ḥalab as “poets” (shuʿarā) and in private as ghajar. Faouzi Skali, Saints et sanctuaires de Fès (Rabat: Marsam, 2007), 191. Aaron C. Taylor, “A Possible Early Reference to the Gypsies in Spain prior to 1420 Ms. 940 of the Trivulziana Library in Milan, Italy,” Romani Studies 26, no. 1 (2016): 82–3. Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Royal Chancery, Registers, 2573, fol. 145v. Pym 2007, 5. [bada’a l-islām gharīban wa-sayaʿūdu gharīban kamā bada’a]. Maribel Fierro, “Spiritual Alienation and Political Activism: The Ġurabā’ in al-Andalus during the Sixth/Twelfth Century,” Arabica 47 (2000): 236. Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros, “The Muslim Minority in the Portuguese Kingdom (1170–1496): Identity and Writing,” e-journal of Portuguese History 13, no. 2 (2015) [akhākum haqqan al-gharīb Muḥammad bin Qāsim al-Ruʿaynī khaṭīb ikhwānikum al-ghurabā . . . fi ḥīnihi]. Ibid. L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 63. Abū l-Khayr al-Ishbīlī, Kitāb ʿumdat al-ṭabīb fī maʿrifat al-nabāt li-kull labī = Libro base del médico para el conocimiento de la botánica por todo experto, trans. and ed. Joaquín Bustamante, Federico Corriente, and Mohamed Tilmatine, 3 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2004), I, 197, no. 1918; Federico Corriente, “Additions and Corrections to A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 98 (2008): 59. Fernando Velázquez Basanta, “El alcázar del Naŷd y el palacio de los Alijares,” Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos 60 (2011): 309–25. Antonio Orihuela Uzal, “Granada, between the Zīrids and the Nasrids,” in Art and Cultures of al-Andalus: The Power of the Alhambra, ed. Rafael López Guzmán, José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, María J. Viguera, and Carmen Pozuelo Calero (Granada: Consortium for the Commemoration of the First Milennium of the Foundation of the Kingdom of Granada, 2013), 54. John Derek Latham, “The Later ʿAzafids,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 15/16 (1973): 117. Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Al-Iḥāṭa fī akhbār gharnāṭa, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh ʿInān (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1955), 292. Simmel’s theories are discussed in the introduction. See also Joseph C. Berland and Aparna Rao, “Unveiling the Stranger: A New Look at Peripatetic Peoples,” in Customary Strangers: New Perspectives on Peripatetic Peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, ed. Joseph C. Berland and Aparna Rao (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 1–28. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 6. Unni Wikan, Life among the Poor in Cairo, trans. Ann Henning (London: Tavistock, 1980), 27. Bosworth 1976, II, 197–8. Ibn Dāniyāl 1978, 239, v. 31.

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Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22

Bosworth 1976, II, 198–9; AD vv. 60–4. Bosworth 1976, II, 212; AD vv. 183–7. Bosworth 1976, II, 288–9. Teresa Bernheimer, The ʿAlids: The First Family of Islam, 750–1200 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 29. Shmuel Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arab World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 104. Guo 2012, 28. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 85. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 89. Slight revision of the translation in Bosworth 1976, II, 204; AD v. 89. On the Shiʿi book of occult sciences Kitāb al-jafr, purportedly transmitted by Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, see Daniel De Smet, “Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq and Esoteric Sciences,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, 16 vols. (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 2008), xiv, 362–3. Emilie Savage-Smith, Islamicate Celestial Globes: Their History, Construction, and Use (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 17. Three Shadow Plays 1992, 69. [kitābuhu wa-takhta l-ramli wa-kursiyuhu wa-uṣṭurlābuhu]. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange 2014, 209–10. I revised the translation slightly to highlight ʿUṣfūr’s gharīb accoutrements and dress. For the Arabic passage, see Wehr 1956, 235. Bosworth 1976, II, 297–9, v. 36. Ibid. [kitāb fīhi taṣāwir wa-tazāwīq]. Two manuscripts vocalize b.lhān as balhān. An astrologer would write on pieces of paper and conceal them in a compartment in the box. He would show a crowd a blank sheet of paper, then place it in the box, utter some magical phrases, then pull out the inscribed papers to surprise the audience. It would be nearly impossible to identify a maqlab in existing art collections, but a ten-sided wooden casket made in fifteenth-century Spain has notches where a compartment could have been slotted into the box (V&A Museum 270–1895). Höglmeier 2006, 214. Ibid., 225. The title character Gharīb in the shadow play ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb announced that communing with jinn kings formed part of his astrological performance: “I pretended to have control over kings of the jinn so that I could summon into my presence jinn like Maytatrūn and Shaysabān.” Mahfouz and Carlson 2013, 95. Liebrenz, “Troubled History of a Masterpiece: Notes on the Creation and Peregrinations of Öljeytü’s Monumental Baghdad Qurʾān,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts (2016): 224. See the digitized fourteenth-century Arabic Kitāb al-Bulhān here: https​:/​/di​​gital​​.bodl​​ eian.​​ox​.ac​​.uk​/i​​nquir​​e​/p​/3​​e8474​​57​-c1​​29​-4c​​3f​-b6​​​7b​-13​​8573a​​fb1de​. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı, “The Falnama in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2009), 27–40. Höglmeier 2006, 225. Stefano Carboni, “The ‘Book of Surprises’ (Kitab al-bulhan) of the Bodleian Library,” La Trobe Journal 91 (2013): 27–9.

188 Notes 23 Bodleian MS Or. 133, fol. 1r. 24 On this treatise see David A. King, In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2003–2005), I, 299–302. 25 D. S. Rice, “The Seasons and the Labors of the Months in Islamic Art,” Ars Orientalis 1 (1954): 3. 26 E. Baer 1968, 531; D. A. King 2003–5, I, 299. 27 Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Carboni 2013. 28 Syrinx von Hees, “The Astonishing: A Critique and Re-Reading of ‘Ağā’ib literature,” Middle Eastern Literatures 8, no. 2 (2005): 101–20. 29 George Saliba, “Islamic Astronomy in Context: Attacks on Astrology and the Rise of the Hay’a Tradition,” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 4, no. 1 (2002): 25–46. 30 A. Tunç Şen and Cornell H. Fleischer, “Books on Astrology, Astronomical Tables, and Almanacs in the Library Inventory of Bayezid II,” in Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2019) I, 767–821. 31 Abū Maʿshar, Kitāb al-mawālīd, BnF arabe 2583, fol. 4r. 32 Ibid., fols. 2r–3v. 33 The leaf of the demon Jazrafīl riding an elephant is cataloged as British Museum 1934,1208,0.1. 34 Julian Raby, “Saljūq-Style Painting and a Fragmentary Copy of al-Ṣūfī’s ‘Fixed Stars’,” in The Art of the Saljūqs in Iran and Anatolia: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Edinburgh in 1982, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1994), 109–11. 35 The Sīn term hankāma derives from the Persian hangām, which means “assembly, crowd of merchants, players, strolling musicians, etc.” 36 In most astrological schemes Mars is the ruler of Aries. Is the error intentional to show the improvisational and imprecise patter of the astrologers, or has Jawbarī misunderstood core astrological concepts? 37 Höglmeier 2006, 225–6. 38 This line of questioning is very similar to the chatter that the astrologer Hilāl al-Munajjim has with two audience members in ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb: “And, you, what is your name, my son? And you, too, sir? Yes, your father!” (Three Shadow Plays 1992, 70) It also recalls an anthropologist’s observation of a Sīn-speaking fortune-teller in contemporary Egypt who asked a client for the names of her mother, her fiancé, and her fiancé’s mother before making a prediction. Parrs 2017, 102. 39 Höglmeier 2006, 225–7. 40 Palazzo Pitti, Florence, N. cat. 00188569. 41 Rice 1954. 42 Eva Baer 1968. 43 On the differences between the Arabic Bulhān and its Turkish adaptations, see Barbara Schmitz, Islamic and Indian Manuscript and Paintings in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1996, 71–84); and Stefano Carboni, “Ricostruzione del ciclo pittorico del Kitab al-bulhan di Oxford: le miniature delle copie ottomane mancanti nell’originale,” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, Rivista della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere dell’Università di Venezia 27, no. 3 (1988): 97–126.

Notes

189

44 Noah Gardiner, “Books on Occult Sciences,” in Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. Gülru Necipoǧlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2019), I, 746–7, 763; II, 205. 45 Farhad and Bağcı 2009, 28. 46 For example, Yusuf and Zulaykha are depicted in Mscr.Dresd.Eb.445, fols. 28v–29r, and Leyla and Mejnun in TSM H.1702, fols. 29v–30r and Mscr.Dresd.Eb.445, fols. 11v, 46r. 47 Farhad and Bağcı 2009, 30. 48 On these manuscripts, see Massumeh Farhad, “The Dispersed Falnama,” in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2009), 43–5. 49 Folios 19v, 26v, and 39v appear to have been painted in the 1540s. On this dating, see Karin Rührdanz, “Miniaturen des Dresdener ‘Fālnāmeh’,” Persica 12 (1987): 1–56. 50 For the current whereabouts of these leaves, see Massumeh Farhad, “The Manuscripts,” in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2009), 43–5. 51 Ibid., 67. 52 Rachel Parikh, “Faith and Fate: The Khalili Falnama and Shīʿī Identity in Golconda,” in Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700, ed. Keelan Overton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 228. 53 Antoinette Owen, “Technical Aspects of the Hamzanama Manuscript,” in The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India, ed. John William Seyller (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institutions, 2002), 280–4. 54 John William Seyller, “Catalogue of Early Mughal Paintings,” in The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India, ed. John William Seyller (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institutions, 2002), 56. 55 Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Persianate Geomancy from Ṭūsī to the Millennium: A Preliminary Survey,” in The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, ed. Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2018), 152, fn. 3. 56 George Saliba, “The Role of the Astrologer in Medieval Islamic Society,” Bulletin d’études orientales 44 (1992): 66.

Chapter 6 1 Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, “Sur un passage curieux de l’Ihathet, sur l’art d’imprimer chez les arabes en Espagne,” Journal Asiatique (43 s.) 20 (1852): 252–5. 2 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3 Beatrice Gruendler, The Rise of the Arabic Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 2. 4 K. B. Gardner, Descriptive Catalogue of Japanese Books in the British Library Printed before 1700 (London: British Library, 1993), 196. 5 Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention, trans. Douglas Martin (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 122. 6 Jacob, Ein arabischer Berichterstatter aus dem 10. Jahrhundert über Fulda, Schleswig, Soest, Paderborn und andere deutsche Städte (Berlin: Mayer und Müller, 1891), 13–14.

