Contadini, Anna

English

SOAS Research Online

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Jonathan M. BloomSource: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 120, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 2000), pp. 271-273Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/605051 .Accessed: 18/10/2011 11:15Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofthe American Oriental Society.http://www.jstor.orgReviews of Books several of his successors (whose rule amounted to a dictatorship) but to insure by their presence the very survival of the Fatimid dynasty in the face of a Saljuk onslaught. The extent of this influx was considerable; sources suggest that well over thirty thousand Armenians took up residence in Egypt and, because many of them remained Christian, they constituted a recogniz- able threat to the Muslim domination of the country. Among the seven (or possibly more) Armenians who were to hold the wazirate in the century from Badr until Ruzzik b. Tal'ic, one was the Christian Bahram, who never converted, even though as wazir he was granted the title "Sword of Islam" (sayfal-Islam). These Armenians thus form a distinct chapter in Fatimid his- tory and the phenomenon of their participation en masse in its final phase deserves considerable scholarly attention and study. Therefore, given the inherent interest of the subject that is implied in Professor Dadoyan's title, students of Fatimid his- tory should be drawn to her book. What they will find in it, however, may prove disappointing and more than a little diffi- cult to fathom. The author is not a specialist on the Fatimids nor on the Egypt of this period. Instead she wants to use the Fatimid Armenians as a major case to illustrate how heterodox and sectarian Armenians interacted with sectarian Muslims. She sees this situation as the "... last large scale phase in the perpetual alliance between the Armenian sectarians and the Muslims" (p. 1). Apparently, therefore, she understands the ex- tensive Armenian role in Fatimid Egypt as the outcome of a natural affinity between the Ismacili Shicites and various rene- gade and heterodox Armenian groupings-both at odds with the orthodoxy of their respective religious establishments. To make that argument, she devotes substantial space to the history of pre-Fatimid Armenian heresies, going back several centuries and earlier. Fully a third of the book treats this back- ground, without more than a vague hint as to why or what im- portance it has for its later subject. Finally, when she does come to the Armenian establishment in Fatimid Egypt, the con- nection to this latter subject exists by faint implications-a re- lationship that is not likely to be at all clear to most readers. A sentence such as the following comment about the "spiri- tual zeal" of the Jamflis (Badr and al-Afdal) seems to provide a bridge. It seems that the cultural syncretism which gave rise to sectarian, revolutionary and apocalyptic movements (like IsmaCilism itself) underlay the intimacy the sectarians had with Islam at the same time maintaining their adher- ence to their Armenian identity. (p. 124) In reviewing the specific careers of various key individuals in the Fatimid state, Dadoyan also tends to see an Armenian presence in all situations where she can deduce even the slight- est possibility of it. As one example, because many Armenians had once been relocated to Sicily in an era long before the Fatimid period, any Sicilian could thus have been Armenian. Jawhar, the Sicilian, the famous general who conquered Egypt for the Fatimids, according to this reasoning, is "... thought to have been of Armenian descent" (pp. 83-84). The caliph al- Mustacli was Armenian by virtue of the fact that he was Badr al-Jamali's grandson (pp. 13, 106, 128-30). Where this infor- mation came from is unclear; al-MustaCli was actually Badr's son-in-law (and thus al-Afdal's brother-in-law), but hardly an Armenian. These two examples must suffice but there are more in the book. In general the writing is careless throughout and often con- fused and confusing; and the facts put in evidence, even when accurate, are frequently forced to mean something quite un- likely. Still, it is useful to be reminded of the depth of Arme- nian involvement in Fatimid Egypt. Some issues discussed by Dadoyan-though not necessarily resolved by her-are highly significant. For example: the precise religious attitudes and proclivities of Badr and al-Afdal remain a mystery; Bahram's connection to an international Armenian ecclesiastical elite through the Catholicos Grigor Martyrophil and his nephew (also named Grigor), who