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Consorts of the Caliphs - 9781479850983

Un libro in lingua di Ibn Al-Sai Toorawa Shawkat M. (EDT) Bray Julia (INT) edito da New York Univ Pr, 2015

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Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-centurycompilation of anecdotes about thirty-nine women who were, as the titlesuggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the earlyAbbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim butilluminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Sa?i (d. 674 H/1276 AD), and the only oneto survive in its entirety. Ibn al-Sa?i was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicledthe academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled thefinal years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmicMongol invasion of 656 H/1258 AD.
In this work, Ibn al-Sa?i is keen to forge aconnection between the munificent wives of his time and the storied lovers ofthe so-called golden age of Baghdad. Thus, from the earlier period, we findHarun al-Rashid pining for his brother’s beautiful slave; al-Wathiq falling fora slave who belonged to one of his other slaves; and the artistry of suchmusical and literary celebrities as ?Arib and Fadl, who bested the male poetsand singers of their day. From times closer to Ibn al-Sa?i’s own—when Abbasidauthority was trying to reassert itself and Baghdad was again a major center ofintellectual and religious activity—we meet women such as Banafsha, who endowedlaw colleges, had bridges built, and provisioned pilgrims bound for Mecca;slave women whose funeral services were led by caliphs; and noble Saljuq princessesfrom Afghanistan.
Informed by the author’s own sources, his insiderknowledge, and well-known literary materials, these singular biographicalsketches, though delivered episodically, bring the belletristic culture of theBaghdad court to life, particularly in the personal narratives and poetry ofcultural heroines otherwise lost to history.

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