190 Notes 7 The German Türkenkalender exists in a single copy at the Bavarian State Library (BSB-Ink M-149). On this work and its relationship to similar anti-Turkish literature of the period, see Simon Eckehard, The Türkenkalender (1454) Attributed to Gutenberg and the Strasbourg Lunation Tracts (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1988). 8 The Scheide Library at Princeton University (31.14) holds a unique copy of the Latin tract, and the Berlin State Library (8° Inc 1512.20) holds the only known copy of the German version. 9 On shadow plays, see Die Welt des Schattentheaters von Asien bis Europa, ed. Jasmin li Sabai Günther and Inés de Castro (Munich: Hirmer, 2015). On spices and silk, see Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On porcelain, see Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). On gunpowder, see Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 10 An oft-cited article does not entertain the possibility of stages of technological transfer. “The first printing from moveable type was done by Pi Sheng in China during the years AD 1041–9. Because of the vast number of characters required in Chinese, the invention was not widely adopted. Gutenberg’s invention was made without knowledge of the Chinese discovery.” Francis Robinson, “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print,” Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 1 (1993): 231, fn. 2. 11 Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 10. 12 Kathryn A. Schwartz, “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?” Book History 20 (2017): 1. 13 A long-running argument in the literature is that paralleling developments in early modern Europe, an Islamic print revolution in late nineteenth-century Cairo, ushered in an intellectual Renaissance. See Geoffrey Roper, “Fāris Al-Shidyāq and the Transition from Scribal to Print Culture in the Middle East,” in The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, ed. George N. Atiyeh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 209–32; and Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 14 Frédéric Barbier, Gutenberg’s Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 11–35. 15 Karl R. Schaefer, Enigmatic Charms: Medieval Arabic block printed amulets in American and European Libraries and Museums (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 24–5. 16 The Diamond Sutra is cataloged as British Library Or. 8210/P.2. 17 The invention of movable ceramic type is attributed to the Chinese craftsman Pi Sheng between 1041 and 1049. Buddhist texts composed in Tangut script have been excavated in northern China. Researchers have determined that they were printed with wooden movable type in the eleventh century. See Peter Kornicki, “Steps Towards a History of the Tangut Book: Some Recent Publications,” East Asian Publishing and Society 2 (2012): 87. 18 Camillo A. Formigatti, “A Forgotten Chapter in South Asian Book History? A Bird’s Eye View of Sanskrit Print Culture,” in Tibetan Printing: Comparison, Continuities, and Change, ed. Hildegard Diemberger, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, and Peter Kornicki (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 90.

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19 Michael C. Brose, “Uyghur Technologists of Writing and Literacy in Mongol China,” T’oung Pao, 91, no. 4/5 (2005): 396–435. 20 David Morgan, The Mongols (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), 45–6. 21 Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilization in China: Paper and Printing, vol. 5.1, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 306. 22 A. Róna-Tas, “Some Notes on the Terminology of Mongolian Writing,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 18, no. 1/2 (1965): 136–7. 23 Michela Bussotti and Han Qi, “Typography for a Modern World? The Ways of Chinese Movable Types,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 40 (2014): 18. 24 Peter Kornicki, Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 121. 25 Karl Jahn, “Paper Currency in Iran: A Contribution to the Cultural and Economic History of Iran in the Mongol Period,” Journal of Asian History 4, no. 2 (1970): 101–35. 26 Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), III, 102. Al-Banākātī was quoting directly from The History of China by Rashīd al-Dīn Hāmadānī (d. 1318), the Jewish vizier of Mongol Ilkhanid Iran. 27 Christopher M. Murphy, “Appendix: Ottoman Imperial Documents Relating to the History of Books and Printing,” in The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, ed. George N. Atiyeh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 284. 28 Ibid., 289. 29 Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 15–6; Kapr 1996, 30, 49. 30 Stefan Heidemann, “Numismatik und Geldgeschichte des islamischen Iran,” in Handbuch der Iranistik, ed. Ludwig Paul (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2017), 94. 31 George C. Miles, Coinage of the Umayyads of Spain, Part I (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1950), 97. 32 Blaise Agüera y Arcas, “Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg’s DK Type,” in Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Kristian Jensen (London: British Library, 2003), 12. 33 Oriental Coin Cabinet, Jena, inv. no. 438-A06. Stefan Heidemann, “Calligraphy on Islamic Coins,” in Alif: The Art of Writing in Islam, ed. Jürgen Wasim Frembgen (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 166. For other examples of punched coin dies, see Luke Treadwell, Craftsmen and Coins: Signed Dies in the Iranian World (Third to the Fifth Centuries AH) (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2012). 34 Manfred Bumiller, Islamisches Blei. Die Wiederentdeckung einer bisher verschollenen Kultur. Funde aus Nordafghanistan und Grenzgebieten mit dem Schwerpunkt auf Frühislamische Objekte und Nachschöpfungen der Neuzeit. Band 8/b (Bamberg: Universitätsmuseum Islamische Kunst, 2012), 221–4. 35 Carol Manson Bier, “The Work of al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad, Die Engraver at Iṣbahân and al-Muḥammadiyya,” American Numismatic Society Museum Notes 24 (1979): 243–5; Stefan Heidemann, “Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad—A die engraver of the 4th H/ 10th Century,” in Oriental Splendour: Islamic Art from German Private Collections, ed. Claus-Peter Haase, Jens Kröger, and Ursula Lienert (Hamburg: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 1993), 41–4; Treadwell 2012, 74.

192 Notes 36 Ofir Haim, Michael Shenkar, and Sharof Kurbanov, “The Earliest Arabic Documents Written on Paper: Three Letters from Sanjar-Shah (Tajikistan),” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 43 (2016): 141–90. 37 Maya Shatzmiller, “The Adoption of Paper in the Middle East, 700–1300 AD,” JESHO 61 (2018): 1–32; Rustow 2020, 113–37; Hirschler 2012. 38 Richard Bulliet, “Medieval Arabic Ṭarsh: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Printing,” JAOS 107, no. 3 (1987): 427–38; Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth Century: The Arabic Documents from Quseir (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Arianna D’Ottone Rambach, “Unpublished Exemplars of Block-Printed Arabic Amulets from the Qubbat al-khazna,” in The Damascus Fragments: Towards a History of the Qubbat al-khazna Corpus of Manuscripts and Documents, ed. Arianna D’Ottone Rambach, Konrad Hirschler, and Ronny Vollandt (Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2020), 409–38; Paul B. Fenton, “Hebrew Print from 1300s,” Genizah Fragments: The Newsletter of Cambridge University’s Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library 5 (April 1983); Mark Muehlhaeusler, “Eight Arabic Block Prints from the Collection of Aziz S. Atiya,” Arabica 55, no. 5/6 (2008): 528–82. 39 Arianna D’Ottone, “A Far Eastern Type of Print Technique for Islamic Amulets from the Mediterranean: An Unpublished Example,” Scripta: An International Journal of Codicology and Palaeography 6 (2013): 67–74. 40 In 1909 Bernhard Moritz claimed to have seen six Fatimid-era printing plates in the Khedival Library in Cairo, but their whereabouts are unknown. On these, see Schaefer 2006, pp. 31ff. Seventeenth- through nineteenth-century metal print matrices are in several collections: Walters Museum 54.510 is a pilgrimage certificate depicting the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Mosque of Medina. The Museum of Islamic Art (Doha) houses MW 634.2011 and MW.635.2011, which are both seventeeth- to nineteenth-century zinc alloy and wood printing blocks from northwestern Africa. Karl Schaefer identified a likely nineteenth-century Arabic metal printing matrix (Glasgow Museum 1919.80.e). See his “Mediaeval Arabic Block Printing: State of the Field,” in Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in Languages of the Middle East, ed. Geoffrey Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1–16. 41 Władysław Kubiak and George T. Scanlon, Fusṭāṭ Expedition Final Report. Vol. 2: Fusṭāṭ-C, 2 vols. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989), II, 69–70. 42 Paul B. Fenton, “Une xylographie arabe médiévale à la Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg,” Arabica 50, no. 1 (2003): 116. 43 Cambridge Or. 1080 J50. See Fenton 1983. 44 Schaefer 2006, 104. Attempts to date amulets based on script, ornament, and the use of diacritics and vowel marks may be promising for establishing typologies of prints. François Déroche’s classification of Quranic hands should be systematically applied to the blockprints for categorization purposes. 45 Schaefer 2006, 34. 46 Solange Ory, “Un nouveau type de mushaf: inventaires des corans en rouleaux de provenance damascaine, conservés à Istanbul,” Revue d’études islamiques 33 (1965): 87–149. 47 D’Ottone 2013, 68; Karl Schaefer, “Eleven Medieval Arabic Block Prints in the Cambridge Library,” Arabica 48, no. 2 (2001): 216. 48 Schaefer 2006. 49 Francesca Galloway, Asian Textiles sale, Autumn 2015, London, England. This fragment of a blockprint features no text but rather an image of hawks, gazelles,

Notes

50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59

60

61

193

rosettes, and scrolling vines. Also, in 2016 Sam Fogg offered a fragment of an Arabic amulet (lot 8087) for sale. The whereabouts of these gallery items are unknown to me. Muehlhaeusler, “Math and Magic: A Block-Printed Wafq Amulet from the Beinecke Library at Yale,” JAOS 130, no. 4 (2010): 607–18. Muehlhaeusler 2008. Tonegawa Collection . Al-Saleh identified one of the Columbia blockprints, and Boris Liebrenz recognized two others in this same uncataloged trove. See Yasmine Al-Saleh, “‘Licit Magic’: The Touch and Sight of Islamic Talismanic Scrolls,” PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 2014, 105–6, 232, 327; and Liebrenz, “An Arabic Letter (ca. AH 6th/12th CE c.) Concerning the Production of a Manuscript of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Šifā,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 9, no. 1 (2018): 32–8. D’Ottone Rambach 2020. Helga Rebhan, “Gegen reale und vermeintliche Gefahren: Zwei arabische Blockdruckamulette,” Bibliotheksforum Bayern 11, no. 1 (2017): 20–2. On AKM 508, see D’Ottone 2013. MMA 2016.624 is a blockprint of an ibex or a gazelle. Alexandra Wade, “Item of Interest: Hidden Treasures,” A Monument of Fame: The Lambeth Palace Library Blog, 7 June 2018. (accessed June 13, 2018). Şule Aksoy and Rachel Milstein, “A Collection of Thirteenth-Century Illustrated Hajj Certificates,” in M. Uğur Derman armağanı: altmışbeşinci yaşı münasebetiyle sunulmuş tebliğler, ed. Irvin C. Schick (Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi, 2000), 123–4. Lyla Halsted recently presented her findings about an undated blockprinted Arabic amulet scroll (Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin I. 7161) that features blockprinted images illustrations of Mecca and Medina. Lyla Halsted, “A BlockPrinted Arabic Amulet Scroll depicting Mecca and Medina,” Lecture at New York University, 28 September 2018. Fenton 2003; University of Utah, Marriott Library, Arabic Paper 1561. . While no Persian blockprinted amulets have yet been located, Persian text was blockprinted on textiles. See Oxford University, Ashmolean Museum, EA 1990.379. Ruth Barnes, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), II, 112, no. 377. This amulet was originally given an inventory number of 941. The Coptic script is a transliteration, not a translation, of the Arabic, making it the earliest print of Arabic in Coptic letters. Josef Karabacek, Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer. Führer durch die Ausstellung (Vienna: Selbstverlag der Sammlung, 1894), 247. Schaefer understood the text as Coptic, tentatively transcribing it as “. . . eis __ra__l eie f . . .” and translating it as “Behold! Uriel (?) Surely he . . . (?).” See Schaefer 2006, 141–2. For more on writing languages in different alphabets, see Dario Internullo and Arianna D’Ottone Rambach, “One Script for Two Languages: Latin and Arabic in an Early Allographic Papyrus,” in Palaeography between East and West. Proceedings of the Seminar on Arabic Palaeography held at Sapienza, University of Rome, ed. Arianna D’Ottone Rambach (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2018), 53–72, and Scripts Beyond Borders: A Survey of Allographic Traditions in the Euro-Mediterranean World, ed. Johannes Den Heijer, Andrea Schmidt, and Tamara Pataridze (Louvain-La-Neuve: Peeters, 2014).