may have been Bahram's own brother, raises again the question of Bahram's possible princely status prior to his entry in Egypt and his purpose in coming there; and the Banu Ruzzik's purported attachment to a Nusayri-Imami version of Shicism, at least in the case of al-Malik al-Salih Tala>ic b. Ruzzik, and their Armenian backgrounds, also requires investigation. But specialists on the Fatimids should take up these issues with due caution and certainly consult the sources in addition to the material in this book. Unfortunately, the non- specialist, even while gleaning from it valuable information about the Armenians, in the absence of a way to judge what is accurate and what is speculative (or even incorrect), may be all too frequently led astray by its author's less obvious agendas. PAUL E. WALKER UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text. By IRENE A. BIERMAN. Berkeley: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1998. Pp. xvi + 124, illustrations and maps. $50 (cloth); $20 (paper). Fatimid Art at the Victoria and Albert Museums. By ANNA CONTADINI. London: V & A PUBLICATIONS, 1998. Pp. 138, color plates and illustrations. ?60, $99 [U.S. distribution: Antique Collectors' Club Ltd., Wappingers Falls, N.Y.] The Fatimids (r. 909-1171), Ismacili Shicites who claimed descent from the Prophet's daughter Fatima and his son-in-law CAli b. Abu Talib, rose to power in tenth-century Ifriqiya (now 271 Journal of the American Oriental Society 120.2 (2000) Tunisia) and soon fought with the Umayyads of Spain for con- trol of much of northwest Africa. In 969 the Fatimid general Jaw- har turned in the other direction and conquered Egypt, ostensibly the first stage in the Fatimids' conquest of the entire Muslim world and their recognition as its rightful rulers. Inspired by Jawhar's successes, the Fatimids abandoned north Africa and moved eastwards, establishing their capital at Cairo, on the banks of the Nile. Although they came to control parts of Syria and the Hijaz and even were briefly recognized in Baghdad it- self, things didn't work out the way they had planned, and for most of the next two centuries Fatimid power was largely con- fined to Egypt. There they transformed Fustat, a somewhat sleepy regional capital, into Cairo, the bustling metropolis of the Med- iterranean, and presided over a mixed and prosperous popula- tion of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, Blacks, Turks, etc. Despite famines, political and religious crises, and the on- slaught of the Crusaders, the Fatimids held on by the skin of their teeth for two centuries until Saladin restored Sunni rule to Egypt. The Fatimids have exerted a powerful attraction on later gen- erations of historians, perhaps because of the shivers they arouse as the only Shicite dynasty to have ruled Egypt, which was nor- mally a bastion of Shafici Sunnism, or else because of the un- paralleled splendor of their art and court. The great Mamluk historian al-Maqrizi chronicled the history of the dynasty and its fabulous monuments and treasures, basing his accounts on mostly now-lost chronicles written in the Fatimid and post- Fatimid eras. These tantalizing reports are complemented by a score of buildings, largely mosques and tombs, surviving in Cairo and a seductive assortment of artworks-including lus- tered ceramics, exquisite rock crystals and diaphanous linens interwoven with gold, mostly preserved in European church treasuries and museums. Apart from the 1969 millenary celebration of the founding of Cairo, which provoked an exhibition and a symposium, there has not been an exhibition or book devoted to Fatimid art until recently, but a spate of publications shows that the Fatimids have finally gotten their chance. The two books under review are complemented by recent and important publications about Ismacili-particularly Fatimid-history and thought by such em- inent scholars as Farhad Daftary, Heinz Halm, and Paul Walker. In 1998 the Institut du monde arabe held the first international exhibition on Fatimid art in Paris, which was commemorated in an important catalogue (Tresorsfatimides du Caire, 1998). The proceedings of the accompanying symposium at the Sorbonne, edited by Marianne Barrucand, are in press. The two books under review present very different approaches to the visual world of the Fatimids. Anna Contadini's Fatimid Art is by far the better book and would be a useful and impor- tant addition to any library dealing with Islamic art. It presents the collection of artworks from the Fatimid period in London's Victoria and Albert Museum and includes such varied media as carved rock crystal, woven