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SUMMARY:Reading Across Confessional Lines: Jewish Readership of Muslim Suf
 i Poetry in Cairo\, 1171-1250 - Dr Nathaniel Miller\, Faculty of Asian and
  Middle Eastern Studies
DTSTART:20180123T131000Z
DTEND:20180123T140000Z
UID:TALK97750@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Arthur Dudney
DESCRIPTION:Significant research has been done on the ideological dimensio
 n of the Christian side of the Crusades in the Holy Land (the first throug
 h ninth Crusades\, 1095-1291). In calling for the First Crusade\, Urban II
  is reported to have called for the extermination of the non-Christian unb
 elievers as a means to ameliorate the internecine conflicts of twelfth-cen
 tury Europe\, offered remission of sins to Crusaders\, and\, presumably\, 
 hoped to shore up the authority of the papacy. Institutions resulting from
  the Crusades\, such as the Knights Templar\, reshaped the social landscap
 e of Europe. \n\nOn the Islamic side\, the advent of Saladin's Ayyubid dyn
 asty\, which gained prominence after his reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187\,
  is said to have marked a resurgence of a traditionalist militant Sunnism\
 , marked\, for example\, by an increase in the _Virtues of Jerusalem_ (_Fa
 ḍāʾil al-Quds_) hadith collections. Saladin also drew to a large exten
 t on mystical Sufi figures for ideological support.\n\nMy talk examines an
  unpublished document that sheds light on a Sufi favoured by Saladin\, the
  Egyptian poet Ibn al-Kīzānī (d. 1166). Several as-yet unpublished text
 s of Ibn al-Kīzānī are preserved in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic transcribed in
 to Hebrew) in Cambridge's undated Geniza document T-S AS 161.50. Elsewhere
 \, Ibn al-Kīzānī is reported to have held heterodox opinions\, and to h
 ave had a 'sect' of lower-class followers in Egypt and the Levant. In pres
 enting T-S AS 161.50 in translation\, I will discuss how this document she
 ds light on and complicates the image of resurgent Sunnism associated with
  Saladin. T-S AS 161.50 unequivocally demonstrates that Ibn al-Kīzānī p
 ossessed a readership among Egypt's Jewish community\, and suggests that S
 aladin (a native speaker of Kurdish)\, drew on an eclectic mix of Arabic c
 ultural elements in order to construct an image of himself as a legitimate
  Islamic leader. These elements were not limited to the works of tradition
 al and 'orthodox' Islamic scholarship\, as represented in the _Virtues of 
 Jerusalem_ texts\, but included socially peripheral figures such as the ch
 arismatic Ibn al-Kīzānī\, whose readership was inter-confessional and w
 hose texts circulated outside of the scholarly milieu that produced most o
 f the manuscripts shaping our view of the period.
LOCATION:The Richard King Room\, Darwin College
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