194 Notes 62 Three Shadow Plays 1992, 74. 63 Muehlhaeusler 2008, 566–7. 64 Eric C. Lapp, “Marketing Religious Difference in Late Antique Syria-Palestine: Clay Oil Lamps as Clientele Indicators,” in The Archaeology of Difference: Gender, Ethnicity, Class and the ‘Other’ in Antiquity. Studies in Honor of Eric M. Meyers, ed. Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2007), 371–80. 65 On this celestial globe, see Savage-Smith 1985, 26, 219–26. 66 Schwartz 2014, 41. 67 The “t” is undotted in Streck’s wordlist, so it may not be the Arabic consonant “ṭ.” Streck 1996, 387. 68 Three Shadow Plays 1992, 95. 69 Bulliet 1987, 430. I have changed Bulliet’s “mold” to “stamp.” Using similar language, the tenth-century physician Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Tamīmī (d. 370/980) claimed that Egyptian textile printers carved teak wood, probably sourced from East Africa, into stamps (qawālib al-sāj). See Anya H. King, “Gilding Textiles and Printing Blocks in Tenth-Century Egypt,” JAOS 140, no. 2 (2020): 455–65. 70 Three Shadow Plays 1992, 58 [wa-aqdamnā ʿalá waṣfi l-ṭ*rāshi]. Kahle felt that the entire phrase waṣf al-ṭirāsh was in the language of Shaykh Sāsān. See Kahle 1950, 164. 71 Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 72 Bernhard von Breydenbach, Peregrinationes in Terram Sanctam (Mainz: Erhard Reuwich, 1486). 73 In nineteenth-century Syria an abridgement of al-Jawbarī’s thirteenth-century exposé of the Banū Sāsān, al-Mukhtār fī kashf al-asrār wa-hatk al-astār, was among the costliest thirteenth-century works around. In 1836, a copy fetched 37.5 silver coins, and in 1853, 42.2 silver coins. By comparison, in 1837 a thirteenth-century anthology to which the famed seventeenth-century Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī had appended an autograph note sold for only ten silver coins. See Liebrenz 2014, 673–75. 74 Höglmeier 2006, 215. 75 Kubiak and Scanlon 1989, 78, fig. 95. This blockprint is also reproduced in Bloom 2001, 219; Gayer-Anderson Museum GA 3421, pictured in Schaefer, “Four Block Prints in the Gayer-Anderson Museum (Bayt al-Kiritliya), Cairo,” in Memory of Printing and Publishing in the Middle East, ed. Aḥmad Manṣūr (Alexandria: Library of Alexandria, 2018), 19–32. 76 Muehlhaeusler 2008, 544–50. 77 Rebhan 2017. 78 Sebastian Gaspariño, “Amuletos de al-Andalus,” 2010 . 79 D’Ottone 2013, 67. 80 Schaefer 2006, 170–6 and pls. 40–40c. 81 Schaefer 2006, 177–80 and pl. 41; Muehlhauesler 2008, 552–6. This matching pair was identified in D’Ottone Rambach 2020, 431. 82 On these see Schaefer 2001. 83 D. S. Richards, “Written Documents,” in Kubiak and Scanlon 1989, 68–70, 80, fig. 99. Scanlon described this document to Miroslav Krek, who was later unable to locate it in the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo. See Krek, “Arabic Block Printing as

Notes

84 85 86 87 88

89 90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97

98 99 100

195

the Precursor of Printing in Europe,” Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt 129 (1985): 12–6. Schaefer 2006, 134–6, 228 and pl. 27. Pictured in Marcel Cohen, L’invention de l’écriture et son évolution (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1958), III, pl. 53. Schaefer 2006, 142–5, 229, and pl. 31. Pictured in Arabic Papyri: National Library of Egypt (Cairo: Dar el Kotob, 2008), unpaginated. The editors date it implausibly to the eighth or ninth century. Schaefer 2006, 140–2, 229, and pl. 30; Karabacek 1894, 247. “Nr. 941 [=ÖNB P.Vindob. A. Ch. 12.145] ist ein sehr merkwürdiges Stück; denn an ihm begegnt uns neben dem arabischen Text auch ein koptischer Buchstabenschnitt in einer als Bordüre herumlaufenden koptischen Translitterirung des arabischen Gebettextes.” Muehlhaeusler 2008, 541–2. The ÖNB A. Ch. 12.141 fragment would have formed the lower right corner of the larger Utah A1562 amulet (Muehlhaeusler 2008, 542–3). Additionally, in ÖNB A. Ch. 12.141, the word lillāh (“to God”) is printed upside down and in mirror script, so presumably the other three corners also had words oriented in this way, which should aid identification of other fragments of this work. Cf. Schaefer 2006, 134. Höglmeier 2006, 215. Gum arabic and vitriol (= iron sulfate) were used to thicken the ink, helping it cleave to treated paper. Lucia Raggetti, “Cum grano salis: Some Arabic Ink Recipes in Their Historical and Literary Context,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 7, no. 3 (2016): 316. Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul, inv. no. 13327. Pictured in D’Ottone Rambach 2020, 412. Richard N. Schwab, Thomas A. Cahill, Robert A. Eldred, Bruce H. Kusko, and Daniel L. Wick, “New Evidence on the Printing of the Gutenberg Bible: The Inks in the Doheny Copy,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 79, no. 3 (1985): 375–410. Lucia Raggetti, “Inks as Instruments of Writing: Ibn al-Ğazarī’s Book on the Art of Penmanship,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 10, no. 2 (2019): 201–39. Bosworth 1976, II, 71. The manuscripts gloss bi’l-ṭarsh as ḍarb al-qālib ka’l-kitāba, or “the striking of the stamp like writing.” Neither tinsmiths nor tinkers appear in Maya Shatzmiller’s exhaustive Labour in the Medieval Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 1994), suggesting that it was an invisible medieval trade. The only two tinsmiths (sankarī or samkarī) whom I have identified in the sources are ʿAlī b. ʿUmar b. Ibrāhīm al-Sankarī al-Mawṣilī and Muḥammad b. Sunqur al-Baghdādī al-Sankarī. The former craftsman completed an elaborate inlaid brass candlestick in 717/1317 that is today held in the Benaki Museum of Athens and features vernacular poetry along its rim. On this piece, see Anna Ballian, “Three Medieval Islamic Brasses and the Mosul Tradition of Inlaid Metalwork,” Mosueio Benaki 9 (2009): 113–41. The latter artisan fashioned a hexagonal copper table with silver inlay in 728/1327 (Islamic Art Museum of Cairo, 139). Bulliet 1987, 430. Raggetti 2016, 332. I have made some adjustments to Raggetti’s translation of these lines. Among its most celebrated practitioners were Albrecht Dürer (d. 1528) and Rembrandt (d. 1669).

196 Notes 101 Some manuscripts have sarmāṭ and others sharmāṭ. Whether the differences are attributable to copyist’s error or shifts in language over time remain to be seen. Jacob, “Der Nâtû” 1910, 178–9. 102 Kahle 1926, 318. 103 al-Ḥusayn 2011, 101. [wa-man yanfudhu sarmāṭan]. 104 Bosworth 1976, II, 201–2. I have slightly altered Bosworth’s translation. 105 Parts of this poem are cited in Muehlhaeusler 2008, 562. The term ʿazbartu is a Sīn verb. Its nominal form ʿazbarah means “fraud” or “scam” and appears in Höglmeier 2006, 333. On the mandal, see Bosworth 1976, II, 297; Edward Lane described a Cairene fortune-teller, who, during a séance with a mandal, called out to his god Ṭarsh. The diviner was probably summoning the jinn king Ṭārish, who lives in houses among humans. (Manners and Customs, chapter 10). Several alms lists from the Cairo Geniza include professional munādil. See Mark Cohen 1995, 115, 118. 106 Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine, Certificats de pèlerinage d’époque ayyoubide (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2006), 227–56. 107 Ibn Ṭawq 2000, III, 1297. I am grateful to Torsten Wollina for this reference. 108 Höglmeier 2006, 215. Bulliet translated hayākil as “sellers of figurines” (Bulliet 1987, 432), but al-Khafājī (d. 1659) confirms that this term means amulets and is not Arabic. “As for the amulets that they call haykal and hayākil, it is not among the speech of the Arabs” (Al-Khafājī 1865, 236). Even so, the word occurs in East African Semitic languages, as the Tigrinya haykäl and Amharic aykäl mean “talisman” or “kind of bracelet.” Khalid Mohamed Farah, “Words of Old Semitic Origins in Sudanese Colloquial Arabic,” in Arabic Varieties: Far and Wide. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of AIDA—Bucharest, 2015, ed. George Grigore and Gabriel Biţună (Bucharest: Editura Universităţii din București, 2016), 234. 109 Line 10 of Gutenberg Museum (Mainz) GM 03.1 Schr. See also Schaefer 2006, 104, pls. 15–15d. 110 Bosworth 1976, II, 297, 319; SD v. 27. 111 Al-Khafājī, Shifā’ al-ghalīl, 236. I was unable to verify this passage in al-Ṣaghānī’s al-ʿUbāb. 112 Jeffrey Kotyk, “Buddhist Astrology and Astral Magic in the Tang Dynasty,” PhD thesis, University of Leiden, 2017, 242. 113 Bosworth 1976, II, 298; SD v. 40. 114 Sebastian Gaspariño 2010 . Fragmented copies of this same blockprint, along with their lead cases, have been preserved in the Tonegawa Collection of Spain (TP1-2) as well as in a private California collection, whose anonymous owner claimed that the amulet and case had been discovered in Spain. See D’Ottone 2013, 67. 115 A double-sided blockprinted fragment (Bodleian Library Ashmolean Museum WA1863.1913), measuring 99 × 74 mm, shows on one side Mary kneeling before Jesus, as he tells her, “Do not touch me.” On the reverse is a handwritten German prayer. 116 Formigatti 2016, 81. 117 Schaefer 2006, 104. 118 Adri K. Offenberg, “The Printing History of the Constantinople Hebrew Incunable of 1493: A Mediterranean Voyage of Discovery,” The British Library Journal 22, no. 3 (1996): 221–35.

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119 Geoffrey Roper, “Early Arabic Printing in Europe,” in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter, ed. Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002), 129–50. 120 Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Spatial Organization of Knowledge in the Ottoman Palace Library: An Encyclopedic Collection and Its Inventory,” in Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4), ed. Gülru Necipoǧlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2019), I, 18. 121 Louis de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Mémoires de Saint-Simon (Paris: Hachette, 1926), 202. Quoted in Fatma Müge Goçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 60. 122 In The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), Marina Rustow reconstructs part of the Fatimid state archive from textual fragments preserved in the Cairo Geniza. 123 Tamar El-Leithy, “Living Documents, Dying Archives: Towards a Historical Anthropology of Medieval Arabic Archives,” Al-Qantara 32 (2011): 406. 124 Shatzmiller 1994. 125 Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 20. 126 Murphy 1995, 286.