textiles, ceramics, glass, carved ivory and wood, and metalwork. The first chapter is a solid in- troduction to Fatimid history and architecture. It is followed by chapters on the individual media, including discussion of their history and technique. The discussion of rock crystal is partic- ularly interesting. To each chapter Contadini appends a cata- logue of many, but not necessarily all, of the examples from the V&A collection attributed to the Fatimid period. This selec- tion indicates at once the book's strength and its weakness, for the author is unsure whether her book is about Fatimid art- hence she discusses works outside the V&A collection-or about the V&A collection-hence she discusses works in the collec- tion that have nothing to do with the Fatimids, such as the Mar- wanid tiraz and a Yemeni iqat, both illustrated in color. Overall, this is a fair, useful, and reliable book. Irene Bierman's book is quite different. It is at once more ambitious but ultimately less successful. Her thesis is that the Fatimid rulers of Egypt were the first to use writing on build- ings and textiles ("the public text") to present their own dis- tinct ideology to the diverse members of Cairene society. Fatimid doctrines, she argues, were presented in a distinct "Fatimid" form of Kufic script embellished with tendrils, leaves, and flow- ers. The book's blurb suggests that it will provide new insights into a complex period of Muslim history, as well as provide a pioneering model for studying public writing in other societies. This is hardly likely. The author appears to have decided on a theory about public writing and adduced only the evidence needed to support it, while ignoring any conflicting evidence or information that might have led her to modify her extreme positions. For example, floriated Kufic was established in Egypt before the arrival of the Fatimids. It was not developed to make an ideological statement but was an aesthetic response to peculiarities of the Arabic script. There can be no question that the Fatimids used public texts to make public statements, but by limiting her scope to Egypt, Bierman is con- veniently able to ignore the long tradition of public writing in the Muslim world before the Fatimids and in other regions, from Central Asia to Spain, let alone in the pre-Islamic Roman world. Although her reading on subjects ranging from contemporary sig- nage to contextual literacy is omnivorous, and she thereby expands the horizons of dull scholarship, she oddly ignores the substantial literature on such crucial subjects as the contemporary-and per- haps related-revival of public writing in medieval Italy (Petrucci 1993) or larger questions of Islamic epigraphy (Blair 1992). Bier- man is to be commended for writing a book with an idea; unfor- tunately, the idea is-in my opinion-quite wrong. REFERENCES Blair, S. S. 1992. The Monumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Irana and Transoxania. Supplements to Muqarnas. Leiden: E. J. Brill. 272 Reviews of Books Petrucci, A. 1993. Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Cul- ture. Tr. L. Lappin. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Tresors fatimides du Caire. 1998. Exhibition catalogue, 28 April-30 August 1998. Paris: Institut du monde arabe. JONATHAN M. BLOOM RICHMOND, NEW HAMPSHIRE Hadji Bektach, un mythe et ses avatars: Genese et evolution du soufisme populaire en Turquie. By IRENE MELIKOFF. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1998. Pp. xxvi + 317. Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East: Col- lected Papers of the International Symposium "Alevism in Turkey and Comparable Syncretistic Religious Communi- ties in the Near East in the Past and Present," Berlin, 14- 17 April 1995. Edited by KRISZTINA KEHL-BODROGI, BAR- BARA KELLNER-HEINKELE, and ANKE OTTER-BEAUJEAN. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1997. Pp. xvii + 255. Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives: Papers Read at a Conference Held at the Swedish Re- search Institute in Istanbul, November 25-27, 1996. Edited by TORD OLSSON, ELISABETH OZDALGA, and CATHARINA RAUDVERE. Istanbul: SWEDISH RESEARCH INSTITUTE IN ISTANBUL, 1998. Pp. 210. Irene Melikoff's attempt at synthesis, and the two confer- ence volumes, follow on the heels of three collections of papers published by editions Isis in Istanbul, two consisting of Meli- koff's own scattered articles: Sur les traces du soufisme turc: Re- cherches sur l'Islam populaire en Anatolie (1992); De l'epopee au mythe: Itineraire turcologique (1995), and one consisting of papers presented at a conference on the Bektashis held at Stras- bourg on 29 June-2 July 1986: Bektachiyya: Etudes sur l'ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bek- tach, ed. Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein (1995). In a revealing "Avant-propos" to one of the collections of her articles (Le soufisme turc, p. 3) Melikoff recounts her aston- ishment one day in 1969 when she heard someone singing a nefes containing the words: Men Ali'den gayri Tanri bilmezem ("I know no other God than Ali"). She had been visiting Tur- key regularly for twenty-five years and had never imagined the possibility of such an assertion. "Je croyais tout connaitre de ce pays et voila que je d6couvrais une Turquie inconnue, insoup- qonnde, qui vivait en marge de l'autre, la Turquie officielle!" And so she spent the next twenty-five years investigating this hidden and intriguing side of Turkish culture. Her remarkable career as the doyenne of Bektashi/Alevi studies, to which the Strasbourg conference paid homage, has culminated in the book under review. Hadji Bektach is useful in providing an overview of her own researches, extending, as she puts it, "over a quarter of a century" (p. xiii). But there is little in it that is not found in her earlier articles, to which she frequently refers. And it is disappointing in other respects. In revealing the "myth" of Haji Bektash and trying to sepa- rate out the strands of history and legend, Melikoff perpetuates one or two myths herself. Chapter one of her book is entitled "Le chamanisme islamis6." Shamanism is understood as the original religion of the Turks of Central Asia, which in Anatolia became funneled into the heterodox sects that developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and eventually settled around the figure of Haji Bektash, an otherwise obscure dervish who had some connection with the Babai revolt in 1240 and settled near the present-day town of Hacibekta?. It was Fuad Kopriilii who first put forward the notion of an islamized shamanism or shamanized Islam, but the evidence for it is tenuous in the extreme. A recent article by Reuven Amitai-Preiss has, I hope, given it the coup-de-grace ("Sufis and Shamans: Some Remarks on the Islamization of the Mongols in the Ilkhanate," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42.1 [1999]: 27-46). A major obstacle to the advancement of Bektashi/Alevi studies is that our chief source for the legend of Haji Bektash, the hagiographical Vilayetname, which dates to the fifteenth century, has not been edited. Melikoff acknowledges the defi- ciency (p. 59: "L'6dition d'Abdulbaki Golpinarlh tant assez libre, une nouvelle edition serait bienvenue"), but then goes on to cite Gilplnarll's 1958 publication, which is actually a trans- lation into modern Turkish and not an edition. It is true that Golplnarll included a facsimile of the Ankara manuscript, but unfortunately this is largely illegible. A small example of the danger of relying on this publication is found on p. 62 of Melikoff's book, where she cites the following legend: Haji Bektash demonstrates the "cooking" or maturation process re- quired of the dervish by having one of his disciples, a certain Molla Sadeddin, cooked over the fire in a closed vessel. After forty days he removes the cover and Sadeddin has disappeared; after another forty days he again removes the cover and Saded- din has turned into a baby; finally after another forty days he again removes the cover and Sadeddin has reverted to his orig- inal form. In Melikoff's recounting, the vessel in question is a cauldron (kazan). This depends, although unacknowledged, on Golplnarll's publication, p. 62. But this passage happens to be legible, with the aid of a magnifying-glass, in the facsimile (fol. 139a), where it turns out that the vessel is a wash-bowl (legenVe). The reading is confirmed in a versification (ca. 1500) of the Vilayetname by Firdevsi-i Rumi (Manzum Haci Bektd? Veli Vilayetndmesi, ed. Bedri Noyan [Aydin, 1986], 313). Ap- parently Golplnarll changed the wash-bowl into a cauldron to make the story more realistic! The recent, uncritical, French 273 

Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives: Papers Read at a Conference Held at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul,

Exhibition catalogue, 28 April-30

Public Lettering:

Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East: Collected Papers of the International Symposium &quot;Alevism in Turkey and Comparable Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East in the Past and Present,&quot;

Fatimid Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum

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