Maqrizi and the Bathwater

The recent Mamluk Studies Review (Jan. 2010, pdf available here) contains an essay by Frédéric Bauden on the historical work of Cairo’s great medieval historian al-Maqrizi. This is Bauden’s ninth essay mining the extraordinary rough drafts of al-Maqrizi’s great work, the Khitat. What is extraordinary about these drafts is that they still exist, which is likely due to the very success and popularity of al-Maqrizi. At his death his personal manuscripts were not destroyed but were considered valuable on account of his fame.

This recent essay is a challenging one for a fan of al-Maqrizi, as he is branded something of a plagiarist, though with due consideration for the variable historical meaning of that term. Bauden noticed that 19 leaves (82a-100b) of the manuscript were written in a different hand than that of al-Maqrizi. This section corresponds to the section on madrasas in the Khitat. One possibility would be that al-Maqrizi employed a copyist, but close analysis by Bauden goes a long way toward demonstrating that this is a section from an earlier work by al-Maqrizi’s associate and neighbor al-Awhadi. There is some circumstantial evidence drawn from handwriting, but most important is the nature of the changes made to this section by al-Maqrizi, who introduced changes that made its language more impersonal, most likely so that it could pass as his own work.

The possible use by al-Maqrizi of the earlier work of his colleague al-Awhadi (d. 1408) has been known for some time. A historian of the next generation, al-Sakhawi (d. 1497) made some sharp charges against al-Maqrizi, writing:

[Al-Awhadi] devoted his attention to history, of which he was passionately fond. He wrote a comprehensive draft about the topography of Misr and Cairo on which he worked hard. [With this,] he did a useful work and in an excellent manner. He made a fair copy of part of it. Then Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi made a fair copy of it [completely] and attributed it to himself [after he had made] additions. [translation Bauden, pg. 162]

This and other similar comments by the same writer are clearly aimed at disparaging the work of al-Maqrizi, insinuating that his work was not original. That al-Maqrizi made some use of the earlier work by al-Awhadi is not in doubt, since he himself tells us about this use in his own biographical entry for al-Awhadi:

…I have jotted down from him heaps of historical data, and I benefited from him a lot in the field of history. God assisted me in providing me with drafts in his own handwriting about the topography of Cairo that I incorporated in my comprehensive book [the Khitat]. [translation Bauden, pg. 170]

This is essentially the same information given to us by al-Sakhawi, only couched in a more favorable light. Obviously the problem is in knowing how to weigh these two different versions of al-Maqrizi’s use of earlier material. The benefit of the doubt has generally gone to al-Maqrizi, since the issue is pretty much insoluble without hard evidence. That is where al-Maqrizi’s rough draft is helpful; it provides the first evidence from which an independent judgment could be made.

I should note that I was skeptical at the beginning of this article that I would find anything disturbing about al-Maqrizi’s methodology. The work of al-Maqrizi strikes some modern readers as not so much a work of history as a cut and paste job. Arabic history, from ibn Ishaq on down to al-Maqrizi, is not so worried about developing a strong narrative arc of “what happened.” It is content to be more fragmented and to present various accounts and possibilities. I’ve grown to love that indeterminacy.. as I think most people who work on this material would agree. Since so much of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat is borrowed from various sources, what could be disturbing about the incorporation of some material from a contemporary? And after all, we’re just talking about 19 leaves of a very lengthy work.

But this essay turned out to be more challenging to the work of al-Maqrizi than I had guessed. To understand this we should be clear about where the originality of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat really lies. It is not in the prose, but rather in the architecture of the work. This is a point that we are re-learning in our own digital era. Where there is a glut of material, curation comes to the fore. The prize goes to the scholar/writer who organizes and sets out material in a fashion that readers can intuitively grasp. The Khitat is not a “great book” in the way we think about, say, the Aeneid or the poetry of Yeats; it is a collection of disparate material that shaped the way Cairo was perceived from the time of al-Maqrizi on down to our own time. That grand curation of past writing on Cairo is the glory of al-Maqrizi. Unlike Virgil or Yeats, his reputation would not inherently plummet if it were discovered that he did not write all of his great book.

And this is exactly where we are. Bauden has shown that al-Maqrizi incorporated large sections of the work of a predecessor, making only minimal (and misleading) emendations. This would not be catastrophic for an admirer of al-Maqrizi, for the reasons I just gave. However, there is more here in the argument of Bauden. The grand architecture itself, it appears, can be attributed to al-Awhadi. Bauden notes:

…finally, a close analysis of the layout of this section, I mean the order in which the madrasahs are enumerated, shows conclusively that al-Maqrizi followed it almost exactly: only eight madrasahs appear to have been moved to another place in al-Maqrizi’s plan, which means that he took al-Awhadi’s general organization of the section on buildings. This is another upsetting element. [199]

In fact, I would argue that this is the most troubling aspect. If the architecture should be attributed to someone else, then our view of al-Maqrizi will have to change. Bauden goes on to show that the draft of al-Awhadi was in a fairly complete state. The section on madrasas began with an excursus on the introduction of the madrasa to Egypt. This use of excurses on various topics, mixed into the section on buildings, is a marked feature of the Khitat, and it is now likely that this should be seen as a contribution of al-Awhadi. Within these 19 leaves there are also references to other sections that have been completed, such as the one on mosques, so possibly al-Maqrizi inherited quite a bit more than these 19 leaves, which he then fair-copied into his own manuscript. The large point here is that the structure of the Khitat can be traced back to al-Awhadi in important details.

While this may change our view of al-Maqrizi as an author, it does not change at all the value of this vast book. I would suggest that the main result of Bauden’s essay will be a revaluation of the Khitat as more of a social text, rather than the product of a single historian. Bauden makes the useful point that it is unlikely that al-Maqrizi conceived of writing the Khitat before the death of his colleague al-Awhadi. Why would he begin working on it when he well knew that his friend was working on a similar project? It appears to have been the premature death of al-Awhadi, and coming into possession of the rough draft, that set al-Maqrizi at work on the Khitat sometime shortly after 1410. We should also mention the death of Ibn Duqmaq at about this same time, who also left behind an unfinished work. So al-Maqrizi should be seen as picking up and completing a project that was more or less “in the air” at his time. From some points of view, that will make the Khitat an even more interesting book to study.