Chapter 7 1 Some book historians have studied errors in early modern European printers’ Arabic books, and analogous work with medieval prints should tell us more about production processes, including whether a work was produced with movable type. See Liebrenz, “Früher Druck mit arabischen Typen in Leipzig, 17.-18. Jahrhundert,” in Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in the Languages of the Middle East, ed. Geoffrey Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 22, and Celeste Gianni, “The Challenging Enterprise of Producing the Typeface for the First Arabic Book Printed in Movable Types,” Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library, Gale Database, Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2016. 2 Bewteen lines 26 and 27 the word allāh is carved below the word raḥma. Line 26 should read, in part, raḥmat allāh qarīb min, following Qur’an 17:82. 3 The impression in University of Utah A1563r has finer lines, so was probably made earlier than that in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München A.or. 88.2023. 4 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek P. Vindob. A. Ch. 12.134. 5 Kai-Wing Chow, “Reinventing Gutenberg: Woodblock and Movable-Type Printing in Europe and China,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 175. 6 Peter Schmidt, “The Use of Prints in German Convents of the Fifteenth Century: The Example of Nuremberg,” Studies in Iconography 24 (2003): 43. 7 Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch, “Early Woodcuts and the Reception of the Primitive,” in Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, ed. Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 20.

198 Notes 8 The so-called Bois Protat (BnF, Department of Prints and Photographs; 60 × 23 cm) is a fragment of a woodblock, engraved on one side with an image of the Annunciation and on the other with a scene of the Crucifixion. A soldier standing under the cross proclaims in a banner of speech “Vere filius Dei erat iste” (This was really the son of God.) Recovered in 1898 from under a stone floor in Sâone-et-Loire, France, the woodblock has traditionally been dated to 1370–90, though several scholars have argued for a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century dating. The size of the Bois Protat is consistent with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century print blocks; paper large enough to accommodate its impressions were only produced in Europe in these later centuries; and the two sides were likely not engraved at the same time. On these arguments see Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, 2 vols. (New York: Dover 1963), I, 107; Richard S. Field, “Bois Protat,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Gale In Context: World History, . Accessed May 5, 2021. 9 Untitled Latin Manuscript, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Ms. Clm 16455, 1410 CE; Achim Riether, Einblattholzschnitte des 15. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2019), 425–6, 458–9; Field, “Saint Dorothy and the Christ Child,” in Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, ed. Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 128–30. Riether and Field dated the removal of the woodcuts to 1879, although the library’s online manuscript catalog gives the date as 1829. See . Two woodcuts—one of the Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, and another of Saint Jerome—found in Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Hs. 2800 have been thought to date to the year 1410, but more recent scholarship places their production closer to 1430. See Richard S. Field, “The Holy Family,” in Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, ed. Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 133. 10 Johannes Lang, Das Augustinerchorherrenstift St. Zeno in Reichenhall (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 90. 11 Holm Bevers, “An Unknown Bohemian Woodcut,” Print Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1986): 343–6. 12 Faika Çelik, “Probing the Margins: Gypsies (Roma) in Ottoman Society, c. 1450– 1600,” in Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Stephanie Cronin (New York: Routledge, 2008), 173. 13 Adriano Papo, “Giovanni da Ravenna, umanista, pedagogo, notaio,” Studia Historica Adriatica ac Danubiana 2, no. 2 (2009): 33. Non abitano in nessuna città o paese, non hanno né capanne né tende, non attrezzi non veicoli, non greggi; camminano nudi o quasi e dove arrivano si stendono sul suolo alla rinfusa; maschi femmine ragazzi; sono ispidi bruni capelluti fetenti, macilenti e d’aspetto orrido. Vengono a Ragusa una volta all’anno, nel periodo della canicola, e si fermano fuori le mura. Non si trattengono piú di una settimana in un luogo e così percorrono tutta l’Illiria. Sono ladri e mentitori. Indovinano il futuro, gabbando i gonzi. Il loro mestiere consiste nel lavorar crini del cavallo, coi quali costruiscono utensili di che tutte le case si provvedono; quegl i utensili Giovanni chiama cicotrigonizatoria: una parola forse zingaresca, certamente diabolica, che né io né altri siamo riusciti a interpretare.

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I am grateful to Richard Gyug (New York) for this reference. 14 Fraser 1992, 62. 15 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Cumans controlled territory from the Aral Sea in modern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to the Danube River. Western Europeans recognized the military advantage of converting the Muslim Cumans and Tatars to Roman Catholicism. If they were brought into the Christian fold, it was hoped that they would ally with the Christian states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans against militant steppe groups but would also join in Crusading efforts around the Mediterranean. Domingo (c. 1170–1221), the eponymous Castilian founder of the Dominican monastic order, planned to travel to the steppe to convert Cumans to Catholicism, but the trip never came to pass. (Victor Spinei, “The Cuman Bishopric—Genesis and Evolution,” in The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans, ed. Florin Curta, with assistance from Roman Kovalev (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 414.) Even so, shortly after Domingo’s death, a Roman Catholic diocese of Cumania was established in Romania in 1228, only to be destroyed in 1241 by Mongol forces. In service to these conversion efforts, an anonymous author in early fourteenth-century Crimea compiled the so-called Codex Cumanicus, consisting of a Latin-Persian-Cuman dictionary and a Cuman-German dictionary, to facilitate communication with speakers of the Kıpçak-Turkic Cuman language (Library of St. Mark, Venice, BNM ms Lat. Z. 549 (= 1597)). 16 For an extensive treatment of “Tartars” in the medieval European imagination, see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 287–416. 17 Other than Michael and Bartholomew, only one other Muslim convert approached King Sigismund during his four-year stay in Constance. This unnamed male petitioner was granted a letter of safe conduct on March 17, 1417, just four days after the others. See Wilhelm Altmann, Regesta imperii XI: Die Urkunden Kaiser Sigmunds (1410–1437), 2 vols. (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1896–7), I, 146. “März 17: [er] giebt einem Christ gewordenen Muhamedaner einen Schutzbrief.” 18 Altmann 1896–7, I, 140. 19 Ibid., I, 145. 20 Fraser 1992, 79. 21 See Jacques Lenfant, The History of the Council of Constance, trans. Stephen Whatley, 2 vols. (London, 1730), II, 116–7. The original German reads: “[er] empfiehlt allgemein den zum Christentum übergetretenen Muhamedaner Bartholomäus Gr[af] v[on] Bethsaida.” See Altmann 1896–7, I, 145. 22 Lenfant 1730, II, 116. 23 Ibid. 24 Angus Fraser, “Juridical Autonomy among Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Gypsies,” in Gypsy Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, ed. Walter O. Weyrauch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 138. Translation of Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia universalis (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1550), Book VI, 267–8. 25 Frances Timbers, ‘The Damned Fraternitie’: Constructing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 10. 26 Erhard Etzlaub, Road Map of Central Europe, c. 1492, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Rosenwald Collection 1943.3.1448. 27 Fraser 2001, 137; Winstedt, “Some Records of the Gypsies in Germany, 1407–1792,” JGLS 11–12 (1932–33): 99–102. Hektor Mülich, a merchant in Augsburg, who was

200 Notes

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

probably not even alive in 1418, wrote in his chronicle that Egyptians had arrived in the city on November 1, 1418. Whether he was describing a new band of travelers or miscopying an older chronicle is unclear. Kenrick 2004, 62; Fraser 1992, 67. The original Latin is in Die Chronica Novella des Hermann Kroner, ed. Jakob Schwalm (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1895), 409–10. One manuscript variant has Sechanos, instead of Secanos. A 1430 German summary of this chronicle changed some details and added others that probably represent the later author’s longer acquaintance with these new groups. He wrote that the band of “miserable people” numbered 400 adults, that the men wore long black beards, and that they all claimed to hail from Little India (p. 548). Heng 2018, 426. Çelik 2013, 282. Adriano Colocci, Gli Zingari: storia di un popolo errante (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1981), 46–55. Kapr 1996, 40–6. Kenrick 2004, 56. Heng 2018, 427. Arthur M. Hind, 1963, I, 107. Peter Parshall, “Saint Anthony Abbott,” in Parshall and Schoch (2005), 297. On the history of this manuscript and woodcut, see Richard S. Field, “A FifteenthCentury Woodcut of the ‘Death of the Virgin’ in a Manuscript of ‘Der Stachel der Liebe,’” Studies in Iconography 24 (2003): 71–137, and idem., “Death of the Virgin,” in Parshall and Schock (2005), 148–51. Schmidt 2003. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Codex graecus Monacensis (Cgrm) 582a, fol. 114r. Knauer 2010, 2. Ibid, 4. Lapov et al. 2008, 160, 162. Sarah Blick, “Bringing Pilgrimage Home: The Production, Iconography, and Domestic Use of Late-Medieval Devotional Objects by Ordinary People,” Religions 10, no. 6 (2019): 392. . A mid-fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting features a woodcut of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary hanging on the wall. (Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Female Donor, c. 1455, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Accession number: 1961.9.11)). A fifteenth-century French coffer with pasted-in woodcut: Oxford Bodleian Library, Janitor’s List 993. Hans Körner, Der früheste deutsche Einblattholzschnitt (Mittenwald: Mäander Kunstverlag, 1979), 104–5.

Epilogue 1 Höglmeier 2006, 155, 424. 2 Otto Kurz, “Metz Unmuss,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 14 (1953): 87. 3 Pokorny 2009, 597.

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4 Kurz 1953, 88. The reading of the second half of the line is uncertain, but Kurz suggested “sorge(n) wirt mir” followed by two unclear words. He also cited an earlier author, Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber, who proposed “sorge(n) wirt mir nywe pin,” although this reading does not rhyme, as one would expect. 5 Hind 1963, I, 104. 6 Pokorny 2009, 597–8. 7 Charles D. Cuttler, Exotics in 15th-Century Netherlandish Art: Comments on Oriental and Gypsy Costume (Brussels: Liber Amicorum Herman Liebaers, 1984), 428, 430, 433, fig. 4. 8 Edmund Gilbert, et al., “Genomic Insights into the Population Structure and History of the Irish Travellers,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 42187 (2017): 1–12.

Appendix 1 1 In a modern Shi’i Bahraini dialect, dabash means “cattle.” See Clive Holes, Dialect, Culture, & Society in Eastern Arabia, vol. 1 Glossary (Leiden: Brill, 2001), xx. 2 Streck (p. 293) noted that in Ḥalabi gishshi means “to fart quietly.” I am inclined to accept the majority transcription.

Appendix 2 1 L. A. Mayer, Mamluk Playing Cards (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 9. 2 Timothy B. Husband, The World in Play: Luxury Cards, 1430–1540 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 13–15. 3 Bulliet 1987, 436. 4 Bishr Farès, “Figures Magiques,” in Aus der Welt der islamischen Kunst. Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel zum 75. Geburtstag am 26.10.1957, ed. Richard Ettinghausen (Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1959), 154. A color photo of this amulet is found in Al-Saleh, “Licit Magic,” 373, fig. 57. The accession number of the amulet is Islamic Art Museum of Cairo no. 15648. 5 Kitāb raqā’iq al-ḥulal fī daqā’iq al-ḥiyal, BnF MS arabe 3548, fol. 5v. [fī ḥiyali banī sāsān wa-hum al-ṭuruqiyya]. 6 Yāqūt b. ʿAbdallāh al-Ḥamawī al-Rūmī, Muʿjam al-buldān, 5 vols. (Beirut: Dār ṣādir, 1977), III, 379; Bosworth 1976, II, 297, v. 31. 7 Nuwayri 1933, I, 284; Three Shadow Plays 1992, 77–8; Bosworth 1976, II, 196, v. 52. 8 Bulliet 1987, 436; Littman 1920, 11; Kahle 1926, 319; von Kremer 1864, 265. 9 In nineteenth-century Algeria, qajama was also recorded as meaning “to speak.” See Reinhart Dozy, Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1881), II, 309. 10 Dozy 1881, II, 48. 11 Bosworth 1976, II, 296, v. 23; Höglmeier 2006, 207–13; al-Zarkhūrī 2012, 185; Christopher Braun, “Equipped with Shovels, Pickaxes, and Books: Treasure Hunters and Grave Robbers in Medieval Egypt,” in Living with Nature and Things: Contributions to a New Social History of the Middle Islamic Periods, ed. Bethany J.

202 Notes Walker and Abdelkader Al Ghouz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 79–102. 12 Ibn Khaldūn 1967, II, 324. 13 Bosworth 1976, II, 296, v. 23. 14 Reading the Middle Ages: The Changing Medieval Canon, ed. Heather Blurton and Dwight Reynolds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

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INDEX Abbasids  23–6, 28, 30, 32, 47, 53, 59, 60, 83, 98, 104 Caliph al-Mansụr (r. 754–75)  23 Caliph al-Muʿtasim (r. 833–42)  26 Abdal  175 n.87 Abdal dili, see Abdoltili Abdoltili  29, 44–5 Abgar Dpir Tokhatetsi  124 Abū ʿAlī Asbāṭ b. Sālim  26 Abū Dulaf, see al-Khazrajī, Abū Dulaf Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Abī ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Aḥmad  88 Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Baṣīr  88 Abū Nuwās  26, 40 Achaemenid Empire  31 acrobats  13, 39, 49, 135 al-Adīb al-Nādirī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Ismā’īl  60 Afghanistan  9, 20, 21, 109–10, 127 Walwalij (modern Qunduz)  110 Aga Khan Museum (Toronto)  112, 115 ahl al-sitr  181 n.2 Ainu language (Japan)  5 Aisha bint Abī Bakr  23 ʿajā’ib  89 ʿAjā’ib wa-akhlūqāt  89 ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb  16, 18, 37–9, 47, 49–50, 52–4, 84, 113, 160, 176 nn.13–14, 187 n.17, 188 n.38 Akkadian  31, 32 Aksoy, Şule  112 alchemy  99, 171 n.24 Aleppo  1, 21, 59, 63, 70, 74–7, 81, 93–4, 102, 120, 165 n.54, 185 n.78 Bānqūsā neighborhood  75 Ḥārat al-dallālīn (Brokers’ quarter)  76 Ḥārat al-qurbāṭ (Ḥārat al-ghurabā’)  75

Turab/Turbat al-ghurabā’ [Tomb(s) of the ghurabā’]  76 Wafā’iyya Sufi lodge  76 Alexandria (Egypt)  44 Algeria  45, 201 n.9 ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib  17, 23, 84 Ali Qapu palace  98 Amazigh  17, 173 n.56 Amharic  196 n.108 al-ʿĀmilī al-Ḥānīnī  33 amulets  14, 18, 30, 49, 85, 106, 110–17, 119–20, 125, 127, 142, 159, 193 nn.60–1, 195 n.90, 196 n.108, 196 n.114, 201 n.4 lead case for  120–1, 196 n.114 sellers of  49, 113–14, 120, 125, 196 n.108 Andalusia  55, 63, 78–80, 103, 105, 115, 127, 139 Andrew, Duke or Count  134 animal trainers  13, 81, 125 bears  34, 49, 53 cats  34, 160 elephant  49, 177 n.23 goat  49 lions  49, 177 n.22 mice  34, 160 monkeys  17, 34, 49, 53, 177 n.28 snake  49, 54, 160 Antioch  24 Antonites  136 al-Aqṭāʿ  30 Arabcha  44, 45 Aral Sea  199 n.15 Aramaic  20, 31–2, 35, 46, 103, 107, 111, 114, 116 Arba’ah Turim  124 archives  121, 125, 135, 137, 197 n.122 argot  8, 45, 162 n.5, 164 n.39 Armenian language  22, 61–2, 115, 123–4

228 Index Armenians  2, 53, 61, 63, 70–1 Artuqids  33, 40 al-Ashʿarī, Abū Mūsā  23 al-Aṣmaʿī, ʿAbd al-Malik b. Qurayb  22, 41 astrolabe  84 astrologers  13, 18, 30, 34, 48–9, 58, 78, 84–7, 93–4, 98–100, 102–3, 113, 119, 121, 123, 127, 136, 138, 140, 159, 171 n.24, 187 n.15, 188 n.38 Hilāl al-Munajjim  84, 113, 188 n.38 Muḥammad b. Hilāl al-Munajjim al-Mawṣilī  113 ʿUsfūr  85, 187 n.12 astrological tables  84, 88 astrology  120, 136, 138–9, 160–1, 187 n.17 astronomy  88, 136 al-ʿAṭṭār, Dā’ūd  51 Austria  129, 135, 137 Vienna  136–7 Austrian National Library  113, 115 Ayn Jalut  52 Äynu  45 al-ʿAzafī, Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh  80 ʿAzafids  80 Azemmour  79 al-Badrī, Abū Bakr b. ʿAbdallāh  27, 73 Baer, Eva  89, 94 Baghdad  16, 24–6, 30, 41, 48, 71, 83, 85 al-Baghdādī, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf  36 Bahman b. Isfandiyār  16 Bahrām Gōr  23, 29 Bakātūsh (village in Nile Delta)  43, 78, 186 n.84 Bākhamrā (Iraq)  83 al-Bakrī, ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz  8 al-Balādhurī, Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā  23 Balkans  105, 136–7 al-Balkhī, Abū Maʿshar  88, 92 Baltic Sea  133 al-Banākatī, Abū Sulaymān Dāwūd  108, 191 n.26 Bani Addes  45, 176 n.102 Banū Sāsān  15–20, 27–33, 37, 39–41, 44, 54, 58, 59, 63–4, 66, 68, 71, 73, 81, 83–5, 100, 113–15, 118, 129, 139,

141, 164 n.37, 167 n.16, 170 n.72, 171 n.24, 175 n.95, 194 n.73 known as ṭuruqiyya  159–60 name change to ghurabā’  18–20, 28, 64, 139, 167 n.20 Baqliyya (Vegetarians)  26 Barbaro, Giosaphat  21 barber  17 Bartholomew, Count of Bethsaida  132, 199 n.17 Basra (Iraq)  22–4, 26 al-Basra (Morocco)  78 Battle of the Camel  23 Battle of Uhud  99 Bauer, Thomas  57, 180 n.78 Bavaria  14, 102, 129–31, 136, 138 Bavarian State Library (Munich)  112, 115, 123, 129, 136–7, 190 n.7 Beckett, Samuel  50 Bedouins  27, 52, 75 beer  57, 61 beggars  12–13, 17–18, 30, 32, 34–5, 37–9, 41, 45, 49, 52, 54, 59–61, 63–7, 70, 81, 87, 125, 130, 133, 135–6, 171 n.19, 181 n.2 baskets of  67 leaders of  30, 65–6, 167 n.24, 182 n.10 training of  64–5 Behrens-Abouseif, Doris  179 n.64 Benaki Museum of Athens  195 n.97 Beowulf  161 Berland, Joseph  4, 80 Berlekamp, Persis  89 Bethsaida  132 Bibles  105, 117, 126, 137 bibliomancy  96, 98 Bint Shāhanshāh, Sitt ʿAdhrā  72 black skin  133 Blick, Sarah  137 blockprinting, see printing Bloom, Jonathan  106 Bohemia  14, 102, 129, 132, 134, 138 Bois Protat  198 n.8 Bonaparte, Napoleon  96 book illustrations  14, 32, 52, 84, 87–9, 94, 96, 98–100, 159 Book of Hours  127, 137 Boorde, Andrew  71, 140 Bosworth, Clifford E.  8, 44

Index Botticelli, Sandro  94 Bouchot, Henri  135 bread  9, 39, 42, 44–5, 58, 62, 143, 150, 154 Breslau  129 breviary  137 Brinner, William  37, 58 Buddhism  90, 104, 106–7, 114, 120, 123, 127, 190 n.17 buffalo  23–4, 47, 176 n.10 bulhān  83–90, 93–4, 96–101, 139, 159, 188 n.43 bullayq  61 Bulliet, Richard  70, 118–19, 159, 196 n.108 Buyids  29, 59, 83, 110 Byzantium  24, 26, 28, 32 Cahen, Claude  64 Cairo  7, 18, 35–6, 42–4, 47, 49, 51, 53–9, 61–2, 68–9, 78, 81, 84, 113, 119, 125, 177 n.23, 192 n.40 Azbakiyya quarter  62 Bāb al-Futūḥ  35 Bāb al-Lūq  48, 52–7, 60, 74, 81, 180 n.78 Bāb Zuwayla  53 Ben Ezra Synagogue  111, 125 Frankish quarter  70 Fustat  90, 111 Gayer-Anderson Museum  112 Geniza  106, 111, 117, 179 n.58, 196 n.105, 197 n.122 Ḥusayniyya neighborhood  35–6, 53 al-Khalīj al-Nāṣirī (Nāṣir’s Canal)  56, 58 Munsha’at al-Mahrānī  56 camel driver  13, 49–50, 59 caravans  70, 75 Carboni, Stefano  89 Carlson, Marvin  39 Çelebi, Evliya  35, 66, 71, 96, 136 Çelebi, Mehmed  96, 98 celestial globe  84, 113 cemetery  62–3, 72, 74, 80, 184 nn.63–4 Chardin, Jean  98 China  1, 25, 44–5, 94, 98, 105–6, 113–14, 120, 123, 127, 175 n.87, 190 n.17 Empress Wu  114

229

Chinese language  27, 104–5, 107–8, 122, 128 Chingani, see Čingene Chow, Kai-Wing  128 Christians  18–19, 55, 61, 70–1, 79–80, 103, 106, 113, 120, 123–4, 126, 129, 132–4, 136–7, 141–2, 199 n.15 Chronica novella (1435)  133 Cingano, see Čingene Čingene  76–7, 129, 133 (as Secanos), 134 (as Secanos and Cingene), 142 (as Çingane) circumcision female  61, 80, 125 male  73 coins  38–9, 43, 58, 105, 108–10, 194 n.73 coin die engravers  110–11, 118 coin dies  108–9 coin mints  110, 121 Colin, Georges S.  45 collective housing, see ḥawsh; maṣṭaba Columbia University  112, 115, 119 Conrad, Archbishop of Prague  132 Constantinople, see Istanbul constellations  88, 90, 92–4 Conversini, Giovanni  130 conversion from Islam  132, 134 Coptic  27, 51, 103–4, 111, 113, 115–16, 193 n.61, 195 n.88 corn  77, 185 n.78 Corrao, Francesca  39 Council of Constance  132 craft guilds  17–18, 65 craftworkers  1, 18, 48, 54–5, 81, 159 creole  5, 164 n.32 Crete  136, 173 n.68 Crimea  136, 199 n.15 Crone, Patricia  125 Cronerus, Hermann  133–4, 200 n.28 Crusades  105 Cuman  131, 136, 199 n.15 Codex Cumanicus  199 n.15 cupping  33 Cyganorum  129, 138 Cyprus  105, 136 Czech-Polish  136 Czech territories  129, 135

230 Index Damascus  55, 59, 63, 68, 70, 72–5, 120, 174 n.77, 185 n.69 Citadel  72 Ḥārat al-ghurabā’ (Ghurabā’ quarter)  70, 72, 81, 183 nn.45–6 Madrasa al-ʿAdhrāwiyya  72, 183 n.45 Madrasa al-QIjmāsiyya Madrasa al-Ṣārimiyya  72, 183 n.45 Madrasa al-Sharīfiyya  72, 183 n.46 Marj al-Daḥdāḥ cemetery  74 Nūriyya Hospital  72 Paradise Gate (Bāb al-Farādis)  72, 74 Post Gate (Bāb al-Barīd)  72 Qasab Mosque  73 Qubbat al-Khazna  112 Sāliḥiyya Quarter  73 Ṣārūjā Market  73 Taḥt al-Qalʿa  72–4, 183 n.50 turab al-ghurabā’  75, 184 nn.64–5 dancers  41, 44, 60 Danes  162 n.4 Daret, Jacques  141 David Collection (Copenhagen)  117 de Goeje, Michael  22, 42, 167 n.20 De Nicola, Bruno  47 Déroche, François  192 n.44 Diamond Sutra  107, 190 n.16 disabled people  34, 54, 64, 67, 166 n.57 divination  84–5, 88, 96, 99, see also astrologers; bibliomancy; fortunetelling Diyarbakir  61 Dom  2, 9, 20, 22, 28, 142 Domari  4, 9, 21–2, 44, 56 Dominican order  136, 199 n.15 donkey  57, 66 Duc Saint-Simon  124 Dunhuang  107 Al-Durar wa’l-yawāqīt fī ʿilm al-raṣad wa’l-mawāqīt  88 Dürer, Albrecht  195 n.100 Dutch art  141, 195 n.100, 200 n.44

Egypt  2, 4, 7, 12, 17, 20–1, 27, 29, 33, 39, 42–6, 48, 50–3, 55–8, 61, 64, 66, 69, 71, 74, 75, 78–80, 111, 116, 118, 121–3, 127–8, 132, 134, 141, 159, 160 El Cid  161 El-Leithy, Tamer  125 England  77 enslaved people  25, 52, 56, 69, 165 n.43 Ethiopian language  115 Ethiopians  63 Etzlaub, Erhard  133 Euphrates River  76 Fairfield (UK)  88 fālnāma  84, 86–7, 96, 98–9 al-Fāsī, Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Aḥmad  56 Fatimids  53, 192 n.40, 197 n.122 Fez  70, 77–8, 80 Darb al-Ghurabā’  78, 185 n.80 Faddān al-ghurabā’  78 Fez River  78 Logbab cemetery  78 Madrasa Dār al-Makhzān  78 Field, Richard  198 n.9 Fleischer, Cornell  90 fortune-telling  17, 79, 86, 88, 96, 119, 125, 130, 135, 159, 188 n.38, 196 n.105 France Arras  135 Colmar  134 Provence  134 Sâone-et-Loire  198 n.8 Strasbourg  134 Franklin, Arnold  16 Franks  55 Frisian (people)  162 n.4 funduq  68 futuwwa  64 Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge  140

East Africa  17, 113, 194 n.69, 196 n.108 East Turkestan, see Xinjiang Edirne  88 Eger, A. Asa  25

gambling  53 Gedaliah, Judah  124 Genghis Khan  107 George, Alain  52

Index Germany  2, 3, 10–11, 104, 128–9, 132–3, 135–7, 166 n.57 Augsburg  133–4, 199 n.27 Bad Reichenhall  129, 133, 137 Constance  132–3, 141, 199 n.17 Eberbach  133 Ebersberg  136 Erfurt  134 Greifswald  133 Hamburg  133 Hannover  134 Hildesheim  131–2 Holstein  134 Leipzig  129 Lübeck  133 Lüneberg  133–4 Mainz  104, 106, 109, 111 Mecklenburg  134 Meissen  131–2 Memmingen  136 Mödingen  136 Nuremberg  128, 134, 136 Rostok  133 Salzburg  133 Saxony  134 Stralsund  133 Wismar  133 Ghajar  27, 42–3, 46, 68, 75–8, 120, 170 n.70, 173 n.68, 184 n.68, 185 n.83 Gharīb shadow play character  37, 39–40, 49–50, 84, 114, 176 n.13, 187 n.17 of Tibet  4 Ghawṣ  45 Ghaznavids  110 Ghorbat (of eastern Iran and Afghanistan)  4, 21, 70, 109, 142 ghurabā’  1, 2, 4, 11–22, 28, 33–4, 36, 40– 1, 44–9, 52–5, 58, 60–1, 63, 70–1, 73–81, 83–6, 93, 98–100, 103, 106, 108, 110–11, 113, 117–20, 123, 125, 127, 136, 138–41, 159–60, 167 n.20, 167 n.24, 179 n.58, 185 n.70, 187 n.12, see also Strangers communal housing of  63–7 Corbi as 15th-century European transcription of  21, 80

231

equivalent to qurbāt  185 n.70 as generic foreigners  54, 62, 69 onomastica  183 n.53 printing  103–39 as spiritually alienated Muslims  80 Ginzburg, Carlo  5 de Gobineau, Arthur  5 goldsmiths  108–9, 128, 174 n.77 Gorani  1, 21 Grabar, Oleg  52 Greek  22, 31–2, 46, 51, 113, 115, 119, 123–4, 137, 170 n.8 Greek Orthodox  125 de Gregori, Gregorio  127 Guedzâni tribal federation  176 n.102 Gullah  6 Günther, Olaf  45 Guo, Li  39, 84 Gurbet (people)  4, 20, 136 Gutenberg, Johann  104–6, 109–10, 115, 117, 121, 124, 127–8, 134, 137, 190 n.10 al-Ḥabashī  51 Hacivat  39 hadith  79 Ḥadith Riyāḍ wa-Bayāḍ  161 Ḥalab (Nilotic tribe)  2, 3, 7, 42–4, 46, 75, 78, 114, 142, 160, 173 n.68, 174 n.70, 176 n.10, 184 n.68, 186 n.84, 201 n.2 Halsted, Lyla  193 n.59 Hama  59, 63, 74 al-Hamadhānī, Badīʿ al-Zamān  32, 84 Ḥamza (Muḥammad’s uncle)  99 Ḥamzanāma  86, 99 al-Ḥanbalī al-Baʿalī, Taqī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Bāqī b. ʿAbd al-Bāqi Hancock, Ian  11 ḥarāfīsh  36–7, 57–9, 61, 63, 81 ḥarfush, see ḥarāfīsh al-Ḥarīrī, Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim b. ʿAlī  16, 32, 52, 66 al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad  110 hashish  53, 57, 61 ḥawsh  68, 70 Ḥaydar b. al-Ḥajjī ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad  89, 93

232 Index haykal  120, 196 n.108 healer  18, 53 Hebrew  3, 5, 31, 35, 79, 103–4, 111, 113, 115–16, 122–3, 162 n.5 Heidemann, Stefan  110 Herin, Bruno  165 n.54 Hidayāt Allāh  74 Hierosolimitano, Domenico  124 Hikāyat Abī l-Qāṣim al-Baghdādī  84 al-Ḥillī, Ṣafī al-Dīn  8, 16–18, 28, 40, 42, 44, 49, 85, 89, 113, 117, 118, 120, 160, 172 n.28 Hindi  21, 40 al-Hindī, Muḥammad  74 al-Hindī al-Naqshbandī, Badr al-Dīn  74 Hirschler, Konrad  51 Holocaust  10–11 Holy Roman Empire  14, 135, 138 Homs  59, 63 Hülegü  35 Hungarian language  136 Hungary  14, 77, 128, 134, 137 Iberia  79, 80, 102, 124, 127 Ibn Abī Ḥajalah, Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā  33, 56–7, 59 Ibn al-Ashtarkūwī, Abū l-Ṭāhir Muḥammad b. Yūsuf  40 Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Sharaf al-Dīn ʿUmar  50 Ibn al-Ḥajjāj  41, 60 Ibn al-Ḥanbalī  76 Ibn al-Jazarī  117 Ibn al-Nābulusī, ʿUthmān b. Ibrāhīm  27 Ibn al-Ṣā’igh, Shams al-Dīn  57 Ibn al-Wafā’, Abū Bakr  76 Ibn al-Zuṭṭī  27 Ibn ʿArabshāh, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad  175 n.99 Ibn ʿAsākir, ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan  72 Ibn Dāniyāl, Muḥammad  13, 16, 28, 34–7, 47, 49–51, 53, 57, 59, 80, 84, 86, 113, 119, 160, 171 n.24, 177 n.30 Ibn Faḍlallāh al-ʿUmarī, ʿAlī  57, 58 Ibn Faḍlallāh al-ʿUmarī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad  58 Ibn Fashīshā  65 Ibn Ghānim  72 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Aḥmad b. ʿAlī  57

Ibn Ḥarfūsh, Mūsā  74 Ibn Iyās, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad  59 Ibn Khaldūn, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad  50, 160 Ibn Mawlāhum, ʿAlī  50, 84 Ibn Muḥaddith al-Kātib  119 Ibn Muqaffaʿ  29 Ibn Naḥmias, David  124 Ibn Naḥmias, Samuel  124 Ibn Sālim, Bahā’ al-Dīn  73 Ibn Sālim, Muḥibb al-Dīn  73 Ibn Ṭawq, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad  73, 75–6, 120 Ibn Ṭūlūn, Muḥammad b. ʿAlī  73 Ibrāhīm b. ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ḥasan b. al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī  83 Ilkhanids  87, 108, 191 n.26 Gaykhātū  108 Ghāzān  108 al-ʿInāyātī al-Nābulusī, Aḥmad  74 India  21, 74, 86, 99, 113 Golconda  21, 86, 99 Shāhjahānābād (Old Delhi)  74 Indiana University  115 Indian Ocean  105 Indians  25, 69 Indonesia  113 Iran  127 Astarabad  29 Isfahan  96, 98 Mazandaran  21 Qazvin  98 Tabriz  108 al-Irbilī, al-Ḍiyā  89, 93 ʿĪsā, ʿAlī  44 al-Iṣfahānī al-Baghdādī al-Burhānī, ʿAbd al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan  86, 89–90 al-Isḥāqī, Qijmās  72 al-Ishbīlī, Abū l-Khayr  80 al-Isrā’ilī al-Ṭurṭūshī, Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb  105 Istanbul  71, 96, 98, 105, 124, 177 n.23 Balat quarter  71 Italy  94, 111, 124, 127, 133, 159 Rome  129, 132–4 Jacob, Georg  38, 119 Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq  26–7, 86, 98, 187 n.9

Index al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baḥr  22, 24, 27 Jamaican Patois  5 Janān  26 Japan  104 Empress Shotoku  104 Jat, see Zuṭṭ jawānī  120, 121 al-Jawbarī, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm  16, 27, 33–6, 42, 48, 59, 85, 87, 89, 93, 96, 115, 117, 119–20, 139, 160, 188 n.36, 194 n.73 Jawhar, Ṣārim al-Dīn  72 Jazrafīl  90, 188 n.33 Jenepici  130 Jéniche, see Yenish Jerusalem  63, 68, 70, 125, 134 Jesus Christ  26, 128–9, 137, 141, 196 n.115, 198 n.9 Jews  1–3, 12, 17–20, 55, 70, 80–1, 103, 106, 111, 113, 123–4, 126, 141 jinn  87–8, 94, 98, 119, 148, 154, 159 jinn kings  90–4, 187 n.17, 196 n.105 Johannes ex Grafing  136 John, Count of Little Egypt  79 Kabul  17 kadas  51 Kahle, Paul  43, 51, 119, 160, 194 n.70 Kamāl al-Dīn the weaver  1, 21, 51, 76 Kaoli  22 Karagöz  39 Karbalā’  83 Karshuni  115, 124, 171 n.24 Kashf al-asrār  16, 34, 42, 59, 96, 119 Kaysaniyya  83 Kazakhstan  199 n.15 Kenrick, Donald  135 Ketāb-e sāsāniyān ba-kamāl  16, 44, 84 al-Khafājī  33, 41, 181 n.9, 196 n.108 Khara-khoto  107 Khawam, René  38, 171 n.26 al-Khazrajī, Abū Dulaf  8, 15–16, 27, 30–4, 37, 40, 42, 44, 63–5, 81, 83–4, 114, 119, 167 n.23, 171 n.19, 172 n.28 Khuzistan  23, 27 King, David A.  89 King Alfonso V of Aragon  79

233

King Ferdinand II of Spain  100–2, 126 King Juan II of Castile  79 King Manuel I of Portugal King Philip IV of Spain  71 Kıpçak language  199 n.15 Kitāb al-ʿAzīz  139 Kitāb al-bulhān  86–95, 101–2, 178 n.30, 187 n.19, 188 n.43 Kitāb al-fāl  89, 92 Kitāb al-jafr  187 n.9 Kitāb al-mawālid (Book of Nativities)  88, 90, 92 Knauer, Georg  136 Komotini (Greece)  71 Korea  104, 127 Krek, Miroslav  194 n.83 Kufa  23, 26, 83 Kurbat  4, 20, 184 n.68, see also ghurabā’ Kurdish  1, 9, 21, 35 Kurds  19, 63, 70, 75 al-Kutubī, Ibn Shākir  55 Lambeth Palace Library (London)  112 Lane, Edward  196 n.105 language families  5 Lapanne-Joinville, Jean  45 Lapidus, Ira M.  16 Latin  55, 88, 121–2, 125, 129, 133–8, 160, 190 n.8, 198–200 n.28 lepers  34 Lesser Egypt  79, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141 lettrism  88–9 Leyla and Mejnun  189 n.46 Liebrenz, Boris  163 n.20, 193 n.53 lisān al-gharbī  173 n.56, see also Sīn lisān al-ghurabā’, see Sīn Lisbon  124 literary salons  32, 34, 48–9, 81, 87 Little Egypt, see Lesser Egypt Little India  200 n.28 Littmann, Enno  42, 44, 160 Le Livre de la chasse  100 Lom (of Armenia)  2, 9, 20, 22, 142 Lomavren  9, 22 Loterā’i (mixed language)  29 lughat al-ghurabā’  18, 21, 40, 76, see also Sīn lughat al-shaykh Sāsān  18, 21, 37–8, 194 n.70, see also Sīn

234 Index lughat Banī Sāsān  32, 34, 46, 170 n.8, 181 n.9, see also Sīn Lyuli  44 Magian  113 magic  81, 120 magician  17, 49, 54, 100, 111, 118–19, 160 Mahfouz, Safi  39 Malaysia  23 Maliki  79 Mamluk Dynasty  35, 55, 61, 94, 136, 159, 166 n.57 Sultan al-Ashraf Khalīl  35 Sultan al-Mu’ayyad  54 Sultan al-Nāṣir Aḥmad  58 Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad  35, 53, 56 Sultan al-Ṣāliḥ Ismā’īl  56 Sultan al-Ẓāhir Barsbay  66 Sultan Baybars  35, 52–3 Sultan Ināl  54 Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī  48 Mamluk soldiers  53, 69 al-Manāwī, Dā’ūd  43 mandala  86, 113, 119 al-Manṣūrī, Sayf al-Dīn Salār  35 maqāmāt  16, 32–3, 39, 52, 84, 167 n.16 al-Maqrīzī, Aḥmad b. ʿAlī  54 Marinids  70, 185 n.80 marshes  24–6 Mary, mother of Jesus  136, 196 n.115, 198 n.9 Mary Magdalene  141 mashaʿiliyya  177 n.30 maṣṭaba  63–7, 69–70, 81 Master of Flémalle  141 Masʿūd Rukn al-Dīn Mawdūd  33 Maṭāliʿ al-saʿāda wa-manābiʿ al-siyāda  86, 90, 96–7 Mecca  63, 112, 120, 159, 185 n.69, 192 n.40, 193 n.59 medicine  30, 35–6, 90, 93, 121, 157 Medina  159, 193 n.59 Mediterranean Sea  199 n.15 merchants  26, 48, 62, 68, 71–2, 83, 94, 105, 188 n.35, 199 n.27 metalworking  56, 78, 114, 118, 121, 128, 142, 195 n.97

Metropolitan Museum of Art  122–3 Michael, Duke of Egypt  132–5, 199 n.17 Miles, George C.  109 Milstein, Rachel  112 al-Miʿmār, Ibrāhīm  13, 48, 55–6, 58–62, 74, 81, 139, 180 n.78 minority quarters  63, 70–1, 139 mixed language  9, 18–19, 142, 167 n.27, 175 n.87 Moldavia  10, 165 n.43 monastery  64, 124–5, 129, 132, 135–9 Mongolian language  104, 107, 122 Mongols (Tatar)  35, 47, 52, 70, 72, 75, 107–8, 113, 123, 127–8, 131, 191 n.26, 199 n.15 Moravia  129 Moritz, Bernhard  192 n.40 Morocco  45–6 Moses  26 mosquitos  23–4 Mosul  33, 35, 53, 84, 113 Muehlhaeusler, Mark  138 Mugat  9, 45 Mughal Dynasty  14, 84, 100, 177 n.22 Sultan Akbar  99 Muhra  26 mujūn  40, 60, 139 al-Mukaddī, Khālid b. Yazīd  27 Mülich, Hektor  199 n.27 Münster, Sebastian  133 al-Musawi, Muhsin  48 Musée Guimet (Paris)  108 Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art (Istanbul)  112 music  1, 21, 73–4, 139, 142 al-Mutanabbī  22 Muʿtazilism  84 Müteferrika, İbrahim  109, 124–5 al-Nābulusī, ʿAbd al-Ghanī  194 n.73 naffādh  120 Naghash, Mkrtichʿ  61–2 Naminbian Black German  6 al-Nawājī, Muḥammad b. Ḥasan  48 Nawar  22, 28, 42, 56, 81, 142, 167 n.26, 173 n.68 Nazism  3, 10, 166 n.57 Newbold, Captain  42, 184 n.68 night watchmen  13, 125

Index Nile Delta  78, 176 n.10 Nile River  2–3, 21, 42–3, 114 Nöldeke, Theodor  119 nomadism  9, 13, 19, 27, 29, 43, 45, 47, 70, 75, 76, 80, 132, 142, 173 n.68, 175 n.87 Northern Africa  14, 20, 29, 45, 50, 55, 63, 69–70, 78–80, 102–3, 105, 123, 125, 129, 159 North Sea  141 Nubians  20, 49, 52, 75, 173 n.68 Nuremberg Laws  9–10 al-Nuwayrī  160 Öljeytü  87 Oman  27 orality  47–9, 51 Oran  79 Ory, Solange  112 Ottoman Empire  1, 2, 12, 14, 17, 84, 100, 105, 124, 126, 134, 136–8, 165 n.43 Ayşe Sultan  96 Fatma Sultan  96 Sultan Ahmed I  99 Sultan Ahmed III  108 Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror  71 Sultan Murad III  51, 94, 96–7, 100, 124 Ottoman Turkish language  1, 4, 20–1, 32, 86, 88, 90, 96, 123–4, 136, 161, 175 n.87 Özkan, Hakan  60 pagan  133 Palmer, Nathaniel  88 paper  106, 107, 109, 111–12, 117–18, 120–1, 124, 128–9, 138, 187 n.15, 195 n.92, 198 n.8 Baghdadi  87 Chinese  111 Istanbuli  96 mills  106 money  108–9 watermarks  111, 124 parchment  124 Parrs, Alexandra  7 Parshall, Peter  136 peasants  19

235

Pelliot, Paul  107 penance  133, 139 penises  39, 44, 57, 61, 65 Persian (language)  1, 9, 27, 31–2, 35, 45–6, 48, 59, 86, 98–100, 123, 161, 175 n.87, 193 n.60, 199 n.15 Persians  20 Phillip, Duke of Egypt  134 physicians  17, 35–6, 39, 49, 125 pidgin  5, 8, 164 n.32 Pifer, Michael  61 pilgrimage  55, 75–6, 83, 112, 120, 129, 133–6, 139, 185 n.69, 192 n.40 pilgrimage certificates  14, 76, 112–13, 120, 129, 159 plague  56, 62, 68–70, 77, 184 n.63 planets  84, 86, 88–9, 94 Pococke, Richard  76–7 Pomerantz, Maurice  33 Pope Callixtus III  105 Portugal  79 Potts, D. T.  21 Powers, David S.  9 preachers  12, 17–18, 49, 79, 86 Princeton University  123 printed matter, cataloguing of  122, 123 printing  103, 119, 122–3, 137–9, 161, 190 n.13 blockbooks  121 blockprinting  78, 85, 102, 106–9, 111, 114–16, 119–20, 122, 124, 127–9, 135–8, 140–1, 192–4 n.75, 196 nn.114–15, 200 n.44 broadsheets  121 errors  197 n.1 etching  118 incunabula  121–2 inks  115, 117 intaglio printing  118 makers of  106, 114, 117–18, 124, 127, 135, 139 movable type  104, 110, 124, 127, 190 n.10, 197 n.1 pamphlets  121 pilgrimage certificates  14, 76, 112–13, 120, 129, 159 printing block (ṭarsh)  107, 111–15, 117, 118, 123, 127, 135, 192 n.40, 195 n.96, 198 n.8

236 Index printing press  104, 106, 115, 121, 124, 126, 128, 137 printmaking  118, 128 Sīn vocabulary of  113–21 of textiles  194 n.69 typography  104, 109 woodcut (see printing, blockprinting) xylography (see printing, blockprinting) Prophet Muḥammad  84, 117 pubic hair  171 n.23 Qadādār (governor of Cairo)  53 Qalandari Sufis  179 n.57 qalansuwa ṭawīla  52 Qarmaṭīs  26 Qaṣīda fī lughat al-ghurabā’ wa-funūnihim wa-ḥiyalihim  16 Qaṣīda sāsāniyya  16, 30 qaysariyya  55, 68 al-Qazwīnī, Zakariyā b. Muḥammad  89 Quatremère, Étienne-Marc  36 Queen Isabella of Spain  100–1, 126 Qunbur ʿAlī Shirāzī  90 Qur’an  87, 113, 115, 121, 127 rotuli  112 Al-Qurʿat al-mubārakah  89 Quṭb Shāhī dynasty  14, 21 Qutuz  52–3 Raby, Julian  92–3 al-Raḍī Muḥammad b. al-Ḥusayn  17–18 Raggetti, Lucia  195 n.99 Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik)  130, 198 n.13 Rao, Aparna  4, 80 rape  65 Rashīd al-Dīn  108 Rauwolf, Leonhard  76, 185 n.78 Rayy  30, 32, 65 Red Sea  111 Rembrandt  195 n.100 repairman (miʿmār)  56, 61, 179 n.64 Reynolds, Dwight  43, 176 n.10 Rhine Valley  3, 140–1 Rice, D. S.  89, 94 Riether, Achim  198 n.9 Rochester (New York)  136 Roma  10–12, 20, 22, 52, 55, 69–71, 77, 79, 103, 129–32, 134–5, 137, 159, 167 n.27

depictions of  140 as “Egyptians”  55, 129, 132–5, 137–9, 141–2, 162 n.4, 165 n.47, 200 n.27 genetic markers of  69–70 rejection of Gypsy label  11 as Secanos  133–5, 200 n.28 Romania  165 n.43 Romani language  9, 11, 22, 27–8, 42, 46, 55, 71, 79, 136, 170 n.70 Angloromani  29 Balkan dialect  71 Bosnian Ghurbet dialect  71, 136, 140 Calò  29 Ghajar  46, 184 n.68 non-Vlach Sedentary  136 Sinte dialect  162 n.5 rope-dancing  39 Rotwelsch  162 n.5 Rowson, Everett  42 al-Ruʿaynī, Muḥammad b. Qāsim  79 Russell, Alexander  77 Rustow, Marina  197 n.122 al-Ṣafadī, Ṣalāh al-Dīn  41, 48, 55–6, 180 n.78 al-Ṣafadī al-Barīdī, Jalāl al-Dīn Ḥasan b. Abī Muḥammad  33 Safavids  14, 84, 100, 177 n.22 safe-conduct letters  79, 132–4, 199 n.17 al-Ṣaghānī, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad  120, 196 n.111 al-Ṣāḥib Ibn ʿAbbād  22, 30, 32–3, 83 Sahner, Christian  23 Saint Catherine’s Monastery  125 Saint Dorothy  129–30, 133, 137 Saint Jerome  198 n.9 Saint Martin’s Day  133 Saint Sebastian  129, 131, 133, 137 Sait Efendi, Mehmet  124 Sajdi, Dana  74–5 Saka people  107 Saliba, George  100 Salonica  124 Samanids  105 Sāmarrā  83 same-sex practices  4, 57, 60–1 al-Sankarī al-Baghdādī, Muḥammad b. Sunqur  195 n.97

Index al-Sankarī al-Mawṣilī, ʿAlī b. ʿUmar b. Ibrāhīm  195 n.97 Sanskrit  84, 104, 107, 122 Saraqib (Syria)  165 n.54 sarmāṭ  51, 113, 115, 119, 124, 129, 196 n.101, see also amulets al-Sarūjī, Abū Zayd  32, 40, 52 Sasanians  19, 22–3, 25, 29, 32, 139 Sayābija  23–4 Scanlon, George  111, 194 n.83 Schaefer, Karl  112, 138, 192 n.40 Schlegel, Friedrich  5 Schreiber, Wilhelm Ludwig  201 n.4 Schwartz, Kathryn  106 Schwartz, Martin  31 Scott, Joan W.  4 Seljuk  93, 110 Şen, A. Tunç  90 sex workers  35, 39–40, 45, 60, 171 n.23 shadow plays  13, 16–17, 37–8, 43, 48, 50–1, 53, 70, 80, 84, 113, 119, 139, 160, 171 n.24, 190 n.9 artists  43, 50, 54, 73 (named Naʿīṣ or Nuʿayṣ) books of  159 sharīḥa  120 Shatzmiller, Maya  125 Shaykh Sāsān  16–18, 33, 37, 49, 58–9, 86 al-Shaykhūnī, Sūdūn (amīr)  53 Shiʿi Imams ʿAlī al-Hādī  83 Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī  83 al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī  83 Muḥammad al-Jawād  83 Muḥammad al-Mahdī  83 Mūsā al-Kāẓim  83 Shiʿism  21, 26–7, 29, 40, 74, 83–4, 87, 94, 98–100, 111, 123, 170 n.9, 175 n.87, 187 n.9, 201 n.1 Shuʿayb  53 shuṭṭār  41, 173 n.61 Sidi Bubakr  78 sieves  80 Sigismund, King of Hungary and Emperor of Germany  132–5, 199 n.17 Silk Roads  105, 107 Sīm  174 n.69, see also Sīn Simeonis, Symon  173 n.68 Simmel, Georg  3, 80

237

Sīn (language)  2, 6, 7, 13, 18, 20, 29–32, 34–6, 38–40, 42–6, 48, 51, 55, 59, 61, 65, 75, 78, 80–1, 84–6, 89, 103, 111, 113–14, 119, 123, 127, 135, 137–8, 143–61, 164 n.27, 171 n.24, 171 nn.26–7, 174 n.70, 176 n.10, 188 n.35, 188 n.38, 196 n.105 Sind  16–17, 22–4, 26–7 al-Sindī al-Shāfiʿī, Abū Bakr  74 Sinti  11, 20, 129, 162 n.4 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  161 Sirmāṭa al-fann  51 Al-Sirmāṭa fī azjāl khayāl al-ẓill  51 slave market  53 slaves, see enslaved people Slezkine, Yuri  81 Sogdian  32, 40, 107 Sorb (people)  162 n.4 South Arabia  8 Spain  78–9, 111, 159, 187 n.15, 196 n.114 Ceuta  80 Granada  80 Málaga  80 Ocaña  79 Santiago de Compostela  134 Seville  80 Toledo  79 Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (Munich)  129–31 Stein, Aurel  107 stonecutter  56 storytellers  49 Strangers  1–5, 7, 12, 15, 18–19, 28, 70, 74, 78, 80, 141, 160, 162 n.10, 163 n.20, see also ghurabā’ Streck, Bernhard  194 n.67, 201 n.2 Stromer, Ulman  128 Sudan  8, 20–1, 42, 46, 61, 68 al-Ṣūfī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān  93 Sufis  17, 30, 34, 44–5, 50, 52, 54, 76, 79, 179 n.57 Sumayka, see al-Adīb al-Nādirī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Ismā’īl al-Suʿūdī, Muḥammad b. Amīr Ḥasan  96, 97 Swabia  129, 133 swamps, see marshes Switzerland  134 Zurich  135

238 Index sword fighters  53 sword swallower  49 Syriac  31–2, 35, 46, 103–4, 107, 111, 113, 115–16, 118, 123–4 al-Ṭabarī, Muḥammad b. Jarīr  24, 28 Tajikistan  44, 46 Tajik language  42 Ṭalha (supporter of Aisha bt. Abī Ṭālib)  23 al-Tamīmī, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad  194 n.69 Tangut language  104, 107, 190 n.17 Tanta  44 al-Tanūkhī, al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī  41 Tarim Basin  107 tarot cards  159 ṭarsh  114, see also printing Tartars  131, 133–4, 199 n.16, see also Mongols Ṭashtamur  57–8 Tatars, see Mongols tattoos  49, 61 al-Tawḥīdī, Abū Ḥayyān  65, 167 n.24 tax collection  77, 81 Ṭayf al-khayāl  37, 53 Taylor, Aaron C.  79 Tehran  21 Temüjin  107 tent  70, 77, 81 al-Thaʿālibī, Abū Manṣūr  41 Thomas, Count or Earl of Egypt  134 Thrace (Greece)  71 Tibet  4 Tibetan language  105, 107 tightrope walker  49–50 Tigrinya  196 n.108 Tocharian people  107 Tonegawa Collection  196 n.114 Topkapı Palace library  124 Topkapı Palace Museum  99 Transylvania  165 n.43 Travellers  27, 129, 142, 167 n.27 Shelta language  167 n.27 Treadwell, Luke  110 treasure hunters (aṣḥāb al-mīm)  160 treasure-hunting  159–61, 171 n.24 Troitskaya, Anna  44 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph  6, 9

Turfan  107 Türkenkalender  190 n.7 Turkish  1, 40, 46, 48 Turkmen  21, 33, 68, 70, 75, 77, 120 ṭurṭūr  52 ṭuruqiyya, see Banū Sāsān al-ʿUbāb  120, 196 n.111 ʿUjayf b. ʿAnbasah  26 Al-ʿUkbarī, al-Aḥnaf  16, 30, 34, 40, 42, 119, 167 n.24 Umayyad Mosque  111 Umayyads  19, 22–4, 28, 59, 74, 109, 127 Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik  19 Caliph Muʿāwiya  24 Caliph Walīd I  24 Caliph Yazīd I  24 University of Cambridge  127 University of Erfurt  134 University of Oxford  103 University of Strasbourg  113 University of Utah  112–13, 115–16, 123, 127 Upper Egypt  7 Ustad ʿOsman  96 al-Usṭawānī al-Ḥanbalī, Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn b. Sulaymān  74 Uyghur  104, 107, 121–2, 127 Uzbekistan  29, 44, 46, 70, 199 n.15 Uzbeks  42, 72 Uzun Hasan  21 Vali Jan  96 van Nieuwkerk, Karin  7, 44 Velázquez Basangta, Fernando  80 Venice  94 von Breydenback, Bernhard  114, 115 von Kremer, Alfred  7, 42, 68, 160 Wallachia  10, 165 n.43 wandering folk  71 Wāsiṭ  26 Watenpaugh, Heghnar  76 Way of Saint James  133–5 weaver  1, 13, 21, 26, 51, 55–6, 76–7, 85 Wenseslaus, King of Bohemia West Africa  63, 113 Wetzstein, Johann Gottfried  66

Index wine  53, 65 women  4, 11–12, 34, 41, 60–1, 65–7, 72–3, 86, 93–6, 133–4 wrestlers  53 writing  119 Xinjiang  45, 107, 175 n.87 Yaḥyā b. Muḥammad  88 Yale University  112, 122 Yarbrough, Luke  27 Yemen  19 Yenish  2–3, 10–12, 129, 142, 162 n.5 Yersinia pestis  68–9, see also plague Yiddish  6, 12, 105, 162 n.5 Yirmisekiz (father of Mehmet Sait Efendi)  124 Yoors, Jan  4

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youths  26, 30, 33, 60, 64–6, 87, 139, 153 Yusuf and Zulaykha  96, 189 n.46 Zahr al-basātīn fī ʿilm al-mashātīn  19 zajal  51, 60–1 Zanj  16, 170 n.72 Zargari  12, 20 al-Zarkhūrī, Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr  18, 118 zodiac  87–90, 93, 98, 136 Zoroastrianism  90 Zubayr (supporter of Aisha)  23 al-Zuhrī, ʿAbdallāh b. Ayyụb b. Rāshid Zuṭṭ  13, 20, 22–8, 34, 46–7, 66, 83, 170 n.72 religious figurines of  23 zuṭṭiyya cloth  26 al-Zuṭṭī, Abū Ḥātim  26

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